The Early Middle Ages
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| Köln (Cologne). St. Pantaleon. The applied order in the south aisle. Consecrated AD 980. There are abundant general views in Images and Wikipedia Commons. But study wants more than postcards. You can call this church Ottonian or proto-Romanesque or Early Medieval. Studying the plan and elevation and sections, you can see that it is later than Carolingian and not yet full-fledged Romanesque (as the other churches in Köln's Ring of Churches are). The restorations are impeccable, so far as I can judge. |
Before
discussing the background to the art of the centuries from the emperor
Justinian (ruled 527-565) until the end of the Ottonian dynasty in Germany
(1027), we need to return to one of our basic questions: in each place and
time, for whom were the artists working, for whom was the art intended, and how
were artists regarded by the societies in which they worked?
In Classical Greece and the Hellenistic
world, we were struck by the fact that the major artists seemed to address the
whole citizenry of the
polis (city
state) and, after Alexander, secular patrons belonging to the class in power,
economically or politically.
Classical art clearly is addressed to urban, comparatively well educated
citizens, but to all of them, and, like the Greek drama, it is also accessible
to those who may not appreciate its finer points.
The artist, for the first time, thought of himself as a
philosopher, to the extent that he too expressed his principles in written
treatises, and there is no evidence that his theories were not seriously
regarded.
Change begins in the
Hellenistic period, in as much as public art as dynastic propaganda tends to
become readily accessible to the widest possible spectrum of the public so as
to be effective for that purpose.
Roman public art carries further the priority of the message, over, and
sometimes at the expense of, art for art's sake; not surprisingly neither
Hellenistic patrons nor Roman patrons regarded the artist as an intellectual, a
"philosopher", or, as we should say, as a unique creative
individual.
There is some evidence
(as when the emperor Hadrian turns to sculptors from Asia Minor, seeming to
regard them as "real" artists) that in the Greek-speaking world, in
the largest cities, artists continued to be regarded more as creatively gifted
individuals than in the Latin-speaking West.
Likewise, until Theodosius closed the Schools in Athens,
cities like Athens continued to be regarded as places where learning was
pursued for its own sake, even after the Heruli, a Germanic tribe, ravaged the
city.
It is not true that Jews and
Arabs had no use for art; it was the possibility of image-worship that they
abhorred, and, just as Solomon had turned to Phoenicians to adorn his temple,
so in the eighth (Christian era) century the Great Mosque at Damascus drew on
Byzantine skills.
The Early Christians
really did have little regard for art, but when Christianity became the
religion of an empire (and, in the West, the only stable, continuous source of
organized authority in the sixth century outside the area ruled directly by
Justinian), with the same reservations about the risk of image-worship, they
took over and developed what remained of the traditions and workshop techniques
inherited from Greco-Roman Late Antiquity; where the craftsmen were
Christianized "barbarians"--Franks, Saxons, and the rest--they
brought to their work much of their own traditions and their own mind-set, with
remarkable and fertile results.
In
the Greek-speaking east, many of the artists were still urban professional
artisans, while in the west, wherever cities and towns reverted to mere
villages and fortified castles replaced towns, professional continuity
dependent on apprenticeship and markets disappeared.
In both east and west, something entirely new developed: the
spread of Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, Irish, and Benedictine monasticism led to
the monasteries being the primary centers for continuity of learning and
artisan training.
In other words,
for the next few centuries a great deal of the art that we study will have been
made by monks or lay brothers living the rule of one or another monastic
Order.
They made art for the
ruling class as well as for the church (they also supplemented the agricultural
basis of their monastic economy by manufacturing, including making arms and
armor), but their finest efforts were acts of worship in material form: church
art.
Furthermore, the Greek and
Renaissance and Modern (and Chinese and Japanese) idea of the artist as
genius, a Latin word meaning that he is
a creative individual inhabited by a
special
spirit, in Latin a
genius, is
radically incompatible with Christian monastic community ideals.
It is for this reason that we are so
interested when artists in the "high" middle ages, the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, sign their names to their work or write treatises about
the churches that they have designed and when we see that increasing numbers of
artists and artisans are secular townsmen rather than monks or nuns.
It means that the seeds of urban and
secular culture, which will produce the Renaissance, are in fact germinating
and multiplying precisely in the period when church-centered Medieval art
attains its greatest perfection.
As to the question of the audience for which the art was intended, the
answer is
not simply that church art was the Bible of the
Unlettered.
In the monastic
churches, abbeys and priories, the art was not by any means only for the
unlettered lay brothers and the populace who came to the greater monastic
churches on the major feasts of the church year; learned abbots expended great
learning on their design and often indulged their own theological ideas.
Like the Greek Parthenon, however, this
high art was accessible also to the unlearned.
Like Roman Imperial propagandistic art, however, it was
tightly controlled from the top; it was part of policy; it was (in our terms)
State/Church-controlled Media.
On
the whole, monastic art is rather more communal, even though the religious
orders were highly hierarchical, than the religious art produced for lay
parishes.
There is almost no major
serious non-Church art until near the end of the middle ages--no "Dying
Niobid", "Winged Victory" type of public art.
Justinian
(527-565), although Constantinople was his capital, was the last emperor to
speak Latin as his cradle tongue.
But, even later emperors who were Thracian or Syrian by ancestry as well
as Greek, and all of whom were Greek in language, called themselves Rhomaioi, Romans, and regarded the Holy
Roman Empire in the West as merely a Germanic kingdom. Justinian recaptured much of Italy and
North Africa from the Goths and placed his exarch
at Ravenna, south of Venice.
Charlemagne also regarded Justinian's Golden Age (which we call Early
Byzantine) as Roman; wishing to revive the Roman Empire when he was crowned
emperor by the Pope on Christmas, 800 A.D., he turned largely to the law and
literature and art and architecture of Justinian. It looks as if the memory of pre-Constantinian Rome had
receded into the mists for Charlemagne and his advisors, among whom were the
most learned, monastically educated men of his time. The German Otto II in the tenth century was similarly
inspired in seeking a Byzantine princess, Theophano, as his empress. When we shunt off Byzantine art and
history as a mere footnote to Late Antiquity quite separate from western
Medieval history, we are refusing to regard the eastern empire as the kings of
the west themselves regarded it, as the seat of continuity and urban life, as
their only bulwark against the further spread of Moslem princes' power. This did not prevent growing differences
from developing both in religion and in politics. Communications were too infrequent, trade was interrupted,
the Mediterranean Sea was unsafe to sail.
The sixth
century was a great age of church building in the Greek-speaking world. In little peninsular Greece alone,
excavators have found many dozens of good-sized, handsomely planned basilicas
of the Greek rite floor plan, like S. Apollinare in Classe at Ravenna and St.
Demetrios in Salonika (Thessaloniki), and there are just as many in Syria and
Asia Minor. Wherever the walls
have survived, the mosaic pictures are of high quality and great interest. Some of the icons are still in the
ancient encaustic technique. Early
mosques, as at Damascus, proliferate within a couple of generations after the
death of Mohammed (570-632).
Meanwhile, far away in England and Ireland, a century after the death of
St. Patrick and two centuries after the Anglo-Saxon invasion, most of the
monasteries founded by the Irish have become Benedictine and the Anglo-Saxon
kings' subjects have absorbed and begun to digest the British Isles' mixture of
Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Rome-directed Christian traditions. In art, the consequence is a stylistic
complex of great beauty that no one could have predicted. Critical to its formation is the
combination of exquisite craftsmanship based in decorative arts with the
Mediterranean Christian tradition based in the Greco-Roman world. A similar intermingling of disparate
cultures produced new art also in Germany and Lombard North Italy; Scandinavia
was only on the verge of being Christianized. It is against this background that the valiant attempt to
represent Charlemagne as a veritable Roman emperor, in an equestrian statuette,
must be seen, as well as his Palace Chapel by Odo and the Palace School of
manuscript illumination, collectively an extraordinary statement and an
extraordinary effort by a Frankish king.
The art of the
German Ottonian emperors in the tenth and eleventh centuries, continuing much
of what began with Charlemagne's dynasty and with its Byzantine connections,
taking advantage of the end of
Barbarian migration and some increase, therefore, in prosperity, represents a
culture that bridges over from the Early to the High Middle Ages. The human feeling and formal discipline
of the art anticipate Romanesque arts of the end of the eleventh century. The Norman duke William conquered
England with the Battle of Hastings in 1066: the Normans (Norsemen) are no
longer Viking invaders and indeed bring their French language to England. It is therefore worthwhile to look at
one English, pre-Norman church contemporary with Ottonian Germany. [There are fine examples of
architecture in Italy, France, and Spain, also, in the tenth century, but their
study is somewhat too difficult for an introductory course.]
[G 110] [G120]
[MG 165] [G 111] [G 115]
The
church of
Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in
Constantinople
by the architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, built under the
Emperor Justinian is the first great building both innovative in design and (linked
with that) daring in its engineering (even dangerously daring--yet it stands)
since the death of Constantine nearly two centuries earlier.
With SS. Sergius and Bacchus and S.
Irene, two other Justinianian churches in Constantinople, and with the Justinianian
art of Ravenna, it is eloquent as justification for calling this period the
"first golden age" of Byzantine civilization--always remembering that
they regarded themselves as
Rhomaioi,
continuing and maintaining the Roman empire.
The art, in fact, shows them as building on the Roman-period
art of Asia Minor and Greece, but they use brick vaulting in ways that may also
owe something to the Middle East:
pendentives,
for example, are first encountered in an Old Assyrian, 19th-century B.C.,
building.
Here the actual vaulting
is done with bricks, whereas in Rome the walls have structural brick casing
filled with concrete and the vaults are of concrete without brick.
The view from the exterior is somewhat
different from when it was new: the minarets (very fine ones) and the
buttresses, as well as the coats of stucco, are Turkish (for nearly five
centuries after 1453 Hagia Sophia was a mosque,
cami; now it is a cultural monument,
musê), but the central dome and the two half domes are
visible.
Hagia Sophia, in fact, is
both a domed space (the dome always suggesting the vault of heaven) and a
basilica-like space; it is domed for the sense of cosmic glory and longitudinal
for practical reasons: on the great feasts of the Christian year, every person
must attend the liturgy, so, like St. Peter's and the other great Christian
basilicas in Rome, Hagia Sophia is designed to accommodate multitudes at the
great feasts, even more so now that Constantinople is the metropolis of the
Empire.
The uninterrupted rectangular
floor space and the circle of the dome over the center of the square (completed
by the lateral aisles) are plain on the plan (note that it had an atrium in
front, too).
Now, it is one thing
to draw a circle tangent to a square in the center of a greater square in pen
and ink, quite another to raise a dome weighing many tons over the square
space, since being tangent to a line is no physical support at all.
First, the
piers at the corners of the square over which the dome will be
raised are very massive and solid.
Then, great round arches from pier to pier frame the square.
Then,
pendentives are built from center to center of these arches forming
a perfect circle at the level of the tops of the arches.
A pendentive is a triangular section
having the curvature of a sphere with its diameter equal to the diagonal of the
square over which the dome is to be built.
That is why it channels the thrust from the weight of the
dome evenly down through the piers and why it forms the
perfect circle
at the level of the tops of the arches.
The dome with its diameter equal to the side of the square is built
on this ring that is tangent to the arches.
Here in Hagia Sophia the builders also built ribs into the
dome (somewhat as the Apollodoros had done in the dome of Hadrian's Pantheon),
permitting a ring of windows between the ribs at the base of the dome.
What with back lighting from the
exterior, looking up from the floor, this ring of windows makes the dome look
weightless; on the interior, it looks like divine magic rather than splendid
engineering (which, needless to say, it is).
The
aisles of
Hagia Sophia incorporate very heavy arches; these help buttress the daring
center space much as the barrel vaults flanking the central space did in the
Basilica Nova in Rome.
The first
central dome fell, disastrously, because it was lower than a perfect
hemisphere; its replacement built towards the end of Justinian's reign still
stands, although part of one of the semi-domes east and west of it (which look
as if they buttressed the center dome, and might have been intended to do so,
but do not) once fell down (these semi-domes are only one brick thick, for fear
of greater weight!), and the heavy external buttresses (which are not
effectively placed) added by the Turks show that they were concerned for its
stability.
In the photo of the
interior, notice how the progressively smaller semi-domes make the space seem
elastic and expansive and how windows in the filling walls inside the north and
south great arches serve as clerestory.
In the capitals we see the end result of the use of abundant drillwork
in leafy decoration (as on the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus); these clearly are
descendants of the Roman Composite capital, but no leaves stick out, while
drillwork everywhere strikes deep and makes the really solid capital look like
a hollow basket; thus, like the ring of light at the base of the dome, the
"basket capital" denies its supporting function.
Remember the dematerializing use of
gold in the heavenly city behind the saints in the Rotunda of St. George in
Thessaloniki.
[K 12]
In some respects, and those are
characteristic of Byzantine art as a whole, the
Diptych with the Archangel Michael is more continuous with and
faithful to the ideals of the Greek art from which it sprang than the Diptych
of the Symmachi and Nicomachi more than a century earlier.
Although the body of the archangel
seems rather insubstantial (but less so than you might think, considering that
archangels are supposed to be
asomatoi,
bodiless), it has nearly perfect
contrapposto
(except that the supporting leg is not directly under the head) and the drapery
follows, obeys the lines of the body perfectly logically; also, the wings are
like real birds' wings, and the hand holding the orb is effectively
foreshortened.
The archangel has
none of the curious inconsistencies of the "Priestess of Bacchus" of
the Symmachi.
On the contrary, the
inconsistencies in this work are deliberate, like the insubstantiality of the
gold architecture in the mosaics of the Rotunda of St. George: the archangel is
both in front of and behind his architectural framework, which is unrelated to
him in scale.
It is deliberately
otherworldly, but it remains in touch with the intellectual and logical bases
of Greek art.
The same must be
said for most of Byzantine art from Asia Minor (or by artists sent from
Constantinople) or from the Greek peninsula for the next thousand years.
The Archangel Diptych is technically of
the highest quality.
The
inscription says, "Receive him/that which is Present, and learn the
Cause/Reason" (the rest of the statement was on the other, missing leaf of
the diptych).
[K 212]
[1604]
Equally Constantinopolitan
are two famous books (
codices, plural
of
codex, a book make of pages) with
vellum pages, dyed purple (murex shell,
imperial purple) and written in silver, now tarnished to black.
The purple probably means that they
were imperial commissions.
Both
are in Greek, one of
Genesis, the
other of the
Gospels, for use in
reading the Lessons at the liturgy in church.
Both have
unframed pictures like the illustrations
for books like the
Iliad written on
scrolls (
rotuli), but the latter were
pen-and-ink drawings with limited added color.
Full-color, painted illustrations that are unframed tend to
float on the purple ground, and the narrative necessity of a bridge or a tree
can be awkward, so the choice to eliminate the context, the background, the
frame is significant, in concentrating attention on the figures alone.
From the
Vienna Genesis, we see
Jacob wrestling with an (unwinged) angel; notice and remember the drapery that
looks as if it were lifted up by an invisible wire (it goes back to windblown
drapery of ca. 400 B.C.,
via Roman
Victories and other decorative figures) and the conventional tree at the right
that looks like a leafy parasol.
Notice, however, also how easily the illustrator draws figures in motion
and implies bodies in drapery and skillfully highlights and shades them.
There is a long tradition of
illustration behind him, and he is in possession of it.
From the
Rossano Gospels, we have
Christ brought before Pilate; in this illustration, Christ and the men bringing
him are in Greek drapery (
himation),
Christ's being, symbolically, gold, but Pilate looks like a Late Roman/Early
Byzantine
consul (see the Missorium
of Theodosios, the Diptych of Stilicho, and the Official from Aphrodisias in
the preceding section), and his attendants look like those we shall see with
Justinian in the mosaics at Ravenna, San Vitale.
As we observed above, Justinian regarded himself as one with
the Roman Empire, so Tiberius's governor, Pilate, looks like one of Justinian's
provincial governors.
Notice again
how the heavy clothes worn at court preclude the use of pleated drapery.
These purple vellum books were always
rare, but books do travel, and the importance of Greek books of Scripture in
monasteries cannot be overstated.
Someone like St.-Hilaire of Poitiers (ca. 313-367), Bishop of Poitiers,
a Greek born and educated (his real name was Hilarion), a Doctor of the Church,
surely had Greek books with him in France.
Also, when icons later were banned, illustrated books
remained.
Now we turn to the buildings and mosaics of
sixth-century Ravenna built when it was ruled by Theoderic the Ostrogoth (no
barbarian he, having been reared at the court in Constantinople, being
nominally a hostage) and after it was taken by Justinian's armies in the middle
of the sixth century. The
buildings are so important because, from Honorius (402) until 751 (when the
Germanic Lombards took it), Ravenna was the capital of the Western Empire
rather than Rome, and Classis, its port, was the home of the western
fleet. Because Theoderic adhered
to Arian Christianity and Justinian (of course) to Orthodox Christianity,
Ravenna has two each of several things: two Baptisteries, two Sant'Apollinare
churches (the second one is in Classis), but only one San Vitale.
[MG 147] [MG
169] [B 29] [1613] [1603]
In some
respects,
San Vitale at Ravenna is like Sta. Constanza; it is
central-planned with a surrounding aisle, the central space lit by a
clerestory, and its
narthex is
jellybean-shaped (that the narthex is attached at an angle is unique and
unimportant for this course).
But
in others it is a true Constantinopolitan Early Byzantine church (like SS.
Sergius and Bacchus); semi-circular, column-screened niches roofed with
semi-domes open from the central space, making it expansive (cf. Hagia Sophia),
and its east end is purely early Byzantine: a
choir is formed by a wall resting on screening columns out of a
section of the annular aisle, and on either side of the apse are one-storeyed
rooms (for the preparation of bread and wine and for the vesting of the
clergy), which we shall see again in Sant' Apollinare in Classe, a Greek-type
basilica on Italian soil under Justinian.
Also, San Vitale is a two-storeyed, rather large church, unlike Santa
Constanza, and it was not intended as a mausoleum.
On the interior, the main space today has extensive later
modifications, but the choir and apse are original.
Like the ancient Roman Pantheon and like Hagia Sophia, it is
richly marble veneered up to the entablature level; above, it is adorned with
bright-colored and gold glass mosaics.
The
tesserae are cut from
sheets of opaque glass, except for the gold ones which are transparent glass
backed with gold.
They are not
laid absolutely flat (like bathroom tile mosaics) but catch the light at
differing angles, to wonderful effect.
These mosaics
abound in
imperial, courtly use of formal and color symbolism.
If the Christ seated on the globe in the apse stood up, for
example, he would be much taller even than the angels flanking him, and the
angels are taller than the mortals, just as, in the mosaics with the emperor
and empress, the imperial couple are taller and stand farther forward than
anyone else--except the archbishop Maximian, who stands at the head in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy even as the emperor in the secular hierarchy!
Purple is the most honorific color,
reserved for Christ's robe in the apse, concentrated in the robes of the
emperor and empress in the offertory mosaics; white is next (angels and
high-ranking courtiers in white with purple patches); multi-colored garments
designate the low rank of the soldiers in the bodyguard and the lower-ranked
ladies in waiting of the empress.
All the lower-ranked persons, furthermore, are less perfectly frontal
and are heavily overlapped by those ranked a cut above them.
Now it is obvious why we took note of
Imperial Frontality from the first time we observed it in the emperor's chariot
in the relief in the Arch of Titus.
Need we add that all the persons, including the empress, in the female
mosaic are smaller than those in the male mosaic?
Notice that Justinian has a halo--not that he is divine, but
he is emperor by the grace of God.
It is these mosaics that have given rise to the stereotype of Byzantine
art as "flat", and they have, indeed, less modelling than any other
set of high quality.
The large,
bright
tesserae and unbroken gold
background, the hieratic subject matter with its frontality, and the stiff
courtly garments combine to produce this effect.
In these mosaics, the use of this medium for jewel-like and
dazzling effect is carried further than in any others.
I called the scenes with the Emperor
Justinian and the Empress Theodora the offertory mosaics, because he is
carrying the bread and she the chalice of wine that will be used for the
Eucharist.
[G 122] [B 27]
[B 28]
The church of
Sant' Apollinare Nuovo is confusingly
(since
nuovo means "new")
the older of the two basilicas here dedicated to that saint.
It was built by Theoderic a generation
before Ravenna was taken from the Ostrogoths in 540 by Justinian's famous
general, Belisarius.
The mosaics
on the walls of the nave are perfectly preserved, but, under Justinian, were
altered--to remove the figures of Theoderic and his court from the
intercolumniations of the representation of Theoderic's palace at the west end
of the south wall (we know it's the palace, because it is labelled "palatium").
The long
processions mosaics represent
martyr-saints each with his or her crown of martyrdom and palms of victory,
and each is named.
The men
approach Christ enthroned, the women Mary with the infant Christ, who is
offered the gifts of the Magi (whom we have already seen on the "triumphal
arch" of Sta. Maria Maggiore and on the hem of the Empress Theodora's robe
in San Vitale).
Although the
background is solid gold, the style and the general effect here is a little
softer and less hieratic than in San Vitale; it is just as Byzantine, for, as
we noted, culturally Theoderic was no barbarian.
The column capitals are of a special kind, peculiar to this
period, with acanthus leaves swirling around them, as if caught in an eddying
wind, and notice the typical Early Byzantine trapezoidal impost block, between
the carved capital and the springing of the arch.
[MG 166] [MG
167] [1612]
Sant' Apollinare in Classe is a generation later, and its mosaics
are contemporary with those in San Vitale, though not evidently executed by the
same workshop of mosaicists.
Its
bell tower is typically Italian, built separately from the church like Pisa's
most famous one, but it is a later addition.
Typical of a Greek basilica is the faceted
exterior
(here semi-octagonal) of the apse and the separate rooms built on either side
of it, just like those at San Vitale.
Neither of these Ravenna basilicas has a transept, but the older
basilicas in Rome,
except for Old Saint Peter's itself, don't have one
either.
Inside, Sant' Apollinare
in Classe shows us an open timber roof, such as Santa Maria Maggiore and Old
St. Peter's once had and Greek basilicas in Thessaloniki and many other places
in Greece, too.
Here we have lost
all the mosaics on the nave walls, but in glorious recompense the
"triumphal arch" and apse mosaics are preserved.
In the apse, in the center, the
orans is Saint Apollinaris; Christ is
represented not in bodily form but by the cross that is his glory superimposed
on the star-studded vault of heaven, but in the center of the cross is a small
head of Christ, bearded as in the Greek church.
The conventional green landscape is Edenic, a sinless realm
bathed in cool, clean light, not a visual but a spiritual landscape; the sheep
are the
greges, the flock of the con
gregation of the faithful.
On the "triumphal arch", the
sheep are the twelve disciples, coming from the gates of Bethlehem and
Jerusalem (the clouds are the mosaic version of the same conventional clouds as
we saw on the pictorial relief of the Sleeping Emdymion); above them is the
bust of Christ, blessing (cf. K 175 in Section XIV, below), flanked by the
symbols of the evangelists: Matthew (winged man), Mark (winged lion), Luke
(winged ox), and John (eagle--winged by nature), with the same kind of clouds.
These symbols, which we shall see now
repeatedly for the four evangelists, derive from the vision of Ezekiel in the
Hebrew scriptures (
Ezekiel 1:10) and
are only one example of Christian writing and art seeing the whole "Old
Testament" (not "Old" to Jews!) as typifying and culminating in
Christ ("Christ" is Greek for "Messiah", that is,
Anointed).
[K 297]
The
Mount Sinai, St. Catherine's Monastery, Icon of the Madonna and Child
Enthroned with Saints is one of several early icons preserved there that
are in the same medium exactly as the Roman-Egyptian Fayum portraits studied
earlier:
encaustic on gessoed wood
panels.
Many must once have
existed; technique so fine as this is never a flash in the pan but in a long
tradition.
But early icons were
destroyed during the period of officially sanctioned Iconoclasm (730-843), and
only the geographical isolation of this monastery preserved a few.
The image is like a larger, finer
version of the style of the Rossano Gospels, or you could say that the St.
George shows us one of the courtiers of San Vitale, only softly, in paint, with
light and shade.
The Madonna, too,
is gentle and human, and the colors are lovely.
Greek Peninsula
[MG 18] [K
299]
Above, we have mentioned the
Greek type of basilica.
One of the
best examples is the
Church of St.
Demetrios in Thessaloniki (he was martyred there and is its patron
saint).
A terrible fire in 1917
required its rebuilding in large part (which is why it is so clean-looking, but
before the fire it was already fully documented so that the renovation can be
studied with confidence), and it had already lost most of its mosaics during
the centuries of Turkish rule.
Here we can study the distinguishing traits of a great Greek basilica:
first, it has a
gallery, an upper
storey, in the aisles; second, instead of columns all alike the length of the
nave, they are punctuated by square piers in an
alternating support system, as it is called; notice that the piers
continue up in the second, gallery level.
There is good reason, when we see these features appear in western
church architecture north of the Alps, to think of Byzantine inspiration,
especially since alternating supports appear first in an Ottonian dynasty
church when the emperor has married a Byzantine princess.
Notice also the column capitals similar
to those in Sant' Apollinare in Classe and with trapezoidal impost blocks.
The nearly lifesize mosaic of
St. Demetrius between Donors, probably
a century later than the reign of Justinian, is very like a monumental version
of the style of the Mount Sinai encaustic icon's St. George, except that the
figures are taller in proportions and there is less shading.
Syria
[MG 238] Another regional school of
sixth-century basilica design is Christian Syria. Der Turmanin
shows the interesting features of the façade: twin towers with a tribune between them over the arched
entrance. There is nothing like
this in Asia Minor, Greece, or Italy.
The question is whether, with the spread of monasticism, not least from
Christian Syria, the idea of twin towers on a façade, such a standard feature
of medieval churches in France, had its source here. The answer is not certain, but sometimes it is just as
important to learn what is uncertain as to master rock-solid certainties.
[O 429] [O 433]
[O 434]
Although its leafy
capitals and trapezoidal impost blocks and its timber roof remind us of the
foregoing, the
Great Mosque at Damascus,
of the 8th-century Ummayad Dynasty, belongs to Islamic Syria; the world has
changed.
As for Hagia Sophia, we
know the architects' names, `Abd-al-Rahman and `Ubayd B. Hurmuz, and its exact
dates, 707-715: Islam keeps good records.
A mosque is not like a church.
We are not looking at a nave and aisles but at the equal spaces between
rows of columns.
It is not laid
out for liturgical worship but to bring together all the faithful of the region
for daily prayer and to hear the readings.
It is laid out rather like an orchard or, you might say,
like a very great Arab tent with many poles.
We also notice that the arches of the arcade are very tall
and, of course, the arches in the wall above are not a clerestory, since they
do not open on the outdoors, though they do let light through from the distant
windows.
With the spread of Islam
to North Africa, part of Sicily, and Spain (cf. the Mosque at Cordoba at the
end of this section), Islamic design is not marginal to this course.
The mosaics in the Great Mosque at
Damascus are actually the work of Byzantine (Greek or Syrian) craftsmen.
That is why they remind us so forcibly
of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Their
date, ca. 715, falls within the period of Iconoclasm in the Greek church when
artists were underemployed for work in churches.
Although nothing like them can be seen in Christian
churches, they would have found parallels in the Palace at Constantinople and
in public buildings, where the traditional refreshing images of landscape
architecture and idyllic settings were customary and appropriate.
But for the Great Mosque, we might have
no evidence of work of this kind, in mosaic, at this level of skill, at this
date, although we see similar landscape in book illustrations in the 10th
century (see K 148 in the next section).
We now turn to the art of the 7th to 11th
centuries in western Europe.
[K 180]
In 1939 the ship-burial of an Anglo-Saxon
king was discovered in East Anglia near a village called
Sutton Hoo; you can see
its contents today in the British Museum in London.
Nothing about most of the objects would tell you that the
king and his people were by this date, ca. 650, Christians: the great hanging
bowls are adorned with disks with Celtic designs in enamel (recalling the
Desborough Mirror and the Battersea Shield), the great solid-gold buckle
reminds us that the Angles and Saxons who came, traditionally, in 449 were
Germanic, and the
purse lid has Anglo-Saxon designs that remind
us, further, that in their migrations, in the 4th century, the Germanic tribes
had been over north of the Black Sea, whence the rather Scythian-like bird of
prey, not to mention the hero between lions recalling the Sumerian motif on the
Philadelphia Harp from the Royal Cemetery at Ur!
The
ribbon interlaces,
which these artists combine with abstracted animals, possibly arose from Coptic
elaborations of
guilloche border
patterns.
Coptic?
Egyptian?
It would seem far-fetched but for the unifying phenomenon of
these centuries: the international spread of monastic foundations; possibly
Coptic monks, or church objects from the Coptic Christian world, transmitted
the germs of these motifs.
The
church in its first millennium was truly
katholikós
= universal: non-national.
As for
the Christianity of the king buried here, it is attested by Anglo-Saxon (Old
English) literature and by the presence in the ship-burial of silver communion
spoons of Byzantine manufacture, probably from Constantinople.
[At this time, and still today in the
Greek Church, Holy Communion is administered, wine and a bit of bread together,
from a special spoon].
We already
saw Germanic jewelry with
cloisonné
[K 305]; here we have solid gold
champlevé
with garnets in the cells.
[K 181] [K
182]
The Book of Durrow is not much later than the Sutton Hoo ship
burial, but it comes from monastic Ireland rather than England.
It introduces us to the standard format
of an
insular,
Hiberno-Saxon (
Hibernia is
Latin for Ireland), early Medieval Gospel Book, standard for the fine, large
illustrated Gospels written on vellum for the Gospel readings in the Liturgy
(there were no inexpensive, personal Bibles before the printing press).
At the beginning of each gospel,
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, was the "portrait" of the evangelist, in
the position occupied in Greek and Roman books by the author's portrait (and by
the author's portrait as frontispiece in printed books, like the first folio of
Shakespeare), but, especially in books made in Irish monasteries (and there
were Irish monasteries not only in Ireland but in northern England and on the
Continent), this might be the Symbol of the Evangelist (from the vision of
Ezekiel) instead of a straightforward portrait.
Thus, in the Book of Durrow, the
imago hominis, Man, is
Matthew's symbol.
Also, for each
Gospel there was a
carpet page, sometimes with a cross worked into
the pattern but in our example from the Book of Durrow with a circle full of
pure interlace surrounded by bands of animal-interlace: there is no symbolism
here whatsoever, but the beautiful, intricate work both glorifies the book and
is an act of dedicated devotion on the part of the monastic artist.
Besides, on the first page of the text
of the Gospel, the
initial letters were illuminated, as we shall
see in an example from the Book of Kells.
In this art, the Man symbol is as rigorously abstracted and patterned as
the animals involved in the bewilderingly intricate yet rational interlace
(nothing is left unconnected), and the flat colors are like enamels or
inlays.
Quite obviously, this is
not art made by someone incompetent to do otherwise but art obedient to its own
high discipline, as exigent as the laws governing Classical Greek art.
[K 184] [K 185]
In the Northumbrian
Lindisfarne Gospels, from a monastery
in northern England, and about a half century later, we also have the author
page and the carpet page (our examples in this case both belong to
Matthew).
The carpet page here incorporates the Cross but otherwise is
pure interlace, with and without animals, thus differing from the carpet pages
in the Book of Durrow mostly in its more evolved intricacy: considering the
work and the mind-set that went into all of this rational interconnectedness is
mind-boggling.
From scored lines
visible in raking light on the vellum and from visible pin pricks scholars have
deduced the use of a fine grid and an unwinding string compass as well as a
rigid compass to create the pattern.
The colors here are subtle and very beautifully harmonized.
The author page, on the other hand,
betrays (what in fact is documented in this case) the presence in these
Northumbrian monasteries of copies of Gospel books from the Mediterranean
world, from Rome (and, to judge from the use of the Greek word for
"saint", written in Roman-alphabet letters, from the Greek-speaking
world, too).
It is not only that
Matthew (
o agios Mattheus) is
represented straightforwardly as an author writing his book, with his symbol,
the winged Man (
imago hominis) tucked
behind his halo; he is in three-quarter view, wearing an himation with (sort
of) folds, seated on a (sort of) foreshortened seat, with a pleated curtain at
the right.
It is fascinating to
see what the Anglo-Saxon artist does with such a prototype.
He disassembles the seat and footstool,
and he makes what were shadows in the folds of drapery into orange slivers on a
green robe.
It is as if the illusion
of optical vision in his model made sense to him only in terms of its potential
for pattern.
He piously retains
the traditional three-quarter view for Matthew but alters it to make it lie
flat on the page and work with his decorative use of flat color.
[1616]
The Irish
Book of Kells is about a century later; it is the latest of the
great Hiberno-Saxon Gospels.
From
the Book of Kells we look at the third kind of decorated page, the illuminated
initial.
At
Matthew I:18, after all the "begats", the parentage of
Christ himself is given, beginning in Latin with the words
Christi autem.
Here
the first gospel is given a
second illuminated initial page that the
others don't have; it is traditional: using the Greek letters, a large
chi and
rho, X P, for
Christi.
Although the Book of Kells is the most
richly illustrated of all, it does not have such mind-boggling pure interlace,
because, as an Irish manuscript, it uses the repertory of Celtic motifs (the
whorls, etc.) much more than the Anglo-Saxon ones, and it adds to the purely
formal decoration all sorts of little animals and faces.
The elaboration of illumination in
monastic manuscripts could go no further than this.
The Book of Kells also has the evangelist
"portrait" pages and throughout its text, wherever there is space at
the end of a line or section, delightful small, whimsical drawings.
They are loving adornments without any
particular reference to the text of the gospels.
[K 240]
After centuries of Roman colonization
in the western half of Germany,
the
horse and rider on the stele found near Hornhausen may reflect acquaintance
with provincial Roman images of riders; indeed, it probably does.
But as with the Anglo-Saxon version of
a draped figure in 3/4 view (the Matthew of the Lindisfarne Gospels), here the
Frankish (do not equate "Frankish" with "French" in the
modern sense of the word) artist has thoroughly negated three dimensionality by
means of the double outline around the horse.
Also, he felt no need to provide enough space behind the
shield for us to assume the rider's body there.
And, of course, at the bottom of the stele, we see the same
kind of animal interlace as in the contemporary Lindisfarne Gospels, only
carved instead of drawn and painted.
[K 241]
Early Medieval churches had the area
around the altar surrounded by a stone fence, usually carved (in Rome, the
church of Santa Sabina, a 5th-century basilica, still has one).
The
Balustrade of the Patriarch Sigvald in the Baptistery of Cividale
Cathedral in northern Italy is Lombard work.
The Lombards (a Germanic tribe whom the Italians called
Langobardi = Long Beards, the tribe that took Ravenna in 751) had some
acquaintance with Early Byzantine church art, and the basic layout of the
Sigvald relief, the cross with trees and candlesticks, for example, is
Byzantine; placing the animals in wreaths and the tree of life guarded by
griffins came from the same source but reflect Byzantine use of motifs from
Sassanian Persian weaving and metalwork.
The "chip" carving here is cruder than chip carving technique
in Byzantine work, and the contours of the figures are cooky-cutout (remember
the stelai in the Grave Circle at Mycenae).
The Symbols of the Evangelists, of course, are the same Man,
Lion, Ox, and Eagle that we met first in Sant' Apollinare in Classe.
This is a splendid example of
Mediterranean and Germanic arts just beginning to coalesce.
[K 243]
The North Germanic (Norse) Vikings ca.
800 A.D. were as yet hardly touched by Mediterranean religion (Christianity) or
general culture, although the Eddas do make their gods, the Aesir, descendants
of the Trojans!
Books, at least a
few, had, as usual, travelled.
On
the other hand, the
written Eddas are later than the
Animal Head on a Post from the Oseberg Ship
Burial.
This Viking art is
later than the Lindisfarne Gospels or the poem
Beowulf, about contemporary with the Book of Kells, but earlier
than Norway's famous wooden (stave) churches.
The Norse version of animal interlace is very flat with
evenly spaced ribbon elements.
The
ancestry of the dragon head is as complex as that of the creatures on the purse
lid from Sutton Hoo.
CAROLINGIAN ART
[K 249]
Artistically, culturally, the
Bronze Equestrian Statuette of Charlemagne
from Metz sums up everything that in Europe west of the Saale River,
excluding Brittany, Spain (which was part of the Ummayad Caliphate), and the
British Isles, distinguishes the Carolingian Empire from the Merovingian
kingdom that preceded it.
The
horse's head may be small in proportion and its legs rubbery, but compared with
the Hornhausen horse it is a miracle of Greco-Roman naturalism; so is the treatment
of drapery in Charlemagne's cloak.
Small as it is, for those who made it, it must have evoked very
powerfully imperial images like the equestrian Marcus Aurelius which then stood
near the Lateran Basilica, the Cathedral of Rome.
It proves (however the goal was accomplished) that
"research" into the Roman past was not confined to monastic
scriptoria.
[MG 148] [G
482]
Above, we noted that
Carolingian (the name comes from
Carolus,
Latin for Charles, Charle
magne from
Carolus Magnus = Charles the Great, so German Karl der Grosse) ideas of Roman
Law and Empire and architecture mostly derive from Justinian's reign (which we
call Early Byzantine).
Even at a
glance, it is obvious that the
Palace
Chapel at Aachen (French Aix-la-Chapelle), contemporary with Charlemagne's
coronation as emperor of the West by the Pope (on Christmas day, A.D. 800), was
inspired by San Vitale (or the similar SS. Sergius and Bacchus in
Constantinople).
Centrally
planned, it has the tall central space lit by a clerestory, the two-storeyed
annular aisle.
(Note, on the plan,
that there are Gothic later additions, only the parts printed black being
original).
It is also the first
building north of the Alps whose architect is known to us by name: Odo of
Metz.
Odo could not build a replica
of San Vitale; the building tradition in NW Germany was in stone, not
brick.
Also, Odo had his own
ideas, partly conditioned by conservative engineering in stone building: there
hadn't been a lot of building at this scale for centuries, partly doubtless by
their own taste for rectilinear clarity in design.
The Palace Chapel avoids all the effects of expansive,
ballooning space that Justinian's architects sought.
It has no niches opening from the central space, and its
stone piers are stoutly rectilinear.
As for the zebra treatment of the round arches on the ground storey (not
evident in the old photo in the Prints), they are from Islamic architecture,
probably from Spain where the Mosque at Cordoba was being built [G 431, at the
end of this section].
In its own
way, the Palace Chapel is just as "Roman" as the Equestrian
statuette; although we shall confine the term "Romanesque" to the
late 11th and 12th centuries, it is understandable that the whole earlier
middle ages, beginning with Charlemagne, is sometimes included under that
heading.
[MG 200]
It is not often that we can learn most
about architecture of a certain kind in a given period from buildings that
never got built as planned (and in any case have been replaced long since by
newer buildings).
Such is the case
with the table-top size
Plan for a
Benedictine Monastery at St. Gall of A.D. 820.
Besides the plan itself, drawn to scale (the module is the
length of a bed in the dormitory) although without wall thickness, we have all
the descriptive labels (written in verse meter in Latin, in the legible
Carolingian book hand that is the basis for our printed fonts) on the plan (not
included in the copy from which your Print is taken) to tell us which building
is which and what was in the upper storey of two-storey buildings (around the
cloister).
Further interpretive
information is in the Rule of the Order of St. Benedict, the only monastic Rule
that is published and thus available to laymen.
There is so much to learn from the St. Gall Plan that a
whole course can be based on it.
Here we shall only notice what we need to know for this course.
The abbey church, the cloister, and the
abbot's house were built of stone, but needed steeper roofs (to shed heavier
snows) than in Italy.
The church
has two apses, for altars to SS. Peter and Paul; so have some later ones in the
Rhineland.
The
scriptorium (St. Gall was an important
center of book production) is in the upper storey of the square north of (left
of) the
choir.
We saw a
choir in San Vitale, but not in the basilicas in Rome; now we see a
church with a
transept (deriving
straight from Old St. Peter's)
and a choir between the transept and
apse.
The church has many altars,
because every Benedictine abbey had members who were priests as well as lay
brothers (who, like nuns, were not), and priests all must say Mass daily.
The twin towers, with spiral
staircases, at the west are built separately and held bells.
West of the abbot's house is the
School: any child who was educated at this period went to a monastic school
(although a royal child might have tutors instead), and west of that is the
Guest House for Distinguished Visitors
On the south side of the western apse is the Guest House for Commoners;
the Guest House for Distinguished Visitors has a
necessarium naturæ, an
outhouse, but the Commoners' hasn't.
The School, the Abbot's House, the Doctor's House, the Infirmary, the
Novitiate, and the Monks' Dormitory all have
necessaria naturæ; in the
corner of the Monks'
necessarium is
(labelled) a
lucerna, since the Order
of St. Benedict specifies that a lamp
must be left burning there at all
times.
Some very clever bits of
planning here go beyond the requirements of the Rule: the Infirmary and the
Novitiate each has its own chapel (at this date, novices were young boys, not
ready to share fully in monastic life), but the architect has them built
together, double-ended, with a dividing wall, each entered from its own
cloister; the doctor's house, herb garden, and leech house are near by.
South of the Novitiate is the Orchard
(each fruit tree labelled) sharing its plot of land with the Cemetery, then the
vegetable garden, then the hen house and goose house with a dwelling for their
keeper between them.
Between the
main cloister and the perimeter wall is the Industrial Area: barrel makers,
sword and armor makers, goldsmiths, leatherworkers--everything needed and some
to sell.
At the west are all the
barns, marked according to the animals to be kept in them.
The Monks' Cloister, finally, which is
rather like the peristyle in a Pompeiian house, is attached to the south side
of the church (the church was 200 feet long).
The dormitory has a door into the south transept, since
Benedictine monks must rise to sing an Office in the wee small hours; the Cellar
has large barrels for wine and small kegs for beer (water was iffy to drink,
and the Rule allows a pint of wine apiece, daily); even without its
inscription, the Refectory is recognizable from its long tables and has
passages to kitchen, bakery, and brewery.
Notice that such passages connect all the parts of the layout that are
part of the monks' Enclosure; the agricultural and industrial personnel, as
well as school boys and visitors, had no casual access to the Enclosure.
It is thought that most of the
buildings were of native timber-frame construction, just like barns and
workshops, et al., outside of monasteries in this region.
[MG 323]
A masonry building whose angular
"arches" visually remind us of timber construction is the
Gatehouse of the Carolingian Monastery at
Lorsch.
Only the Gatehouse is
late 8th century (and its roof design is later).
Although its three-arch design with
superimposed orders reminds us of architecture in the Roman
colonies of the Rhineland (such as Trier and Köln = Cologne <
Colonia), and the slender columns of the
ground storey have Composite capitals, their being combined with colored
patterns makes the Gatehouse look like "Hansel and Gretel"
architecture, made of candy and cake.
Also the architrave over the capitals is not a whole entablature, and
even a provincial Roman architect would not have used the angular
"arches".
Something more
fundamental: Roman architects (and Byzantine, and Odo of Metz, too) adorn the
interior,
not the exterior, of the building with colored stone veneers.
The upper floor of the gatehouse houses
a chapel, as did the gatehouse of the monastic church to which we now turn.
[MG 185]
The
Abbey Church of St. Riquier at Centula, completed in 799, no longer
stands.
It is known from a drawing
in an 11th-century manuscript (now lost), copied in an early 17th-century
Benedictine printed book.
Thus we
know its
elevation (its vertical
projection), whereas for St. Gall we knew only the plan.
With narthex, nave, transept, choir,
and apse, its
plan resembles St. Gall
except that the narthex is
designed like a second transept but unlike the transept it is in two storeys
with groin vaults supporting the upper floor (where you see Xs, there are
groins),
and there are four towers with spiral staircases
attached
flanking the choir and to the west façade: note the arched niche fronted by two
columns between the west columns--above the niche the wall is flat; this makes
a distinctive two-tower façade, the
lineal ancestor (whatever the
possible relevance of churches like Der Turmanin) of all the western
two-towered church façades.
Germans have a convenient name for this, which we all use:
Westwerk.
But there is more which is unlike Rome's basilicas that we
must learn here.
Where the
transept and the transept-like narthex cross the same-widthed nave, the
crossing squares thus created are framed with arches, which support
crossing towers.
No early
church in Italy has a crossing tower.
The drawings show round crossing towers here; the transition from square
to round cannot be ascertained since the church no longer stands but was more
likely, perhaps, a
squinch (see
below) than a pendentive.
From the
drawings, also, it is thought that the
spires
of all the six towers were open and wooden, as your drawing shows.
What is quite certain is the wholly new
shape of the Centula church (near Abbeville, France).
Besides having the necessary steep roof, its design is
insistently vertical: it is the cumulative effect of
Westwerk, tall narthex/transept with spired crossing tower, tall
transept with spired crossing tower, two more slender towers, and even an
extra-tall apse.
We take churches
with "aspiring" proportions for granted, but this is where it all
starts; all the
basilicas of either Latin or Greek rite are
fundamentally horizontal buildings.
Perhaps the necessity of a steep roof combined with knowledge of the use
of domes over central-plan churches inspired the northern builders to create
these innovations.
[K 213] [K
167]
We already have seen how
awareness of ancient Greek and Roman author portraits as frontispieces to
volumes of their works inspired the Book of Durrow's Author Page using his
symbol (the Man, from Ezekiel) and the Lindisfarne Gospel's transformation into
its own style of a "real" author portrait derived from a
Mediterranean Gospels book.
Also,
in a house in Pompeii on the wall there is a copy (from a book of his Comedies)
of the frontispiece portrait of Menander.
From the early 6th century we have an actual surviving Early Byzantine
author portrait, in the
Manuscript of
the Princess Anicia Juliana of the Physician-Author Dioskourides (it is a
medical treatise).
Dioskourides is
seated in three-quarter view, with his feet on a footstool (this is not only
honorific but useful, when the floors are cold), conversing with a female
figure named
Euresis: Discovery
(since the word is of the feminine gender in Greek, it is personified as a
human of the female sex; almost all abstract ideas are feminine in gender in
Greek and Latin, and that is why their personifications are females).
Since the evangelists are authors, they
have the same kind of portraits, and anyone can see that the model for the
St. Matthew page in the Coronation Gospels
of Charlemagne (the Gospel Book, on purple vellum, on which all the later German
emperors took their oath at their coronations) was a 6th-century, probably
Constantinopolitan, Gospel Book with evangelist portraits equivalent to that of
the physician Dioskourides.
We
know that there were eminent scholarly churchmen with very high connections
(the younger sons of the nobility if bright enough were placed as novices, and
abbots and abbesses were often royal relatives), and the monasteries and/or
palace chapel must have had some beautiful Early Byzantine (and Roman or North
Italian) books.
The portraits in
the Coronation Gospels are very conscientious copies of such a model.
We have Middle Byzantine Gospel books
surviving with evangelist portraits also deriving from 6th-century ones
confirming this thesis.
The
Coronation Gospels' St. Matthew, like the Equestrian Charlemagne we began with,
is remarkably successful; this is not only a sudden renascence of the imperial
past but is being done at a Frankish court and in the Frankish imperial
monasteries, which produced only pattern art a generation earlier.
Studied closer, the vague
foreshortening of the writing stand, the dislocation of the shoulder, and the
pointlessness of the highlights on the skin become apparent.
Compare the highlights in the paintings
from the Early Christian catacombs; those are slapdash, cursory, but the
painter so possessed the understanding and knack of highlighting that all the
highlights work to suggest light falling on the forms of the human face.
The Carolingian artist, on the
contrary, is being very careful, and trying very hard, but he "just
doesn't get" the relation between light and form.
His success with the drapery over the
knee is all the more remarkable.
No doubt about it, this Palace School manuscript is a valiant attempt to
make a "real" imperial Gospels for Charlemagne, and to be a real
emperor, not just a Frankish king,is what Charlemagne wanted.
[K 308]
The
Grandval Bible represents the Carolingian School of book
illumination located at Tours and a generation later than Charlemagne's own Palace
School manuscripts.
Here we have
illustrations to
Genesis 2: Adam and
Eve.
These are copies of
illustrations in a Bible made in Italy in the 5th century, not much later than
the Vatican Vergil.
In the narthex
of the church of San Marco in Venice the mosaics in one dome are also copies of
just such a
Genesis.
It had framed pictures with Late Roman
landscape elements and short figures recalling those in the Parting of Lot and
Abraham on the nave wall of Santa Maria Maggiore; just as Christ was beardless
in 5th-century art in Italy, so here even God the Father is beardless (very
strong evidence in itself that the model was a very early Latin Bible).
The sky is horizontally striped in
blue, lavender, pink; these stripes derive from optical-illusion skies where
the artist observed that only the high sky looks blue and it shades to white or
pinkish at the horizon.
Eve
nursing Cain in a rustic bower while Adam delves (as a consequence of that
apple, in the register above) has, even in the Carolingian copy, much of the
childlike charm of 5th-century western art.
The storytelling is direct and literal.
[K 189] [K
26]
Also at
Reims in northern France in the generation after Charlemagne there
was a distinctive School of manuscript illumination.
It produced the
Gospels
of Archbishop Ebbo and the
Utrecht
Psalter, to name the two most famous
books.
For the sake of consistent
comparison, for the third time we choose the "portrait" of Matthew
from the Ebbo Gospels (Mark and Luke are traditionally in front view).
The acanthus-leaf border, the ink horn,
the knobby writing stand all show its relationship to the Matthew of the
Coronation Gospels, but, as some art-historical wag observed, it looks as if
plugged in, electrified by a sort of high-voltage current.
It is very easy to identify.
A more relevant epithet would be
calligraphic;
although the Ebbo Gospels portraits are in full color, most of the work seems
to have been done with a reed pen (which is what they wrote with--not a quill)
rather than a brush, and the strokes have somewhat the personal energy of
handwriting.
The expressive
exaggeration, however, goes beyond the energized strokes; the gestures likewise
are exaggerated, and slender, gesticulating figures in this style are also seen
in metalwork of this school.
Still, reference to our other book, the Utrecht Psalter (volume of the
Psalms of David, which were recited in the daily Offices of the church)
suggests that the Reims School expressivity did originate in the use of reed
pen and ink for drawing.
The
Utrecht Psalter has, generically speaking, the same kind of unframed pen
drawings, without much color (here with none at all), as were used to
illustrate military history, and epics, and, interestingly, manuscripts of
Roman comedy (Terence, Plautus).
We think the man who wrote and drew the Utrecht Psalter knew
those; some of his figures have faces that look like the theatrical masks that
were worn performing Terence, and we do have a Carolingian copy of a Roman
manuscript of comedies.
But how do
you illustrate the Psalms?
They
aren't stories.
Our artist took
each vivid phrase and drew it literally: Ps. 44: 23, "Awake, why sleepest
thou, O Lord", is illustrated by the man (God!) in bed at the top in the
illustration in our print.
Look up
the psalm and try to figure out the rest, if you like.
More important art historically: notice
how similar the strokes that make hillocks are in the Ebbo Gospels and the
Utrecht Psalter.
OTTONIAN ART
[K 254]
How very different is the portrait of
the
Emperor Otto II (or III) receiving
the homage of the Provinces from the Registrum Gregorii, an Ottonian
manuscript book of the late 10th century!
If this is Otto II,
he is the emperor who married the Byzantine
princess Theophano, and Otto (whichever) is represented very similarly to
Theodosius on the Missorium in Madrid or on the base of the obelisk in
Constantinople, even to the way the raised knee is handled.
But this is almost exactly 600 years
later.
The Homage of the Provinces
goes back at least to the Roman emperor Hadrian (we have reliefs of provinces
from the temple built to honor him when he died in 138).
Stylistically, there are real changes
from Carolingian drawing.
Not only
is the style of drawing more disciplined than before, even in the Palace School
manuscripts, but it is a different kind of discipline, emphasizing clarity of
contours, some of the smoothest contours we've seen since Egyptian art.
These contained forms are especially
characteristic of the Trier-Echternach School.
The frontality, not so much of the central figure, but in
the relationship of the whole composition to the frame and the surface, also is
a change from Carolingian style.
This work, where it relates to Byzantine work, relates to Middle
Byzantine, with which it is contemporary, right after the end of Iconoclasm,
rather than to the past--Justinian's Early Byzantine.
From that source surely comes the preferred color tonality:
cool and predominantly pale, what we think of as pastel or sherbert colors,
favoring the secondary hues, green, orange, and violet, more than previously.
[1614]
Although the Reichenau School, way up
the Rhine (Reichenau is a perfect place for a monastery, being a tiny island in
the Untersee part of Lake Constance, where modern Germany, Switzerland, and
Austria meet), has a livelier manner of drawing than Trier, it shares the new
discipline and the lavender and green color combination.
The
Codex Aureus (Golden
Book--and on purple vellum)
of Otto III, ca. 1,000 A.D., is a splendid imperial Gospels.
Here we have the portrait page for
Luke, rather than Matthew, both author portrait below and evangelist symbol
above, the latter surrounded by the heavenly host, with a prophet as an
antetype for Luke at top center; all this is framed in a living arch on
purple-mottled columns, with exuberant leafy capitals no longer really
Corinthian.
The explanation is
written in a metric line of Latin at the bottom: FONTE PATRUM DUCTAS BOS AGNIS
ELICIT UNDAS =
The Ox (Luke)
brings forth waters (note the sheep
slaking their thirst at the bottom)
drawn
from the Source of the Fathers
(i.e., from the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets, asserting that Christ is the
Messiah foretold by the Hebrew scriptures).
This is truly an elaborately worked out picturing of Church
theology.
The objects in Luke's
lap are
codices of his Gospel.
[K 291]
The
Gero Crucifix from the time of Otto II, ca. 975, now in Köln
Cathedral (begun 1248), not only possesses the discipline and clear contours
that we have seen in the foregoing, but it is nearly lifesize, carved of wood,
joined at the shoulders, gessoed and painted, the colors still discernible
after more than a millennium and concomitant generations of candle and incense
smoke.
Still more important is
what it is and means.
There has
never before in western art been a Christ on the cross like this one, which
emphasizes his humanity and suffering.
Indeed, for the first thousand years of the Church images of the
crucifixion of
any kind are few and far between.
The best comparison is with the
Crucifixion at Daphni [K 230; see next section] about a hundred years
later.
The art of the early Church
tended to deemphasise the painful and degrading side of what, as they knew, was
the most disgraceful form of capital punishment and too, too mortally
human.
Only approaching its second
millennium does the church, and the whole body of the faithful, gain the
confidence to consider that Jesus' very glory came through his acceptance of
the cross--a precondition, after all, of his Resurrection and of Christians'
salvation.
The Gero Crucifix is
evidence of Christians' reaching this stage of spiritual maturity.
In the history of medieval art, as a
nearly lifesize masterpiece, even more powerfully expressive than one with
"correct" anatomy, it is one of the first signs of the rebirth of
substantive (full-size) sculpture, which will flourish a century later in the
West.
[MG 38]
Also in Köln and of the same generation
as the Gero Crucifix is the
Church of St.
Pantaleon.
Its
Westwerk is
original, and we now see why we took the trouble to describe the
Westwerk of St. Riquier (Centula) in
some detail: in plan, this one would look almost exactly like it.
In fact, Ottonian architecture grows
directly out of Carolingian architecture, only it is less tentative, more well
thought-out, after nearly 200 years' experience,
and it has some new
details.
On the
Westwerk of St. Pantaleon, for example,
the rows of little arches under the string courses combined with the narrow
strips on the corners and between the windows, here built in stone, derive from
the brick work of Lombardy, which is, after all, part of the Ottonian
Empire.
Köln is famous not only
for its Gothic Cathedral but for its early (Ottonian and Romanesque) churches.
[MG 199] [MG
198]
St. Michael's Church in Hildesheim (1003-1033) took a direct hit
from a bomb in 1945 in World War II.
It has been lovingly rebuilt.
Even the wooden ceiling which had fine 13th century paintings on it (totally
lost) has been painstakingly restored and repainted, working from
photographs.
Small consolation
(since it could have been done without the sacrifice of the original fabric of
the church), but, in the process of study to rebuild it, excavation and the
removal of some later additions brought to light new evidence for the original
design, so that a better plan and exterior elevation can be drawn today than
the one on the Print.
Looking
either at the plan or the view down the nave, we see that Hildesheim has double
apses (like the church on the St. Gall plan) and crossings and a choir (like
St. Riquier), and, as in the latter, the plan is based on the crossing square
used as a module.
But it also has
alternating supports like St. Demetrios
in Thessaloniki!
These make it
explicitly clear that the nave is exactly three crossing squares in length,
and, considering the Byzantine connections that we have noticed, it may well be
a borrowing from Byzantine basilica churches.
Only, since St. Michael's has no gallery (second storey)
above the aisles, but a flat nave wall like previous western churches, the
square piers cannot continue up vertically.
The zebra arches here are probably inherited from
Carolingian practice, whereas in the Palace Chapel at Aachen they were a fresh
borrowing from an early mosque, like Cordoba.
[MD 35]
The
Bronze Doors of Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim are not exterior doors but
lead to the crypt of St. Michael's (which, incidentally, is
not the
Cathedral of Hildesheim).
Bishop
Bernward not only had St. Michael's built but was a scholar, and he went to
Rome, where he saw Trajan's column and basilicas with bronze doors (Santa
Sabina has wonderful 5th-century doors, but they are of wood).
He returned and had cast a paschal
candlestick in the shape of a spiral column, but with the life of Christ
instead of Trajan's Dacian Campaigns figured on it.
It seems strange to us today for a great ecclesiastic and
scholar, but Bernward is reported to have been also a fine craftsman and bronze
caster.
He has to have been, for
these bronze doors which were made (the inscription lets you read the date
plainly, MXV) in A.D. 1015 are the
first bronze doors cast in one piece
since Roman antiquity, about 700 years earlier (calculating from the completion
of the Basilica Nova of Constantine).
The doors have lions' head pulls (rings in lions' mouths), which
Bernward surely saw in Rome (the earliest known examples go back to the 5th
century B.C. in Greece); of course, the Ottonian lions' heads prove that the
sculptor was not familiar with living lions.
The leaves of the door,
valvas,
have Old Testament stories on one, the Life of Christ on the other--recalling
the north and south nave walls of Santa Maria Maggiore: from the Fall to the
Redemption is the idea.
The scenes
in the panels could easily have been adapted from pictures in an illustrated
Bible, although with compositions different from those in the Grandval Bible,
but in any case we have here an artist fully capable of creating his own
narrative drama in eloquent speaking gestures.
God: Why did you eat of it?
Adam: The woman gave it to me.
Eve: The Serpent said we should eat it.
It could not be more economical or
vivid.
The 3/4 views are handled
skillfully; what might be a fault in a less expressive work, the shortening of
God's arms, here only enhances the sense of his shoulders hunched up in
outrage.
The plant life necessary
to indicate the Garden of Eden most certainly came from book illustrations; now
you see why we have taken the trouble to notice every conventional tree we came
across.
Artists in the Middle Ages
do not look at trees in order to draw them but only at models in pre-existing
pictures.
E. R. Curtius in his
famous book,
European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages, pointed out that poets, similarly, did not (until the
13th century) look out their own windows at the Springtime but took Springtime
phrases from the poets of Antiquity which they adapted for their own verses,
even "smelling" trees that didn't grow within 1,000 miles of where
they lived.
[
G 364] Early Medieval architecture is not
confined to France and Germany--not by any means--but we can only consider one
example, from Late Anglo-Saxon England, the Tower of the Church at Earl's Barton. Subtract the clock and the battlements at the top, both
Victorian, and the rest of the church, which is every stage of Gothic. Here, a century and a half later, is
the English counterpart to the Lorsch gatehouse (with little arches and
vertical strips as on St. Pantaleon--but very differently rendered, being much
farther from their Lombard origin).
The little arcade near the top has column shafts shaped just like fat
cigars, and here too the use of angular shapes for arches reminds us of
half-timbering. In fact, beside
the Anglo-Saxon church tower, the Lorsch gatehouse, apart from its colored
patterning, looks downright Roman.
After the Norman invasion in 1066, church architecture in England will
be a regional extension of the Norman architecture of northwest France, just as
Old English will give way to half-French Middle English. Yet the Earl's Barton tower is certainly
well built, to stand a thousand years.
[G 431]
Repeatedly we have mentioned the
Ummayad Caliphate's great legacy to Spain, and to Europe, the
Mosque at Cordoba.
Like the Great Mosque at Damascus about
a century earlier, it has leafy capitals with trapezoidal impost blocks
arranged in rows to support tiered arcades.
Only here, as promised, they are zebra arches, with
alternating dark and light
voussoirs.
We have already seen that Carolingian
and Ottonian architects found this attractive.
Notice besides that here the tall arches nip in at the
bottom, as if continuing the line of the circle; thus they are slightly
horseshoe-shaped, and some Romanesque architects will adopt this
horseshoe-shaped, more than semi-circular arch.
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