The Middle Ages and medieval Christendom

The style of European painting prevalent during the last half of the 14th century and the early years of the 15th is frequently called International Gothic. There were certainly at that time features common to European painting generally. In particular, figures were elegant and graceful, yet at the same time there was a certain artificiality about such figures, and a taste grew for realism in detail, general setting, and composition. The degree of internationalism about this phase of Gothic painting owes something to the fact that much of the most important work was executed under court patronage, and most European royal families were closely linked by marriage ties. Local idiosyncrasies, however, persisted; seldom can the art of Paris, for example, be mistaken for that of Lombardy.

The main European courts were those of the Holy Roman emperors (who had nominal suzerainty over central Europe and who at this time had their capital at Prague), the Visconti of Milan, the Valois of France, and the Plantagenets of England. But other sources of patronage existed—in Florence, for example, where the art of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Lorenzo Monaco merged with that of the Early Renaissance. And an extraordinary number of important painters were associated about 1350–1400 with the linguistic area of Low Germany—the Low Countries and Westphalia especially—and the Rhineland.

Under the Holy Roman emperor Charles IV and his son Wenceslas, Prague was the seat of a flourishing and enlightened court for about 60 years. Brought up in Paris, Charles had also traveled in Italy. Indeed, his main palace chapel at Karlštejn Castle near Prague, which is the chief monument to Charles’s patronage, had an altarpiece by an Italian painter called Tommaso da Modena. The chapel itself was decorated chiefly by a local painter called Theodoric of Prague, whose work is Italianate. A group of his panel paintings, especially the altar of Vyšší Brod (c. 1350), shows a curiously Sienese character, though he did not achieve the delicacy associated with paintings from Siena. The emphasis instead is on heavily modeled faces and thick, heavy drapery. Theodoric’s style seems to have initiated the “soft style” that remained a part of German painting well into the 15th century. He certainly determined the character of Bohemian panel painting up to the outbreak of the disastrous Hussite wars (1419).

Charles IV apparently did not collect manuscripts. His ministers and courtiers, however, stimulated an important school of manuscript painting, influenced by French and Italian styles but with distinctive decorative characteristics. Two of the more important manuscripts were a missal (a book containing the office of the mass) done for the chancellor Jan of Streda (c. 1360) and a huge Bible begun for Charles’s son Wenceslas (1390s).

Styles similar to this Bohemian painting soon appeared elsewhere—the paintings of Master Bertram of Minden at Hamburg (c. 1380), for example.

In Paris a style appeared that had some of the characteristics of Bohemian work, especially a strong emphasis on faces and facial expression. An early example, probably executed before 1364, is a portrait of John II (Louvre, Paris), which is firmly modeled in a rather Italianate manner. More important, however, is the workshop of the master of the Parement de Narbonne (1370s), an altar hanging (parement) found at the Cathedral of St. Justin Narbonne. These artists, who were active from about 1370 to 1410, worked in a very distinctive style: their figures, while graceful, have markedly heavy heads and expressive faces. That some interest in settings had developed is suggested by the care that must have been taken to render them reasonably three-dimensional. In this respect the works have much in common with earlier Italian painting.

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An interest in the settings of paintings was shared by panel painters such as Melchior Broederlam, who executed the Dijon altar wings (1390s; Museum of Fine Arts, Dijon). The interest quickly spread during the early 15th century to the manuscript painters, who produced a series of extremely impressive landscape and architectural settings. Especially fine are the so-called Brussels Hours and the Hours of the Maréchal de Boucicaut. The best of the manuscript painters worked for the royal family, among whom Jean, duc de Berry, the brother of King Charles V of France, has achieved permanent fame as a patron. The most notable painters who enjoyed his patronage were Pol de Limburg and Pol’s two brothers. Their illuminations are frequently reminiscent of contemporary Italian painting. The largest and most sumptuous work, Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (left unfinished in 1416), includes calendar pictures representing each month in terms of the seasonal activities of nobility and peasants. At least one Italian artist—identified tentatively as Zebo da Firenze—was painting in Paris at this period (c. 1405). Manuscripts associated with him are usually sumptuously, if erratically, decorated. Indeed, in the matter of erratic decoration they seem to have had a baleful influence. The border decoration of Parisian manuscripts dating to about 1410–25, such as those of the artist called the Master of the Duke of Bedford, often seems to run wild and to lack the restraint characteristic of Parisian painting up to this date.

The most eminent Italian artist of this period was perhaps Gentile da Fabriano. Trained probably in Venice, he painted there in the Doges’ Palace (first decade of the 15th century) and also at Brescia. Subsequently he moved to Florence and thence to Rome, where he died. Most of his north Italian work has been destroyed, and his style must be assessed chiefly by the work done in Tuscany, the Adoration of the Magi altar (1423). His faces and drapery tend to have a soft, rounded modeling, somewhat reminiscent of the northern “soft style.” The subject matter of his painting includes detailed studies of birds, animals, and flowers.

His style forms an interesting contrast to that of Lorenzo Monaco in Florence, who, though equally an International Gothic artist, tended to draw figures with finer, more incisive lines. In many ways Gentile’s style resembles painting done at the Milanese court during this period. Many illustrated manuscripts survive, giving an impression of a transition about 1370–1410 from a strongly traditional Lombard style to something that has much in common with northern work. In particular, Michelino da Besozzo seems as court artist to have worked in a soft style similar to that of Gentile. Also dating from about 1400 is a distinguished group of illuminated manuscripts including the Book of Hours of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, herbals (manuals containing botanical drawings), and a famous sketchbook (c. 1395) containing a large number of drawings of animals from the workshop of an earlier court artist, Giovannino de’ Grassi.

In England the decoration of the royal Chapel of St. Stephen’s (c. 1360) was apparently, for the period, outstandingly Italianate. Subsequently, however, in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey (probably executed c. 1370) there was strong Germanic influence, which has been tentatively compared with the work of Master Bertram at Hamburg.

The court style of the second half of the 14th century is best illustrated by a series of manuscripts done for members of the Bohun family and by a sumptuous missal given to Westminster Abbey by its abbot, Nicholas Litlington, in 1383–84. The work is decoratively lavish, but the figure style conveys only distant reflections of Italian painting.

A great change in English manuscript painting occurred about 1400 and is associated with an artist named Herman Scheerre, who seems to have come from the region of Cologne. His figures have a rather plump softness that brings them into line with stylistic developments elsewhere; he also had a command of perspective and compositional structure lacking in the work of most previous artists in England. The style of John Siferwas, another painter active during this period, is similar, but his page decoration is usually more lavish; he produced a series of beautiful bird studies reminiscent of Lombard work. It should be noted, however, that this sort of realistic observation had long been a feature of English work—in the 14th-century East Anglian manuscripts, for example, and in English embroidery from about 1300.

In view of the number of good painters who came from the region of the Low Countries, Westphalia, and the Rhineland, it is puzzling that these areas should themselves have produced little painting from the period about 1350–1410. Judging from the surviving works, easily the most distinguished of the painters active in this part of Europe was the duke of Burgundy’s painter, Melchior Broederlam, who lived and worked at Ypres. Other artists, such as Konrad von Soest, who executed the Niederwildungen Altar about 1403, seem to have reflected developments elsewhere without pioneering anything strikingly new. It was not until the 1420s that the Low Countries became the center of intense pictorial development.