The Middle Ages and medieval Christendom

Italy

In Italy the critical role played by Byzantine art is clearest of all. It is evident both in the north, particularly in Venice, and in the south at Montecassino, where Byzantine artists were summoned by the abbot Desiderius in the 1060s to work on the decoration of his new abbey church. The wall paintings commissioned by the same Desiderius at Sant’Angelo in Formis, near Capua, are the outstanding surviving example of the consequent fusion of Eastern and Western traditions. In Rome and central Italy in the first decades of the century, the dominant fashion was for figures whose garments hung in a multitude of fine parallel pleats (as in the triptych of the Redeemer in the cathedral at Tivoli and in the wall paintings at Castel Sant’Elia di Nepi and in Santa Pudenziana in Rome). In the 12th century Italian artists took an increasing interest in ancient Roman art, nowhere more so than in Rome itself, where there was a veritable renaissance of classical and early Christian compositional formulas, motifs, and even styles.

France

An early Romanesque art emerged in scriptoria throughout France in the late 11th century—at Saint-Omer in the north, at Mont-Saint-Michel in the northwest, at the abbey of Saint-Aubin at Angers in the west, at Limoges in central France, and at Toulouse in the south.

In the early 12th century, major schools of painting flourished in Burgundy, at the great Benedictine abbey of Cluny, and at the newly founded Cistercian house of Cîteaux. From Cluny there is a lectionary in which Byzantine influence is strong and a copy of St. Ildefonsus’s treatise on the virginity of Mary, with stiff, gorgeously colored and gilded compositions owing more to late Ottonian examples than to Byzantium. There are also wonderful wall paintings in the Cluniac chapel at Berzé-la-Ville, where the various compositions are filled with energy and color, and a tumult of fine sweeping folds and flickering highlights plays over the surface of the drapery. At Cîteaux the early manuscripts show evidence of strong Norman and English influence in their decoration and a satirical delight in observation (as in Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, 1111). Later, in a group of manuscripts of the second quarter of the century, the illustrations are color-washed drawings with slender, lyrically conceived figures whose drapery falls in cascades of parallel rounded pleats, apparently inspired by contemporary southern Italian work (e.g., St. Jerome’s Commentary on Isaiah, the Cîteaux Lectionary).

The most complete surviving set of early Romanesque wall paintings in France is in the church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, where the compositions show great narrative vigor and inventiveness. Quite startling formal mannerisms sometimes occur in provincial French painting of the first half of the 11th century. Two examples are the wonderfully highlighted and emphatically banded and pleated figures at Vicq-sur-Saint-Chartrier and the violently expressive gesturing figures on the vaults of the crypt of Saint-Nicolas at Tavant. In general, wall painters in the early Middle Ages had very limited means at their disposal, and it is remarkable how skilled artists were able to deploy three or four colors to impressive and unifying effect. An example of this is at Montcherand, in the Swiss Jura, where simple hues of brown, ocher, dull blue, and white have been used to depict ecstatically disputing Apostles beneath a huge Christ in Majesty, in a composition of bright abstract subtlety and strength.

England

In the 1120s in England artists at the abbey of St. Albans, drawing on earlier English traditions and Ottonian painting from Germany, devised cycles of full-page scenes with large, emphatically gesturing figures set off against rectangular panels of color, often within architectural settings. In structural density, in their use of accumulated motifs and bright areas of color, and in the intensity of their storytelling, these images (e.g., the Psalter in St. Godhard, Hildesheim, and the Life of St. Edmund) have few parallels in earlier English art.

In the second quarter of the century acquaintance with contemporary Byzantine painting—probably via illuminated manuscripts—and recent developments on the Continent led English artists to a more organic, if expressively attenuated, conception of the human body. Drapery is now stretched and gathered, with sinuous folds isolating curving islands of taut cloth (so-called damp-fold drapery) to describe three-dimensional forms in torsion. Faces are more heavily modeled than before, and glances and gestures are even more piercing and insistent. This is first seen about 1130 in the great Bible of the Abbey of St. Edmund at Bury; later stages of the development can be traced in a series of magnificent manuscripts from southern English scriptoria (e.g., the Dover Bible, the Lambeth Bible, the Psalter of Henry of Blois, and the Bodleian Terence) and in the wall painting of St. Paul and the viper in St. Anselm’s Chapel in Canterbury cathedral (1160s).

In the late 11th century in southern England and in northern France a type of initial letter emerged in which men, monsters, beasts, and birds climb and struggle in “tanglewoods” of rinceaux (ornamental motifs consisting of sinuous and scrolling foliate branches). These ingenious constructions, full of movement and variety, fired the imaginations of artists throughout Europe. On the surface they are an expression of that love of joyously outlandish, grotesque, and even warring imagery that is a ubiquitous feature of 12th-century art; but at a deeper level they are concerned with humans’ unending conflict with sin and the Devil.

Spain

An extraordinary and idiosyncratic tradition of manuscript illumination evolved in Spain in the 10th and 11th centuries. The chief vehicle for this art was the commentary on the Book of Revelation of Beatus of Liebana, a text that seems to have been taken by contemporaries as a symbol of Christian resistance to the Muslim Arabs who dominated much of the Iberian Peninsula in the early Middle Ages. The Arab cultural presence in Spain was widespread, and—even if it did not account for the strongly patterned, sometimes brutal compositions and for the brilliant use of color—it was responsible for particular motifs adopted by these illuminators (such as the horseshoe arch) and for the common practice of recording in a manuscript’s colophon the scriptorium, the scribe and artist, and the date of the manuscript itself.

Northern Spain also produced some of the most splendid Romanesque wall paintings. Spanish artists favored formal symmetrical and hieratic compositions and strong, barely modulated colors. The human form and the stiff, banded drapery that encases it are consistently more idealized and abstracted than in other European painting of the time. At their finest, these works possess a hypnotic numinous power.

The Meuse Valley

The results of the great increase in artistic production, the sudden intensification of patronage, and the wealth of artistic invention found throughout Europe in the late 11th and early 12th century are nowhere more clear than in the valley of the Meuse, in what is now eastern Belgium. One of the leading centers of artistic production was the abbey of Stavelot. The decoration of the outstanding early manuscript from its scriptorium, the Stavelot Bible, of about 1094–97, is the work of various hands and is a perfect microcosm of the influences and interests that gave rise to the first Romanesque painting. The majestic enthroned Christ clearly has his ancestry in Ottonian compositions from the nearby scriptorium at Echternach. Some of the historiated initials are inhabited by delicately drawn figures that seem to stem from the old English tradition of outline drawing. Others incorporate large, darkly modeled figures that look strikingly Byzantine. And the great initial of the book of Genesis has a complex program in which scenes from the Old and New Testaments are juxtaposed in a tree of medallions to demonstrate the scheme of Redemption. The concept of expounding a theological argument in a composition of diagrammatic complexity is something that was dear to the 12th century.

Germany and Austria

Full-page compositions of complex iconography in elaborate formal settings are also a characteristic of north German manuscripts of the 12th century. They are found above all in a group of books associated with the all-powerful duke of Saxony Henry the Lion (1142–95) and prepared in the abbey of Helmarshausen on the Weser River. This scriptorium’s masterpiece is a Gospel book presented by Henry and his wife Matilda to Brunswick cathedral in 1173–75. The illumination is extraordinarily rich and dense, with a solemn and magisterial palette of gold, purple, dark green, azure, ocher, and white. The elaborate iconographies are glossed in long scrolls, which form undulating accents across the pages.

A very different art was practiced in the southeast, where Salzburg was the leading center. A strong Italian element is detectable in the illustrations in books of the first half of the 12th century, such as the giant Bible at Michaelbeuern and the Admont Bible of 1140–50. The latter manuscript—which features large, full-page compositions dominated by tall turning figures, unreal landscapes, and bright colors—is a parallel phenomenon to the great contemporary English books, such as the Lambeth Bible and the Psalter of Henry of Blois. Each shows a preoccupation with Byzantine models for figures and faces. But the strong Italian influence in the Salzburg scriptorium ensured that the German figures are calmer and more solid than their exuberant English cousins. In the middle of the century a wonderfully elegant art of pen drawing emerged at Salzburg, with expressive swaying and gesticulating figures set against backgrounds of blue and green (the Antiphonary of St. Peter’s at Salzburg).

A number of early wall paintings survive in Austria and Germany, but many of those in Germany have suffered disastrously from over-restoration. In Austria the major monument is the late 11th-century Christological cycle in the west choir of the abbey Church at Lambach, apparently by artists from Salzburg. This work was strongly influenced by the contemporary Byzantinizing art of the Veneto. Salzburg painting of the 1150s can be seen in a lyrical female figure personifying the Third Hour, in the monastic Church of St. Peter.

In Germany well-preserved paintings of the early 12th century at Idensen, in lower Saxony, have strong four-square compositions and clearly contoured, stern-faced figures, which stem from late Ottonian tradition. Half a century later, on the lower Rhine, a new spirit and mentality were expressed in two splendid but drastically repainted cycles at Schwarz Rheindorf and at Brauweiler, near Cologne, where elegantly drawn figures play against panels and frames of blue and green, illustrating recondite and complicated iconographic programs.