On Medieval Works of Art

The question we wish to deal with is: What is the essence of the paintings and sculptures of the Middle Ages? What is their true content? In theory these works of art could have meant something quite different to medieval people from what they mean to us today, and that is certainly true in part. A statue of the Madonna means something quite different to a believing Roman Catholic from what it means to a believing Protestant, and it will have a different place of importance in each of their lives. However, it is also true that the person who sees a Madonna sculpture in a museum and has no idea that it is the Madonna will be missing the whole point completely. But even to such an observer it will be clear that he or she is dealing with divine, or at least elevated, figures and not just with a mother and her child. (To prevent misunderstanding, we have specified in the previous article that with the Middle Ages we refer to that period from AD 800 to 1400, which means that the Flemish fifteenth-century art and the art of the Renaissance are not included in our discussion.)

It is possible, of course, to admire the purely aesthetic actualization of the work; to appreciate the beauty of the figure as it has been sculpted or cut out of wood or poured into copper or embossed in silver, to marvel at the composition, the manner in which the various parts of the work have been combined to form a whole. In short, we can value the aesthetic aspects of a work on their own merits. And that is what we will no doubt do, and any museum will try to present us with the most beautiful examples.

But the question remains – is that really the essence of a work of art? When a medieval sculptor was commissioned to create a Madonna statue, it was assumed that he would devote himself to that task. To make a Madonna was not just a pretext for making a beautiful sculpture; rather, the more clearly this statue depicted the Mother of God the more successful it was considered to be. This does not imply that the artist did not set out to create an object of beauty. But to present the issue in this way is to divorce these two aspects, and that is inappropriate. It is obvious that someone who sets out to create a statue of the Madonna will try to do that as beautifully as possible, first of all because its goal is to honour her – and one certainly does not do that, if one can help it, with a piece of junk, and definitely not with something that has been consciously made to look ugly. Secondly, the commissioned artist would be a craftsman who was expected to give the best he had to offer – a beautiful statue of the Madonna. But it certainly had to be a Madonna and look like one as clearly as possible. It would have been unthinkable to leave out something considered to be characteristic of the Madonna; that would have been seen as an affront to Mary, the subject. To give another example, anyone setting out to represent St Peter was required to make it look clearly like Peter, showing his characteristic attributes, such as a key in his hand. And it would not have been acceptable to portray him as a young chap, because that is not what Peter was considered to be like, no one would recognize a youthful Peter.

The theme, the given, the Madonna or the St Peter, was of great importance to the medieval person. If we lose sight of that we will be missing an essential aspect of understanding medieval art. This is true for all the traditional representations – such as the Birth of Christ, his Circumcision, his Baptism in the Jordan, his Crucifixion, etc. These were not simply attempts to give an account of what we might have seen had we been present in Bethlehem or at the Jordan River or at any of those sites. Such naturalism was foreign to people of the Middle Ages (but we will go into that more deeply later on).

Think again of the Madonna: Mary with Child. The latter is included to show why Mary is so important, to indicate that she is the ‘Mother of God’. The point of portraying her is that she represents a reality that is essential to us now, in the present. So it is with the birth of Christ: not only is it meant to portray Mary but also to represent the Incarnation. The Baptism in the Jordan is depicted for the purpose of showing Christ as a divine person and, furthermore, of revealing the Trinity. Images like these were created, in the first place, to represent Christian truths, events from the story of salvation, dogmatic givens. They represent realities which are still relevant, or better said, especially relevant for us today. They are presented as sermons, dogmatic formulations on a par with the Apostle’s Creed. And they are anchored in that Creed, as well as in the liturgy of the church calendar. It is especially that calendar that prompted the portrayal of many characteristic and recurring themes, to the exclusion of other countless possible biblical subjects.

Thus, the theme is of particular importance. It is certainly never incidental. It represents and confronts people with the Christian realities that are the truth. Just as a sermon about, for example, the suffering of Christ is preached not just for the purpose of telling us about something that happened in the past, about history as such, but to illuminate God’s grace and Christ’s work on our behalf, similarly it was with the medieval representations of the main points of the gospel (according to the interpretation of that era, of course, which is sometimes disputable and sometimes not).

Such images, then, are never just an illustration or a ‘concretizing’ of a theme. They are intended to represent certain truths. And sometimes they are much more. A certain Madonna statue may, for one reason or another, come to possess an extra measure of holiness. In that case it becomes very important to own a copy of that statue. We know of instances (for example, the famous holy statue of Mary in Einsiedeln) where a copy was placed next to the original so as to come in physical contact with it, thereby creating a second statue with the same powers. These practices may seem primitive to us, and the Reformation emphatically turned away from them, but within the Roman Catholic milieu they have been accepted for many centuries and in some places continue to exist, even today.

We have seen, then, that the theme of the artwork is of utmost importance, and that the content of the work first of all is manifested in the theme. The practice of copying artworks was very common in the Middle Ages. This is not referring to the unusual example mentioned above but to copying as such. Books were transcribed, since printing presses did not exist yet, and the painted pictures in these books were copied along with the text. The same was true for more monumental works of art like murals and sculptures. But we notice something peculiar here. Just as in the copying of a book it was essential not to leave out or mis-copy a word – in short, to be as precise as possible – while it did not really matter whose handwriting or what style of letters were used to copy the text, so it was also with illustrations or representations. Certainly one was required to carefully reproduce the composition, the arrangement of the original, and to copy its unique characteristics, but the style in which that was done was considered of much less importance. We see that copiers carefully followed the construction of the image, but worked in quite different styles and, with respect to the details, allowed themselves all kinds of freedom, freedom which copiers today would never feel comfortable to take for fear of being reproached or punished for not copying ‘exactly’.

The construction of the image then – the composition or the formula – was important. That is partly because it was through this formula that the content of the work could be understood. In reciting the Apostle’s Creed we would never feel free to mix up the words or the order of the sentences, or to say it in our own words; in the same way the copier did not have freedom. If in the Creed we should recite the statements in a different order, we would immediately be challenged to justify our actions and would be asked whether we intended to change the meaning or the emphasis. With respect to the examples mentioned above, we see the formation of firmly established formulas which were considered to be fixed. If the formula was changed, or if an artist were to use a different, perhaps just as traditional, formula, it would be for a specific reason; the content of the artwork would change; the exegesis of the given would receive a different emphasis. Thus one encounters Crucifixions that are very different in character. Christ can be rendered as Christ the King, for his crucifixion earned him the position of King and Lord over us and all things; or the emphasis can be on the suffering of Christ, a formula that especially came to the fore in Gothic art, though it originated much earlier.

We have learned, then, that for medieval works of art the content lies in the theme, based on how that theme is expressed in a certain composition or formula. The style, the characteristic artistry, is not unimportant and should not be disregarded but in itself it means little or nothing. A small print of St Jerome, for instance, would have portrayed him just as adequately as the most beautiful painting, though even the medieval viewer would not have been insensitive to the differences – which would have had more to do with place and function than with the actual content of the image. In a subsequent article we will see that the above also applies to a certain extent to Baroque art, though a completely different concept was operative as well. But first we will have to turn our attention to the fifteenth century.

It will not have escaped the thoughtful reader that on several points I have formulated the issues and defined the terms in slightly different ways than in my previous article ‘About the content of works of art’. Further research has made that necessary. I hope to explain my reasons for this in a later article.

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For other articles belonging to this series, see the articles ‘About the content of works of art’; ‘The Art of the Fifteenth Century’; ‘Baroque Art’; ‘Theme, Style and Motif in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’; ‘Principles of Nineteenth-Century Art’ and ‘Form and Content of Modern Art’. These articles were originally published in Dutch from 1963-1965 in Ad Fontes.

Published in M. Hengelaar-Rookmaaker (ed.): H.R. Rookmaaker:

The Complete Works 4, Piquant – Carlisle, 2003.