Medieval artists did not know perspective: backward?
I disagree: their figures were flat because they wanted them to be. I remember seeing with my students a Romanesque image of the Virgin on a large golden background: no perspective…
Hieratic by default of the craftsman?
…But then I imagined how they really washed in a chapel: perhaps in the darkness of a winter night in the Pyrenees. And I turned off the light and lit the candles… and the Virgin approached us!
So it’s not that they didn’t know perspective, it’s that they didn’t want to use it?
If you walk past a Romanesque image today in the MNAC or in any spotlight-lit museum, you will only see a flat Virgin, and this one had a huge golden background, which looks like a simple ornament…
Did art progress and overcome itself?
Wait: imagine yourself as a devout believer prostrate before the icon of the miraculous mother in the light of the uncertain and trembling flickering of the candles in the twilight and you will see the Mother of God stretching out her arm towards you. This golden background is not there by chance. It makes possible the exciting moment when we feel that we are praying with her.
A small miracle that Instagram will never catch?
Despite the fact that the experience of the contemporary image is more sophisticated, today it is impossible for it to make us feel this emotion…
Because?
Because of the rate at which we conceive perception today.
The more speed, the less excitement?
To get to see more in art, you don’t have to go faster – more and more images in less time – but more gradually. Our challenge is to recover this slowness.
Wasn’t medieval art just a way to indoctrinate illiterate believers?
It is more complex than this simplicity. His images do not replace any writing: they just say something else in an exciting language and another way of seeing it lost today.
Was this Virgin an intelligent abstraction or simply naive creation?
Historians believed for centuries that these medieval images aspired so that the illiterate people could “read” the doctrine of the Church, but if you stop, as they did, in front of their images, you see that they wanted to generate emotion with their instruments in their way of life.
And then they progressed?
The medieval artist does not have this perception of superiority with respect to the past or inferiority with respect to the future. Our conception of progress is later and productivist, merely capitalist.
Were medieval artists abstract and primitivist without knowing it?
When we explain why Picasso explores the supposed primitivism of African art or modern abstraction, we want to believe that it is modern – a progress – and this prevents us from understanding that long before there was also abstraction…
Wasn’t it all about imitating reality, mimesis, but transcending it to excite?
Medieval artists were abstract before Picasso, because they subordinated the representation of reality to the transmission of an idea: they did not want to imitate reality, but to go further.
If they had wanted to represent a real woman, would they have represented her?
But they were more interested in subordinating this pretense of realism to the achievement of the emotion of praying with her.
But it is tempting to think that we are superior to them and that our art is too.
On the other hand, understanding this Virgin requires knowing how societies, guilds, learning, churches, towns were organized… Anthropology of when she was conceived, carved, painted…
Was the image God’s word?
And the Middle Ages is the age of diagrams and of conveying complex ideas with strokes, letters and drawings that organize and transmit knowledge…
…That it was sometimes complex?
Scholastic theology was even more so. If you remember The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, already in the 15th century…
I will google it to remember: such are the contradictions of history.
You will appreciate the tension between the realistic detail in the relief with which he paints the angel’s wings and the river of colors: yellow, blue and green that emanates from the mantle of the Virgin.
That means?
The mystery of the incarnation is not figurative and Fra Angelico is a Dominican, a scholastic: he explains to us with art a complex truth beyond words.
