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ROBERT BALDWIN, ART AS A LANGUAGE FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO MODERNITY [1]

[revised August 2008]

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

Connecticut College

New London, CT 06320

(This essay was written in 19991 and is revised every few years. The material after 1750 is indebted to the teaching and scholarship of T. J. Clark.)

Introduction: The Question of Shared Values

Up until the late eighteenth-century, Western art functioned as an evolving yet relatively stable system of conventional themes and aesthetic qualities intelligible to artists, patrons, and audiences. This common vocabulary of subject and style allowed art to serve as an important public language formulating the highest values of the day. One way to understand the seriousness and centrality of Western art before 1750 is to compare it to another collective visual language. Until the French Revolution, Augustine’s comment on the sacraments could just as easily have been applied to art.

"In no religion, whether true or false, can men be held in association together unless they are

gathered together with a common share in some visible signs or sacraments". [2]

Although Western values changed dramatically from antiquity to the eighteenth century, they retained coherence and stability largely because they were defined by the social and political elites who commissioned and consumed most art and literature. While high culture at any given moment reflected the diversity of its patrons, three social groups – nobles, clerics, and burghers – monopolized most art patronage between 1300 and 1800. Despite important differences in outlook, these groups shared a common faith in a series of transcendent hierarchies pervading nature and the social-political order. Throughout this harmonious universe, mind ruled body, educated aristocrats and wealthy burghers governed those born to physical labor, men controlled women, Christianity triumphed over other religions, and Europe ruled the other “uncivilized” continents.

In a social and cultural world elevating some groups while subordinating others, it is clearly impossible to speak of shared values without important qualifications tied to gender, class, religion, geography, and race. Female artists, writers, patrons and audiences hardly shared in the heroic imagery of mythological rape reintroduced as a major artistic subject in the Italian Renaissance and prominent for the next three hundred years. [3] It is equally obvious that peasants, artisans, laborers, and the urban poor did not share in the contemptuous or romanticizing views of laborers and beggars developed in court, church, and burgher art and literature between 1300 and 1800. [4] Jews did not share the anti-Semitic values common in Christian art and literature since the 13th century, this despite attempts to indoctrinate Jews by forcing them to attend Christian sermons.[5] Within the Christian world, sixteenth and seventeenth-century Catholics did not share specifically Protestant values and vice versa.

Despite fissures between social elites, Europe maintained a relatively stable cultural system of “shared” values until the late Enlightenment for at least three reasons. First, the three dominant groups - nobles, clergy, and wealthy burghers - enjoyed sufficient common ground to sustain a shared framework of moral, religious, social, and political values for the five centuries leading up to the French Revolution. Second, social elites patronized art works focusing on universalizing subjects tied to religion, myth, and nature’s comic order (planets, astrology). To be sure, aristocrats made contemporary court life an important subject from the age of chivalry (1200-) until the late eighteenth century. But this was possible because court life claimed for itself a unique refinement, grace, luxury, beauty, and intellect which lifted it above mundane realities. With this one exception, timeless subjects dominated the art world through the mid to late eighteenth century except for the seventeenth-century Netherlands, the only burgher republic in Europe. (See below for the rise of everyday life as a subject in seventeenth-century art and the challenge it posed to the rule of timeless subjects in the eighteenth century.).

Third, weaker or marginalized groups were unable to express their views directly in the arena of high culture either because they lacked the disposable income and education (in the case of artisans, laborers and peasants) or because they were largely banished from public discourse (in the case of women).To be sure, exceptions abounded. Women always played a role as patrons, writers, and artists, even if their contributions were often overlooked. Artisans also made their voices heard through the collective patronage of the guild system. More importantly, weaker or marginalized groups helped shape cultural change as part of the larger social dynamic of interaction, exchange, and mutual transformation between all social groups. Women made important contributions to the emotionally charged spirituality of the late Middle Ages which placed new emphasis on the body and on nuptial and carnal metaphors. The gradual rise of urban centers after 1100 gave ordinary townspeople new weight in shifting the cultural center away from the traditional medieval centers of monastery and court. Whereas earlier monks and nuns lived in a world of geographic isolation, ascetic piety, and theological learning restricted to Latin, the early thirteenth century witnessed the creation of popular urban preaching orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, which eschewed theological learning for urban pastoral care, vernacular preaching, and devotional literature aimed at the widest audiences.

Despite important input from all social groups, mainstream values were necessarily skewed toward the interests of dominant social groups. This was particularly true of the shared culture seen in the luxury world of art objects. It was the relative consensus among social elites (and other groups) which allowed art to uphold serious vales and to enjoy an important social role from classical antiquity to the late-eighteenth century. Art was never separated out as an autonomous "aesthetic" realm held apart from the vital issues of the day. Nor did it ever get lost in overly personal visions allowing great artists to go unrecognized in their lifetimes. Even Bosch and El Greco, two of the most highly individual artists before the nineteenth century, enjoyed successful careers painting altarpieces, among other subjects.. Bosch was a highly paid court artist widely esteemed and imitated for his original an challenging allegories while El Greco sidelined in the portraits of nobles and church officials in a country known for its artistic conservatism.

The following paper offers a sketch of the major shifts in the language of Western art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. In the first section, I will look at the rise and fall of the three most important categories of art: religious scenes, mythology, and everyday life from 1300 to 1789. Drawing on the ideas of Thomas Crow and T. J. Clark, I will show how the idea of art as a coherent language, shared by artist and audience, came under growing strain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the French Revolution, many leading artists struggled to devise new languages of theme and style at once true to modern life and possessing the seriousness, grandeur, and transcendence found in Renaissance and Baroque art. While this struggle produced exciting artistic innovations and works of the highest quality, the larger goal of creating universal artistic languages from modern subjects was doomed from the start. Part of the problem lay with modern subject matter which lacked stability, coherence, and universality. Artists also struggled against a gradual loss of consensus following the cultural, political, social, and economic upheavals of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the American and French Revolutions and the shift from an agrarian economy to industrial capitalism.

History Painting and the Language of Art in Renaissance and Baroque Europe

In contrast to medieval notions of the painter or sculptor as a humble craftsman working anonymously for church and court, Renaissance writers from the early fifteenth-century borrowed classical descriptions of orators, poets, and philosophers to redefine art as a liberal pursuit, that is, as an activity of the mind. Borrowing deeply engrained classical distinctions between mind and body, noble and base, free and enslaved, Renaissance writers invented the modern idea of the artist as a thinker and inventor, knowledgeable in religion, classical mythology, history, poetry, anatomy, botany, geology, geometry and mathematics (proportion and perspective). After 1400, paintings and sculptures were increasingly seen as displays of individual artistic talent and knowledge with each artist pitted against rivals and against him or herself in a relentless drive for innovation, lucrative patronage, and above all, eternal fame. Revived by Renaissance humanists from classical culture, the new goal of fame replaced Medieval monastic asceticism and the “triumph of death” with appealing ideas of secular immortality grounded in worldly accomplishments.

In this new, intellectualized world of “Art” modeled on literature, the greatest art addressed the most lofty subjects tied to religion, myth, and history, the "universal" stories or histories which embodied the highest collective ideals for Renaissance elites. Such "history painting" also presumed corresponding qualities of style, above all, grand figures and rhetorical compositions, poetic description of idealized forms, and large-sized canvases appropriate to the subject matter and to the new importance of art in the public sphere of Renaissance churches, squares, and town halls (and the quasi-public spaces of palaces, villas, and townhouses). In short, "history painting" was the crowning category in an uplifting, noble language of art. It encompassed subject and style, on the one hand, and educated artists and beholders, on the other. As this new world of art unfolded from the early Renaissance (1400) through the late eighteenth century, it challenged its educated audiences with a growing variety, complexity and subtlety of artistic effects amidst an expanding vocabulary of subject matter embracing a wider range of human experiences and social types.

Since the new Art invented by the Renaissance directed itself to the most significant subjects, most Renaissance painters avoided everyday scenes or limited them to the private amusement of sketches, prints, and small paintings. The supremacy of "history painting" explains the lesser status of portraiture – deemed descriptive and inferior - and why the still-lower categories of landscape, genre painting (everyday life), and still-life only began to emerge as categories in the early seventeenth century and even then with a lower rank affirmed by almost every writer on art. Nor did genre painting or still-life trespass much into the heroic language of style and size reserved for history painting. This hierarchical system of art crowned by history painting was inseparable from the very idea of art, as forged in Renaissance humanism, and remained in effect until the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century when changing social, economic, political and cultural realities eroded its viability.

To understand more concretely how art worked as a language between 1400 and 1750, let us turn to some examples of history painting and look at the two dominant social cultures for the 15th and 16th (and most of the seventeenth century): the church and the nobility.

Religious Art / Church Culture

Although painted in 1432 in the Low Countries before the spread into Northern Europe of Renaissance humanism and the new ideas of art, artist, and history painting, Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece helps spotlight the important continuities between late medieval church art and the religious painting of the Renaissance and Baroque (1400-1700). Official in its political, Eucharistic, and salvational imagery, in its grand size and prominent placement in the cathedral of Ghent, and in its sumptuously colored, ornately-dressed, solemn forms, the Ghent Altarpiece exemplified a Catholic spirituality which remained central to Western art only through the mid-eighteenth century. After the French Revolution, the most ambitious European artists looked more to a wide array of secular subjects or painted religious scenes which could not hang in any church. The age when church culture and Christian subjects dominated artistic patronage was over.

Commissioned for a private family chapel by a powerful aristocrat who would soon become mayor of Ghent (like his father), the Ghent Altarpiece depicts God the Father presiding over a celestial court. Below in a more terrestrial zone, the faithful gather from all four corners of the world to worship the Eucharistic Lamb of God. In this image, divine authority flows down from above into a liturgical Christ. Exploiting the theme of the Holy Trinity to develop a theological, spatial, and compositional hierarchy, Van Eyck showed divine authority and grace descending from a frontal, static, timeless celestial zone to an equally symmetrical and hierarchical world of the Roman Catholic church featuring numerous saints, religious orders, sacraments, and high church officials (popes, cardinals, and bishops). The Paradise-like quality of the meadow below and the presence of Adam and Eve in the celestial zone above reminded viewers that salvation was possible only through the official church and its sacraments, doctrines, and intermediating figures.

Some eighty years later, Raphael’s Disputa gave expression to similar Catholic ideas with a more naturalistically painted allegory of Theology. Commissioned by Pope Julius II to decorate one of the walls in his private library, Raphael used the new Renaissance artistic vocabulary of dramatic figures carefully studied from life, an innovative composition drawing on the new one-point perspective, and the beginnings of the heroic anatomical forms revived from classical art to image many of the same ideas already found in van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, or for that matter, in the still earlier façade sculptures of Chartres Cathedral sculpted in the early twelfth century. As with van Eck, Raphael also used a symmetrical and hierarchical composition to give visual expression to Catholic ideals of a single Logos descending along the Holy Trinity from a courtly celestial zone into the official Eucharistic rituals and texts of a single, universal church supervised and controlled by masculine popes, bishops, and saints.

Between 1400 and 1725, tens of thousands of church paintings affirmed similar Catholic values, albeit with new aesthetic forms. [6] Let me cite one example, from the 1690s: Pozzo’s Triumph of St. Ignatius and the Jesuit Order. This giant ceiling fresco in the new church of Saint Ignatius served, like the church itself, to glorify the founder of the Jesuit Order who was also the most important figure in the Counter-Reformation Catholic piety launched in the later sixteenth century to combat the spread of Protestant heresy. Built in Rome to proclaim the supreme importance of the new order over all other orders, the church was sumptuously decorated in the seventeenth century in a manner consistent with its newfound institutional importance. Indeed, church and fresco honor the Jesuits as much as their founder, as seen in the other leading Jesuit saints placed below Ignatius on lower clouds.