LITMIR.BIZ

      After the demise of the Roman Empire, all of the art forms declined across western Europe, and a whole set of stylistic and iconographic traditions essentially disappeared. In this political and artistic vacuum, a number of new styles arrived with the cultures that introduced them. The tribal movements in the north brought with them animal art, stylised and small-scale works. The art of such groups as the Vikings and Hiberno-Saxons, who specialised in stylised animal forms and the invention of intricate and abstract knot and weave designs, stands as good examples of the style that succeeded the waning of the heavily figural tradition of the ancient Romans.

      In time, some of the core cultures in western Europe turned again to ancient Roman models for guides. Towards the year 800, Charlemagne’s writers and artists very consciously set out to revive ancient models in order to suggest his political revival of the Roman Empire, and certain specimens of Carolingian sculpture are based, if somewhat naively, on ancient Roman prototypes. A more broadly-based spirit of revival occurred in the Romanesque style, which was flourishing by 1000 A.D. and left its mark on Europe during the next two centuries or so. Just as Romanesque architects re-utilised the rounded arches, wall masses, and barrel-vaults of the Romans, artists attempted to revitalise sculpture by creating monumental and extensive programmes for ecclesiastical exteriors. As for stylistic particulars, a few Romanesque sculptors looked, sometimes with startling fidelity, to the models of the Roman past, basing their works, whether capitals or portrait heads, on originals from antiquity. These were in something of a minority, however, and more generally the Romanesque figural style was varied and novel, sometimes rendered with great elongation or, on the other hand, with squat proportions.

      Many monumental Romanesque works responded to the great movement of pilgrims from site to site, and frightening Last Judgments or memorable images of the Second Coming of Christ served as a reminder of this before the entrance portals, as they did at the cathedrals at Autun and Vézelay. The effective placing of figures in the tympana and in the trumeaux at the entrance doors caught the attention of those entering. Half hidden in the pier of the trumeau at Saint-Pierre Abbey Church in Moissac, the prophet Jeremiah twists and turns, his expressive elongation and thin drapery folds representing a new kind of ecstatic artistry. No less expressive is the Christ figure at Saint-Lazare Cathedral of Autun; his thin and angular body conveying the spiritual sense of his ascension to Heaven. In the tympanum, we have a record of the name of the master, Gislebertus, an early example of the growing status of the artist, who in this case proudly signed his work.

      It is impossible to separate the development of Gothic sculpture from the rise of new forms in architecture. The sculptural programmes in Gothic cathedrals exploded in variety and subject matter. There occurred the addition of the numerous jamb figures along the sides of the doors, and overhead a stunning crowd of saints, prophets, angels, and others occupied the ever-deepening plane of the wall. Some of the early Gothic figures, such as the jamb figures at Notre Dame at Chartres, were linear and columnar, to represent their sustaining role in the Church, but in general, compared to their Romanesque predecessors, the Gothic figures became softer, more realistic, and more sensitively human. Christ over the main portal at Chartres is forgiving and humane, his body supple and plausibly real.

      Even further from the stiff Romanesque style is the courtly Gothic of the later Middle Ages. Here the hip-short stance is an elegant replacement of the antique contrapposto stance, and sometimes a rubbery S-curve or arc runs through the figures. The French late Gothic tradition, in particular, was marked by a courtly elegance and suave sophistication. Especially strongly in the last phases of the Gothic style, the gentle smile on the faces and the curving lines were markedly “pretty” rather than incisive in narrative. The late Gothic manner started in France but radiated outwards, and was manifested throughout Europe, and echoes of it are found in Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, and elsewhere. The elaborate late Gothic building style is often echoed in reliquaries of the period, which sculptors crafted using the florid architectural language of the time.

      During the Gothic period, some sculptors relied on ancient prototypes. The master of the Annunciation group at Reims was clearly looking at Roman models, and the Italian Nicola Pisano did the same. Indeed, the rebirth of sculpture in Italy began in the 1200s in the hands of Nicola, whose marble pulpits (see nos. 301, 302) and other works drew on both the formal models and the overall spirit of the ancient Roman style as he knew it from sarcophagi in the camposanto (cemetery) of Pisa. Like other aspects of the early rebirth of classical culture, Nicola’s innovations had only a limited impact, and even his own son Giovanni Pisano turned to an expressive Gothic manner reminiscent of the art of late medieval northern Europe.

      If the French developed a witty and decorous courtly Gothic, and the Italians carved their figures in a way at times dependent on grave classical models, the Germans had their own expressive mode. The Röttgen Pietà is emblematic of this, with its clotted blood and tortured body of Christ calling attention to the suffering of Christ rather than his perfection of form. Later the German Veit Stoss, encasing his narrative scenes in intricate Gothic frames, filled the spaces with melancholy figures, their draperies full of emotional movement and spatial clustering. This kind of expressionism was found in late Gothic German painting too,

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