MEDIEVAL ART OF THE WEST

He explained that ‘artists depict the different stories of the Old and New Testament2²Old and New Testaments In Christianity, the two parts of the Bible. Testament: Literally a ‘contract’, ‘alliance’, or ‘covenant’ between man and God. According to Christian doctrine, the Old Testament is the initial revelation of God to humanity. The New Testament is the central revelation of God to humanity through Jesus Christ. at their discretion’. This was a widely held belief—even under Charlemagne, around the year 800, court theologians and intellectuals debated with the Greeks, who had just restored the iconodulism, noting that the Libri Carolini highlighted that despite a restricted range of permissible artistic subjects, artists enjoyed a great and formal freedom.

The Bible, widely acknowledged as a comprehensive guide to all aspects of life, became canon for art. However, no true artist would ever attempt to imaginatively express anything that could not possibly be displayed in such a way. The Church was aware of this universal human law. As a result, connecting medieval Christian art to predetermined formulas, its well-known ‘canonism’, does not serve as evidence of monotony or stagnation. Nor does it serve as a justification for labeling a particular artifact as seemingly ‘the same as everything else’ at first glance.

Any religion, just as all kinds of science, is suspicious of fantasy and the imagination, and this was particularly true of medieval Christianity. However, the history of art shows that the Church not only came to terms with the imagination of artists, but also stimulated them. It is quite something else that like any other period, medieval fantasy had its own characteristics and challenges.

When a historian identifies a piece from which an artifact has been copied, it is not an indication of pointless imitation. Mimicry is not imitation or plagiarism, and it is better to overlook the term ‘copy’ in general because it deprives each individual object of its historical content. Any borrowing is culturally justified and can sometimes tell us more about social and political alliances or conflicts than written evidence can. We should abandon the presumption that the written word is more objective than an object or image.

Consider the example of the Church of Germigny-des-Prés near Orléans, commissioned by Bishop Theodulf of Orléans at the beginning of the ninth century as a tribute to the Chapel of Aachen. It was a sign of a certain cultural unity among the educated elite at the court of the Charlemagne ‘academy’.3³AcademyAcademy of Charlemagne: A court circle that brought together scholars, theologians, artists, and poets at the court of Charlemagne. Theodulf was a recognized and authoritative member of the academy, and it was logical that he decided to build a modest replica of his sovereign’s main monument at his estate which had been celebrated in poems by Modoyin,4⁴Modoin (770–843): Clergyman, poet. another member of the same circle. The connection between the two architectural monuments is evident in a proper analysis of the buildings today, but the first written evidence of the relationship between them can be traced back to the tenth century, which itself is impressive.

Similarly, there exists no written record that the Chapel of Aachen was a tribute to the Basilicai A church with a rectangular layout. of San Vitale in Ravenna (527–47), an architectural monument of the times of Justinian I and his claim to Italy, which he had just taken back from the Goths by conquest.5⁵Justinian I was an Emperor of Byzantium whose reign was accompanied by numerous conquests aimed at restoring the unified Roman Empire within its former borders. Active construction also took place during Justinian's rule. They knew that Charles, who was in Ravenna, could not but appreciate this early Christian architecture for its connection with venerable imperial tradition. They knew he had spared no expense in the risky endeavor of transporting columns from ancient temples in Italy to the north to establish his monasteries as successors of the Roman world. However, it never occurred to anyone to think of this as imitation or retrograde.

While reviving the empire, the king of the Franks was looking for a new artistic language that was suitably imperial in form and content.6⁶Translatio imperiiMedieval religious-political idea that a country can inherit supreme power from a once-existing world empire. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire served as such a world empire. The first medieval ruler (excluding the Byzantine emperor) who tried to ‘restore’ the empire was Charlemagne. Thus, Theodulf also drew inspiration from something like the Aachen fashion for aesthetic beauty that reigned at court, but being an extraordinary and bold individual, he did not hesitate to use a different architectural plan for his chapel. He opted for a tetragon, instead of the Ravenna/Aachen octagon, taken from either the Christian East or his native Septimanian Spain.iSeptimania was a historical region on the Mediterranean coast of France. As a result, the building is both highly innovative and original and aligns with the traditions and etiquette of Carolingian culture. For the court elite to feel that there was a unity between Germigny and Aachen, it seemed sufficient that both churches were central in plan and based on various supports. This unity was contradicted neither in terms of the difference in scale, nor by the fact that the royal chapel is octagonal while Theodulf’s church is a Greek equilateral cross with apses7⁷Apse A semi-circular, polygonal, or rectangular projection in the plan of a building, covered by a semi-dome or closed semi-vault. In Christian churches, the altar is located in the apse. The conch is a semi-circular covering over the apse. on all four sides. A mosaic of the Ark of the Covenant carried by angels was placed in the conch of the main apse to remove any doubt that the commissioner of the building had pretensions toward originality. Both the expensive overseas technique and the plot are deeply original for their time, a true religious-intellectual manifesto. It is no coincidence that Theodulf provided a poetic commentary, with elegiac distichs running around the bottom of the composition:

For Theodulf, his personal chapel, a house chapel, as we know it, carried at least the same meaning as for all believers—the Ark of the Covenant, the promise of eternal life.8⁸Ark of the CovenantA sacred object described in the Old Testament. It was a chest containing the stone tablets of the Covenant with the Ten Commandments. He did not wish to see the image of God in his house, because he did not accept Greek iconography, but his prayer was no less passionate or strong because of it. That was his message to his contemporaries and his descendants. By sheer good fortune, this architectural monument has survived the ravages of time despite being badly damaged by restoration work during the nineteenth century.

When analyzing specific phenomena or artifacts, it is important to remember the degree of tradition and innovation that is critical to the universal history of culture. They should be evaluated primarily with consideration for the evolving attitudes toward the authority of antiquity during the Middle Ages. It is also important not to fully rely on written testimonies of historians of the time as these can be subjective and shouldn't be treated as absolute idols by current historians. No matter how informative they are, when reading descriptions of monuments, documents on their creation, charters, guides to sacred places, and other written sources on the history of art, one must not overlook that by definition these texts cannot express what images can represent. The antique and Byzantine ekphrasis,i That is, a literary description of a work of visual art. the literary description of a picture or image (for example, the shield of Achilles in the Iliad), made no claims of being faithful to the ‘original’. On the contrary, it competed with the material object to create its own visual image, placing certain accents in its own way. It would be just as wrong to entrust the interpretation of, for example, GuernicaiGuernica, a painting by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. exclusively to Picasso or the critics of his time. The voices of the author and their contemporaries are facts of history, and as such they are historical sources that require analysis and interpretation.

In the 530s, after having drowned the Nika revolt9⁹Nika Revolt A major popular uprising in Constantinople in 532. ‘Nika!’ is the rallying cry of the rebels, which, translated from Greek, means ‘Victory!’ in blood, Justinian erected a new cathedral—in six years, what was the shortest possible time—in honor of Sophia, the Holy Wisdom. He had justly attributed his victory over the wicked who had frightened him so much to her. This cathedral, the renowned Hagia Sophia, embodied for the first time a Christian idea—of a cosmic cathedral—formed over the centuries on such a large scale, and it evoked sincere and well-deserved awe among his contemporaries. They competed in stringing together epithets of prosaic and poetic descriptions, reciting whole poems to the emperor, and paid tribute to God (for his role as chief architect), the emperor, and even the stonemasons. Not a single marble tile escaped the attentive gaze of the talented court poet Paul the Silentiary. Over the centuries, no medieval architectural monument evoked so much ekphrasis across a variety of genres, including descriptions by pilgrims to the site. At the same time, Hagia Sophia became an architectural model that could be imitated or competed with but could never be copied.

It is enough to look across Istanbul today from Galata.iHistorical district in the European part of Istanbul.

The Ottoman architects of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rose to the challenge, particularly Sinan,10¹⁰Sinan (1488–1588)Ottoman architect and chief architect at the courts of three sultans: Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II, and Murad II. He designed the Suleymaniye Mosque, the largest mosque in Istanbul up until 2019. the creator of the beautiful Süleymaniye Mosque (1550–57).

The Süleymaniye’s dome stands higher above sea level than the Hagia Sophia’s, but it is still smaller in diameter and lower in relation to the base of the building. Indeed, in the Russian Empire as well, at the turn of the twentieth century, amid dreams of the return of St. Andrew’s colors over the Dardanelles and the cross to the dome of Sophia of Constantinople, Vasily Kosyakov built the luxurious Nikolsky Sea Cathedral on the island of Kronstadt according to ‘a project approved at the highest level’. This, the main cathedral of the Russian Navy, is similar to its template in Constantinople in every way. In the West, most were well aware of the greatness of this building, and I believe the Romans also understood the connection that this domed basilica had with the Pantheon and Basilica Maxentius, which it seems to have visually brought together into a single architectural body. But these ‘copies’ were only marginally reminiscent of the original.

We can also look at an example from around the year 760. The ambitious south Italian ruler of Lombardy Duke Arechis11¹¹Lombards Germanic tribal union that captured northern Italy in the sixth century CE and established their kingdom there. built a cathedral at the palace in Benevento in honor of St Sophia that was shaped in an uncommon oval form, and the dedication to the Holy Wisdom speaks for itself. The decadent-era Duke of Lombardy was far removed from the Vasileus of Constantinople in its heyday. He could not possibly build anything that was comparable in grandeur, but this did not prevent an unknown poet of the time to understand and express the duke’s main cultural, political, and religious claims:

Santa Sofia of Benevento is several times smaller than the prototype in Constantinople and cannot compare in terms of complexity and the sheer scale of its architectural and engineering solutions, the luxury of its decoration, or the amazing use of lighting effects. However, the courage of the unknown Lombard architects cannot be denied. They used an original plan, perhaps unique at the time, combining rectangular corbels, slightly rounded walls on the sides of the apses, and two concentric rows of support-–bearing arches. The inner space is broken down into strictly calibrated geometric shapes: circles, squares, and triangles.

This results in a visual effect that no photograph can convey, in something that must be experienced first -hand to appreciate fully. This corporeal, if you will, perception of architectural volumes is shared by the two churches bearing the same name, even if they appear so different from one another. There is no doubt that this kinship was felt by those who commissioned this building, which is possibly the most original of the surviving Lombardy architecture. Various chronicles tell us that the dukes and kings of Lombardy, these secular donors,iThat is, clients or those who commissioned work. put their images on the walls. In addition to using poetic texts, which were chosen for their memorability, these images served as a means to ensure the presence of authority, creating a kind of figurative topography, embodying the authority in both texts and images. This conveyed the roles these rulers had attributed to God and parishioners alike.

The assertions or values conveyed by these images could be commented upon or supplemented with descriptions or by accompanying inscriptions within the images themselves. This is a characteristic if not unique feature of medieval art. The famous Last Judgment,12¹²Last JudgmentIn Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the final judgment carried out by God over humanity before the Apocalypse, the end of time. found on the tympan of the Saint-Lazare Cathedral in Autun (Burgundy, 1120s) and created by the genius sculptor Gislebertus, is unique in many iconographic characteristics, even if we take the many rich breakthroughs and experiments of Burgundian Romanesque styl into account.13¹³RomanesqueArtistic movement in medieval European art. Gislebertus captured the imaginations of pilgrims using the magnificence of the monumental figure of the Judge, as well as of the terrifying agonies of hell. There is nothing particularly original about this use of terror, but the inscription running around the edge of the mandorla14¹⁴MandorlaIn Christian art, a special form of halo, a radiant oval elongated vertically, inside which the image of Christ or the Virgin Mary is placed. An inscription emphasizes the non-human scale of the figure of Christ. underlines the inhuman scale of the figure of Christ:

It is characteristic that in the middle of each phrase in the Latin text, and therefore on the horizontal axis of the mandorla and the body of Christ, there is an epithet that points toward God: ‘solus’iThat is, ‘sole’, ‘only me’. and ‘me iudice’.i‘In my judgment’, ‘because I am the judge’. To the right is a text about righteous men, and to the left is a text about the punishment of sinners. The emphases in the first line all fall on the ‘o’ sound, which is associated with ‘omega’, also an epithet to God.15¹⁵Alpha and OmegaThe combination of the first and last letters of the classical (Ionic) Greek alphabet, which is the name of God in one of the books of the New Testament and also symbols of God as the beginning and end of all that exists. In the second sentence, almost all emphases fall on the ‘e’ sound. God addresses the righteous in the first person, as if he were inviting them unto himself, whereas he addresses sinners in the third person, thus rejecting them. Below this, under its famous scenes of hellish torment, a clearly visible inscription seeks to calm the viewer, alleviating the fear of God that has been instilled into them with the reassurance:

Of course, the phrase in Latin is far more expressive than the translation:

The alliteration of the text, using the double ‘r’ and establishing a correlation between 'horror, terror', 'earthly' (terrenus) and 'sin' (error), serves to underline the 'horror' of this image using the poetic language of the church sermon because if seen without the text, the image could be misconstrued as the work of a capricious master or as being specific to the rapidly developing Romanesque style in Burgundy. The horror specierum is right there to see. To the right of the judge, the scene is calm and peaceful, with all the faces turned directly or in three quarters toward the viewer since they have nothing to fear. But to the left, we see masterfully carved chaos—the gnashing of teeth and the grimaces of demons bent into unimaginable poses. The words of the church confirm what the sculptor had already expressed in stone.

This brief analysis may seem far-fetched: how does the placement of words and the choice of consonances make a difference? This rhetoric was much better understood by a learned twelfth-century clericiThat is, to a representative of the clergy. than by us. We can see that words were combined with visual rhetoric at the hand of a great master, as was the case in Autun, Vézelay, or Le Conquet. It is also important to note that inscriptions on mandorla were perceived as the Almighty speaking directly to each believer entering the cathedral and not just as an annotation to the story. This text had the same performative impact on the religious consciousness of the time as the image itself. To ponder how the medieval believer would have reacted when faced with these luxurious portals, we might refer to the wonderful pages of The Name of the Rose as Umberto Eco studied exactly this question in his youth.16¹⁶The Name of the RoseA novel by Italian historian and writer Umberto Eco (1932–2016). The plot of the novel unfolds within the walls of a French monastery in the fourteenth century CE, where the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his companion and disciple, young Augustinian Adso of Melk, have to investigate the death of a certain Adelmo of Otranto.