Hi
Why didn’t medieval artists paint more lifelike/true-to-life portraits? Was it for philosophical or religious reasons? Did the concept of rendering a real-life image exist at all in pre-Renaissance Europe?
I look forward to your feedback.
Convention, lack of resources, lack of studio training, limited colour palette among other things. The portrait of King Richard II comes near to realism; but it would be odd to imagine artists in 1100 AD had sufficient supplies: although in other plastic mediums such as sculpture and metal-work, and even enamels, they did great things.
The Romans and Greeks had great painters in pre-renaissance Europe, such as Apelles; but another question would be why art in other cultures was generally no more realistic, even with such surpassing skills as had the Japanese. In all early cultures idealist portrayal and tradition was expected beyond realism.
And of course the Roman sculptors were actually very realist-bound. Rather too heavily…
James Burke did part of an episode that touched on this. I forget if it was Connections or The Day The Universe Changed. Probably the latter.
There are plenty of realistic paintings in the middle ages. Once perspective was understood (15th century), they could do nice realism. And the market for art was the church and the nobility; the latter insisted on good likenesses, and the former required human likenesses to portray the religious figures.
IIRC his point was that after the church took over art, particularly the religious one, was not about realism, but about the rank beings had according to dogma; where common folk was small and puny while the angels and saints larger with Christ and God usually the biggest of them all.
With a lot of the population illiterate, art was one of the main ways to educate the people about the order of things, that is, until the renaissance and the rediscovery of perspective.
I don’t know much about art, but I’ve always thought it was the opposite. Many medieval paintings, e.g. Van Eyck’s, look almost like photos, while modern art, like Picasso’s, is bizarre. I assumed the change came when artists couldn’t compete with photos for realism, and so went off in a different direction.
Depending on the the work and the medium, art was realistic in different ways and contexts at different times. A considerable amount of purely secular art, for example, was concerned with scenes of battle and illustrating the flow of great events (in sometimes exacting detail), and thus, often showed amazing detail of environment or decor. Conversely, religious art might feature extremely detailed images. One area to clear up is that painting was not as important in the Early or High Middle Ages as in the Late.
Actually, Van Eyck’s is considered to be an example of renaissance art.
The OP seems to point at what some call the early middle age, from the 5th to the 10th century CE.
That was one of the triggers for the Academia de Bellas Artes class which included Picasso, Dalí and Miró among its students to explore other options, yes. At least one of them also mentioned seeing the paintings of Velázquez “in the flesh” as it were and thinking “ok, there’s no fucking way I’ll ever be able to do that.” Velázquez’s paintings were usually done in sizes which allowed him to work on 1:1 scale; several of them were hyper-realistic several centuries before anybody came up with that word (Arachne and Vulcan’s Forge are just unbelievable).
A lot of medieval art included figures which had recognizable faces, within the constraints of what happened to be in fashion at the time. Romanic art (both painting and sculpture) is a lot more rigid and a lot less likely to have distinct, personal faces than Gothic art. We’re talking about a period of almost a thousand years (exact length varies with your definitions), there was variation both with space and time.
There were many factors, convention and the church being two as mentioned above. However a greater influence is probably the widespread knowledge of the Camera Obscura in later art: Camera obscura - Wikipedia
This can’t be overlooked or dismissed. David Hockney wrote a great resource book on it if you are interested called Secret Knowledge. It’s worth checking out. I think there is also a documentary based on the book. Try YouTube.
It should be noted that Hockney is an artist, not a historian, and that almost all art historians firmly reject the Hockney-Falco thesis that advances in Renaissance art depended on the development of optical aids. Personally I think it’s only a little better argued than von Daniken’s ancient astronaut theories. In both cases, the author can’t figure out how premodern people produced certain artifacts, therefore they conclude that they must have used some unknown technology that has left no evidence.
Yes I should have been more specific. I was referring to the early Middle Ages.5th-14th century. eg Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronicle of england"
Your posts suggest you’re not very familiar with either author’s argument. Hockey’s standing as an artist carries as much weight, if not more, than historians. He is after all an actual artist - not just a theorist. History is full of incidences of discoveries that were paradigm shifts in contemporary thinking that was firmly rejected by the experts of the day only to be proven right in the end.
The fact the you essentially Godwinized the thread by bringing up Von Daniken is ludicrous. There is nothing even remotely comparable between the two. You are also wrong that the camera obscura was unknown technology.
Pierre de Langtoft’s work isn’t exactly early Middle Ages. His depictions of royalty are far from the realism of Renaissance art.
It appears that the paintings in the chronicler’s (Langtoft’s) works were in the Christian tradition. I would like to know if these painters were monks or secular artists.
Sorry if this seems like threadshitting, but of any human endeavour, we with the benefit of hindsight, always find it easy to ask “why didn’t that begin earlier?”, or “Why did it take so long to invent that?”.
I think it’s just by virtue of the way that successful innovations quickly become very commonplace - and we conflate ‘commonplace’ with ‘obvious’. Many simple things are obvious only once they have begun to exist.
Since this is about art, let’s move it to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I think we need to consider that medieval artists were painting realistically - depending on how you define the term.
Paintings, by their physical nature, cannot be completely realistic. A person is not a flat two-dimensional surface. Any attempt to paint an image of a person is going to be distorted. So the question is which distortions do you choose to incorporate into the painting.
So you have paintings like these. Everything is in proportion of its size regardless of where it is located in the setting. People are all shown as being the same size because people are the same size. They don’t grow and shrink as they move around. A medieval artist would say he’s depicting his subjects accurately.
Perspective is basically a method of painting the distortions of reality caused by our viewpoint. An object appears to get smaller as it gets farther away from us. So we have paintings like these where some people are bigger than others, even though all of the people are actually the same size and everything on the painted surface is the same distance away from us.
Medieval artists were usually only interested in depicting symbolic meaning and the inner emotions and mystical states of people. Realism was not their priority. It was not what they were aiming for.
Even when we start to get more realistic art in the later medieval period, it is still almost always heavily symbolic.
Look at this painting by Jan van Eyck, the Madonna of Chancellor Rolin from about 1435. It has a very interesting mix of realism and non-realism.
The Chancellor on the left is a portrait of a real person and he is depicted with almost photo-realism.
The Madonna and Child are far more idealized and less like real people.
The tiny angel holding the crown over her head is even less of a ‘real’ element.
The Wikipedia page has a section describing the heavily symbolic nature of many of the elements in the paining.
There is no doubt at all that if Van Eyck had wanted to depict the Madonna and Child and the room they were sitting in realistically, he could easily have done so. Instead he made the deliberate choice not to use photo-realism for them. He is not trying to depict Chancellor Rolin physically in the presence of the Madonna and Child. Rather, he is depicting the Chancellor’s devotion to them, his inner religious feeling. If you like, the Madonna and Child are what the Chancellor sees in his imagination, in his inner vision.
The earlier art can probably most simply be broken into “before perspective” and “after perspective”. After perspective looks “right” to us.
Before perspective is what we think of as medieval art. Little Nemo’s examples are very good in illustrating the problem. Artists had limited opportunities to learn their craft, and were likely selected from a smaller pool of talent.
For example - the fellow picked to illustrate some manuscripts in a monastery would be one of the monks. If the fellow showed remarkable talent, perhaps the local bishop or noble might pick him up and move him to a more prestigious location, but in general he would not get an opportunity to study from a grand master at an early age - this development followed the renaissance and the availability of more money, so more demand for the best to be found and trained to provide the product.
So that might explain some of the crappy attempts at portrait - some of the artists were not that good at depicting realistic faces. You try drawing a portrait of a friend or family member, and see how recognizable it is to anyone else; especially someone who does not know the person. But then, in the days before photographs, “photorealistic” was not that important either.(There’s the story that at the beginning of WWI when their husbands went off to war, women could go to a local photo store and look through a large collection of small photos to find one that “looked like” their husband to buy as a memory. Before everyone was being photographed, that was “good enough” as a portrait.)
What you see in early art too is a different mindset. The relative importance of each item or person is reflected in the amount of space or relative size. In the example linked of the Last Supper, Jesus is bigger than the apostles. Kings were bigger than commoners, the important building or ship or whatever was bigger than the surrounding ones, etc.
As for “why not realistic”, there is also the “good enough” principle. Many of these illustrations were cartoonish. they weren’t aiming for very realistic skin tones or cloth folds - they were illustrating a story -usually a bible story or historical event - and the important thing was to fit the needed elements in, with the adornments - gold leaf, pictures of reverent object like crown and scepter - to ensure the message contained in the picture got through. Again, note the person doing the illustration likely did not have a picture of the local king (let alone Jesus) and probably may not have seen him more than a few times… so realistic depiction is not necessary. Heck, in the days before gladiator movies, some medieval painters were barely aware of how Romans and people of Jesus time dressed, and there at plenty of medieval and early renaissance paintings where the characters wear somewhat local costume instead.
Much of the art was for the church, and in the days before literacy the art around the church was like a Sunday School lesson depicting stories from the bible. Note that legendary and biblical figures had cues - St. Sebastian and his arrows, St. Peter was bald with bushy beard, John the Apostle had no beard, Moses always held those tablets, etc. (I think it was St. matthew that’s depicted very skeletal in the Milan cathedral holding his skin, since he was allegedly flayed alive), these were cues to tell people who was who.