Arrianna Rimes

Assignment 2: Essay

By Wednesday, September 24, 2014, select one of the questions listed below and develop an essay response of approximately 350 words. Analyze and identify specific historical and visual examples to support your understanding of the topic. Include images with complete identifying information of the specific works of art you chose. Compose your thoughts with careful research and formulate independent conclusions.

Reference and cite (using MLA format) the textbook and at least one other scholarly source (e.g., a class lecture, scholarly article, or museum website). If you need help with MLA formatting, please visit the Writing Center or Tutoring Services. Note: Wikipedia, blogs, and answers/Yahoo! websites are not permitted scholarly sources.

Grammar and spelling are expected to reflect college-level work. Please spell-check and proofread all work prior to submission.

Post your response in a Microsoft Word file to the W4 Assignment 2 Dropbox (do not post anything to the Discussion Areas for the questions). Name your file LastNameFirstIntial_W4_A2_QuestionNumber.doc

Note: Rubrics provide an explanation for full or partial credit. If a criteria listed is not addressed you will receive a zero for that section.

Assignment 2 Grading Criteria Maximum Points Develop a response with accurate and relevant historical information that thoroughly supports the topic and the culture discussed.

10

Analyze and thoroughly identify multiple, visual examples that thoroughly support the topic. 10

Formulate independent conclusions based on research, analysis, and visual observations that support the topic. 10

Utilize the text and scholarly sources that support the response. 10

Employs correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and appropriate logic, voice, and utilize correct MLA formatting. 10

Total: 50

Question 1: Sculpture

This Is the to do---Question 1. Sculpture reflects a culture’s values through its style, subject, and function.

In your essay, discuss the style, subject, and function of sculpture. Compare and contrast specific examples of sculpture from the Romanesque and Gothic eras.

In your own words, summarize how the artworks are reflective of the cultures that created them.

Romanesque Era:

6-19: South portal of Saint-Pierre, Moissac, France, ca. 1115–1135 https://digitalbookshelf.aionline.edu/#/books/1111904871/pages/51103489

Romanesque churches served a largely illiterate lay public. To attract worshipers, the clergy commissioned sculptors to carve Christian symbols and stories on the portals opening onto the town squares.

Many variations exist within the general style of Romanesque sculpture, as within Romanesque architecture. The extremely elongated bodies of the recording angels, the cross-legged dancing pose of Saint Matthew’s angel, the jerky movement of the elders’ heads, the zigzag and dovetail lines of the draperies, the bandlike folds of the torsos, and the bending back of the hands against the body are all characteristic of the anonymous Moissac sculptor’s distinctive style. The animation of the individual figures, however, contrasts with the stately monumentality of the composition as a whole, producing a dynamic tension in the tympanum.

Below the tympanum are a richly decorated trumeau and elaborate door jambs with scalloped contours, the latter a borrowing from Islamic Spain (FIG. 5-7). On the trumeau’s right face is a prophet displaying the scroll where his prophetic vision is written. Six roaring interlaced lions fill the trumeau’s outer face. Lions were the church’s ideal protectors. In the Middle Ages, people believed lions slept with their eyes open.

Romanesque Era:

6-22: Initial R with knight fighting a dragon, folio 4 verso of the Moralia in Job, from Cîteaux, France, ca. 1115–1125. Ink and tempera on vellum, . Bibliothèque Municipale, Dijon. https://digitalbookshelf.aionline.edu/#/books/1111904871/pages/51103492 Ornamented initials date to the Hiberno-Saxon era (FIG. 6-4), but this artist translated the theme into Romanesque terms. The duel between knight and dragons may symbolize monks’ spiritual struggle.

Holy Roman Empire and Italy

The Romanesque successors of the Ottonians were the Salians (r. 1027–1125), a dynasty of Franks of the Salian tribe. They ruled an empire that corresponds roughly to present-day Germany and the Lombard region of northern Italy (MAP 6-1). Like their predecessors, the Salian emperors were important patrons of art and architecture, although, as elsewhere in Romanesque Europe, the monasteries remained great centers of artistic production.

Romanesque Era: 6-23: Hildegard receives her visions, detail of a facsimile of a lost folio in the Rupertsberger Scivias by Hildegard of Bingen, from Trier or Bingen, Germany, ca. 1180. Abbey of St. Hildegard, Rüdesheim/Eibingen. https://digitalbookshelf.aionline.edu/#/books/1111904871/pages/51103492 Hildegard of Bingen-The most prominent nun of the 12th century and one of the greatest religious figures of the Middle Ages, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), was born into an aristocratic family that owned large estates in the German Rhineland. At a very early age she began to have visions, and her parents had her study to become a nun. In 1141, God instructed Hildegard to disclose her visions to the world. Bernard of Clairvaux certified in 1147 that those visions were authentic. Archbishop Heinrich of Mainz joined him in endorsing Hildegard. In 1148 the Cistercian pope Eugenius III (r. 1145–1153) formally authorized Hildegard “in the name of Christ and Saint Peter to publish all that she had learned from the Holy Spirit.” At this time Hildegard became the abbess of a new convent built for her near Bingen. As reports of Hildegard’s visions spread, kings, popes, barons, and prelates sought her counsel.

One of the most interesting Romanesque books is Hildegard’s Scivias (Know the Ways [Scite vias] of God). On the opening page (FIG. 6-23), Hildegard sits within a monastery experiencing her divine vision. Five long tongues of fire emanating from above enter her brain, just as she describes the experience in the accompanying text. She immediately sets down what has been revealed to her on a wax tablet resting on her left knee. Nearby, the monk Volmar, Hildegard’s confessor, copies into a book all she has written. Here, in a singularly dramatic context, is a picture of the essential nature of ancient and medieval book manufacture—individual scribes copying and recopying texts by hand. Hildegard of Bingen was one of the great religious figures of the Middle Ages. Here, she experiences a divine vision, shown as five tongues of fire emanating from above

and entering her brain.

Gothic Europe Era :

7-1: West facade of Reims Cathedral, Reims, France, ca. 1225–1290. https://digitalbookshelf.aionline.edu/#/books/1111904871/pages/51103504?return=/books/11119048 71/outline/8

The facade of Reims Cathedral exemplifies French High Gothic architects’ desire to reduce sheer mass and replace it with intricately framed voids. Stained-glass windows, not stone sculpture, fill the tympana. The 12th through 14th centuries were a time of profound change in European society. The focus of both intellectual and religious life shifted definitively from pilgrimage churches and monasteries in the countryside to rapidly expanding secular cities with enormous cathedrals reaching to the sky. In these new urban centers, prosperous merchants made their homes, and guilds (professional associations) of scholars founded the first universities. Modern Europe’s independent secular nations began to take shape (MAP 7-1). To describe the art and architecture of this pivotal period, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), the Italian artist and biographer known as “the father of art history,” used the term Gothic. Vasari chose the term to ridicule what he considered the “monstrous and barbarous” art of the uncouth Goths whom he believed were responsible for both Rome’s downfall and the destruction of the classical style in art and architecture.1 Italian Renaissance artists and scholars regarded Gothic art with contempt and considered it ugly and crude. In the 13th and 14th centuries, however, when the Gothic style was the rage in most of Europe, especially north of the Alps, contemporaries referred to Gothic architecture as opus modernum (Latin, “modern work”) or opus francigenum (“French work”). They recognized that Gothic buildings displayed an exciting new style—and that the style originated in France. For them, Gothic cathedrals were not distortions of the classical style but images of the City of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem. Although the Gothic style achieved international acclaim, it was a regional phenomenon. To the east and south of Europe, the Islamic and Byzantine styles still prevailed. And many regional variants existed within European Gothic, just as distinct regional styles characterized the Romanesque period. Gothic began and ended at different dates in different places, but it first appeared in northern France in the mid- 12th century.

7-6: Royal Portal, west facade, Chartres Cathedral, Chartres, France, ca. 1145–1155. Gothic Era : https://digitalbookshelf.aionline.edu/#/books/1111904871/pages/51103509

The sculptures of the Royal Portal proclaim the majesty and power of Christ. The tympana depict, from left to right, Christ’s Ascension, the Second Coming, and Jesus in the lap of the Virgin Mary. The sculptures of the Royal Portal proclaim the majesty and power of Christ. Christ’s Ascension into Heaven appears in the tympanum of the left doorway. The Second Coming is the subject of the center tympanum. The theme—in essence, the Last Judgment—was still of central importance, as it was in Romanesque portals. But at Early Gothic Chartres, the Second Coming promised salvation rather than damnation to those entering the church. In the tympanum of the right portal, Christ appears in the lap of the Virgin Mary. Mary’s prominence on the Chartres facade has no parallel in the decoration of Romanesque church portals. At Chartres the designers gave her a central role in the sculptural program, a position she maintained throughout the Gothic period. As the Mother of Christ, Mary stood compassionately between the Last Judge and the horrors of Hell, interceding for all her faithful. Worshipers in the later 12th and 13th centuries sang hymns to Notre Dame, put her image everywhere, and dedicated great cathedrals to her. Soldiers carried the Virgin’s image into battle on banners, and her name joined Saint Denis’s as part of the French king’s battle cry. She became the spiritual lady of chivalry, and the Christian knight dedicated his life to her. The severity of Romanesque themes stressing the Last Judgment yielded to the gentleness of Gothic art, in which Mary is the kindly Queen of Heaven.

Statues of Old Testament kings and queens decorate the jambs flanking each doorway of the Royal Portal (FIGS. 7-6 and 7-7). They are the royal ancestors of Christ and, both figuratively and literally, support the New Testament figures above the doorways. They wear 12th-century clothes, and medieval observers also regarded them as images of the kings and queens of France. (This was the motivation for vandalizing the comparable figures at Saint-Denis during the French Revolution.) The figures stand rigidly upright with their elbows held close against their hips. The linear folds of their garments— inherited from the Romanesque style, along with the elongated proportions—generally echo the vertical lines of the columns behind them. (In this respect, Gothic jamb statues differ significantly from classical caryatids; FIG. 2-42. The Gothic figures are attached to columns. The classical statues replaced columns.) And yet, within and despite this architectural straitjacket, the statues display the first signs of a new naturalism. The sculptors conceived and treated the statues as three-dimensional volumes, not reliefs, and they stand out from the plane of the wall. The new naturalism—enhanced by painting, as was the norm for medieval stone sculpture—is noticeable particularly in the statues’ heads, where kindly human faces replace the masklike features of most Romanesque figures. The sculptors of the Royal Portal statues initiated an era of artistic concern with personality and individuality.

Gothic Era :

7-12: Saint Theodore, jamb statue, Porch of the Martyrs (left doorway), south transept, Chartres Cathedral, Chartres, France, ca. 1230. https://digitalbookshelf.aionline.edu/#/books/1111904871/pages/51103515

Chartres South Transept

The sculptures adorning the portals of the two new Chartres transepts erected after the 1194 fire are also prime examples of the new High Gothic spirit. The Chartres transept portals (FIG. 7- 5, right) project more forcefully from the church than do the Early Gothic portals of its west facade (FIGS. 7-5, left, and 7-6). Similarly, the statues of saints on the portal jambs are more independent of the architectural framework. Saint Theodore (FIG. 7-12) from the Porch of the Martyrs in the south transept reveals the great changes Gothic sculpture had undergone since the Royal Portal statues (FIG. 7-7) of the mid-12th century. These changes recall in many ways the revolutionary developments in ancient Greek sculpture during the transition from the Archaic to the Classical style (see Chapter 2). The High Gothic sculptor portrayed Theodore as the ideal Christian knight and clothed him in the cloak and chain-mail armor of Gothic Crusaders. The handsome, long-haired youth holds his spear firmly in his right hand and rests his left hand on his shield. Although the statue is still attached to a column, the architectural setting no longer determines its pose. The saint turns his head to the left and swings out his hip to the right, breaking the rigid vertical line that, on the Royal Portal, fixes the figures immovably. The body’s resulting torsion and pronounced sway call to mind Classical Greek statuary, especially the contrapposto stance of Polykleitos’s Spear Bearer (FIG. 2-34). It is not inappropriate to speak of the changes that occurred in 13th-century Gothic sculpture as a “second Classical revolution.” Although this statue of Theodore is still attached to a column, the setting no longer determines its pose.

The High Gothic sculptor portrayed the saint swinging out one hip, as in Greek statuary.

Gothic Era :

7-17: God as architect of the world, folio 1 verso of a moralized Bible, from Paris, ca. 1220–1230. Ink, tempera, and gold leaf on vellum, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. https://digitalbookshelf.aionline.edu/#/books/1111904871/pages/51103519 God as Architect One of the finest examples of French Gothic book illustration is the frontispiece (FIG. 7-17) of a moralized Bible produced in Paris during the 1220s. Moralized Bibles are lavish books in which each page pairs Old and New Testament episodes with illustrations explaining their moral significance. (The page reproduced here does not conform to this formula because it is the introduction to all that follows.) Above the illustration, the scribe wrote (in French rather than Latin): “Here God creates heaven and earth, the sun and moon, and all the elements.” God appears as the architect of the world, shaping the universe with the aid of a compass. Within the perfect circle already created are the spherical sun and moon and the unformed matter that will become the earth once God applies the same geometric principles to it. In contrast to the biblical account of Creation, where God created the sun, moon, and stars after the earth had been formed, and made the world by sheer force of will and a simple “Let there be …” command, on this page the Gothic artist portrayed God as an industrious architect, creating the universe with some of the same tools mortal builders use. Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe and the center of production for fine books. This artist portrayed God as an industrious architect creating the universe

using the same tools as Gothic builders.