art and culture in medieval europe knights

Those elements don’t speak the language of medieval art - of Constantinople, gateway to and from the Middle East and a hallmark for the standard style of Europe’s Middle Ages. Some is created just through savvy juxtapositions of brilliant color. Its arched Gothic frame, the Virgin’s almond-shaped eyes, the luxurious patterning of her garments and other flattened decorative elements are old-fashioned - as Byzantine and medieval as can be.īut the figures also display something relatively new to Italian art - a lively fullness and spatial volume.

It features the Virgin Mary in the center, flanked by Saints Thomas Aquinas to her right and Paul to her left.

One is a large, lovely, three-panel painting by Bernardo Daddi. Paul Getty Museum can help explain what happened. Two paintings in the collection of the J. He had teed up a revolution in painting for the second half of the 14th century.īut it never came. The painter, 70, left behind some students, a couple of talented studio assistants and plenty of wannabe admirers. Giotto had infused the conventional stories of Christian redemption with dramatic tension, pushing aside the formulaic stylization of so much medieval art. His paintings were famous all across northern Italy. Meiss took a deep look.īefore the pandemic, everyone knew that Giotto di Bondone, widely revered among fellow artists, was the single most inventive, even groundbreaking painter working in Florence in the first part of the century. When it came to the directions that art would take, especially in Italy, the effect of the Black Death on survivors and their descendants was less often considered. “Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century” takes on Italian art in the aftermath of the bubonic plague. The title of his first book, a now-classic text published in 1951, is sobering - especially now, as COVID-19 continues its relentless global sweep. To analyze art made in the wake of a devastating plague, Meiss brought politics, economics, social relations and their tangled interactions into the very center of the study of art history. His inspiration was a pandemic - an epic tragedy that many regard as the single greatest natural disaster in the history of Europe. Meiss didn’t do it alone, of course, but he was a leader of the pack. He stood apart because he changed the way we think about Western art of the previous 600 years. Meiss (pronounced Meese) was a celebrated art historian, one of the best in a generation of mid-20th century Americans who followed European innovators in the field. I admit, that’s a guy I haven’t thought of in ages.

Art and culture in medieval europe knights