Medieval Art

The influence exerted by classical models on the art of the middle ages has been studied in a number of books and articles, and allusions to it are a commonplace in the histories of different periods in medieval art. For the most part, however, the difficulty of distinguishing such influences precisely, and of tracing them to any particular group of works, has been accepted as insuperable, and critics have been content simply to classify what they have noticed as due to some survival of 'the antique': a phrase which might have reference to works produced in classical or Hellenistic Greece, and equally to those of the age of Constantine or of the classical revivals that are manifested in Byzantine art at a still later period. There is some reason for this lack of precision.

If this revival is looked at in relation to the end of ancient civilization, it is its late flowering. Anglo-Saxon sculpture seems to preserve certain technical traditions, in particular the use of the drill, which may conceivably have a continuous history leading back into imperial times, though some phases of the continuity are now obscure; Carolingian painting seems, in some of its phases, to be a recreation of late classical art; we hesitate sometimes before an ivory is attributed to the 5th century or the 9th. What the revival never is, is a conscious attempt to recover Hellenistic or Augustan forms and standards. It looks back, like Charlemagne's revival of letters, to an age when the ordinary man of any culture expected his books to be decorated, and his table to be furnished with ivories. From another standpoint its importance is for the future. It established the very foundations of medieval art and medieval learning. This was the last moment when some of the secrets of classical painting, and classical learning, could be recovered.

The flying angels displaying a medallion with the head of Christ are also derived from an antique sarcophagus or ivory; many varieties of this motif can be found in ancient work, but it passed at an early date into the repertory of medieval art -when it is to be found, for example, in Carolingian ivories - and its frequent later appearances do not justify the supposition that any of them come direct from the antique. Ancient also by derivation are the heads in roundels, a favorite device of renaissance decorators in the 15th and 16th centuries, but unusual in the 12th.

The fragments of the Ara Pacis were not yet discovered in the 13th century. But they certainly are remarkably close to the Antique master's model. In spite of the contrast, however, it may be said that these Gothic sculptures would not have been possible without the revolution which the study of the antique had brought about. It broke down the formal patterns of Romanesque drapery and brought a new humanism into the study of face, hands and body, and a new freedom into the treatment of draperies. And these were essential contributions to the development of Gothic art. This brings us to the notebook of Villard d'Honnecourt, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and one of the most interesting documents in the history of medieval art.