Art. This Shit Is Crazy: Seven Works of Western Medieval Art Everybody Needs to Know.
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Find somebody. Anybody. Go up to them. Say the phrase “Renaissance art”. I can guarantee you that the following thoughts will go through their head.
"Penises! Oh, uh, I--just kidding, um, I mean--the David! Leonardo da Vinci! Patronage! The Medici family! Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello and--fuck, I’m out of Ninja Turtles...oh, Caravaggio! Popes and shit! Sexy Jesus!*”
Look at that. Five artistic giants. A touchstone of Western sculpture. A basic understanding of the patronage system, and the name of a family who made the most of it. Familiarity with papal authority. Even a vague impression of a specific stylistic shift in the depiction of Christ. We are all carrying that information around in our heads, right now! And often, it is more a result of cultural osmosis than of having taken any class or read any scholarly works. This is an excellent thing. We may not be able to remember what we had for breakfast, sometimes, but damn if we couldn’t give a visiting alien race a basic rundown of the Renaissance.
Most of us are are inundated with Renaissance art and culture from the time we’re old enough to crack a book. Or go to church. Or be taken into a museum without completely humiliating our parents. It’s everywhere. Heck, I’m pretty sure the first naked guy I ever saw was Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave” on the cover of a coffee-table book. (It’s all been downhill from there.)
Western culture looks back on the Renaissance like a pudgy father of four looks back on his time as a college football giant: we were at the pinnacle of our potential. Everyone wanted to be us. Those were the glory days.
Now, let’s try this same exercise with medieval art.
“Cathedrals! Pictures of knights! Um. ...No, hang on, give me a second. Um. Plague! Wait, sorry, that’s not art...Uh. The...Cru..sades?”
We’ve got a problem here.
It’s not our fault, though! For a long, long time, Western culture was...kind of really fucking embarrassed of the centuries directly following 476 A.D. 476, of course, being the year the Roman Empire was kneed in the balls by Flavius Odoacer.
The Middle Ages: heralded by extreme force to the crotch.
In the West’s opinion, things only stopped being cringeworthy around the beginning of the 16th century, after the fall of Constantinople.**
To put it in modern terms:
The Renaissance was Ferris Bueller.
The Middle Ages was Cameron.
This thinking persisted for fucking ages, guys. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the medieval period began to be treated just like any other period in history, a period with its ups and downs, and its negative and positive aspects. It short, people finally realized it wasn’t all plague, all the time. And that the term “the Dark Ages” is moronic. But the lingering cultural stigma is what keeps the Middle Ages from permeating our consciousness in the same way that the Renaissance does.
So yeah. History and cultural attitudes have conspired to keep us from that cozy familiarity with medieval art. It straight-up blows. But there is hope!
ART: THIS SHIT IS CRAZY.
Seven works of western medieval art everybody needs to know. Seriously. It will help you get laid.
The Lindisfarne Gospels
Gospel of Matthew. Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne. Probably. 715 A.D. Also probably.
Quick, imagine a monk! Now put him in his natural monkish habitat! Is that habitat a grassy little spit of land with crashing whitecaps and craggy cliffs? Well, congratulations, you’ve just imagined Lindisfarne. In the Middle Ages, this place was home to a bunch of monks, and they spent their days doing monk stuff. There were also sheep, but they spent their days doing sheep stuff, and functioning as handy visual aids for the novices. Sort of like a flannelgraph that can shit on your foot.
Now, for those of you who are not familiar with the medieval monastic lifestyle, the aforementioned monk stuff consists of three things: text creation, praying, and brew-ups. No points for guessing which one God “totally likes best.” At some point, though, they sobered up long enough to remember that St. Cuthbert, who had been the Bishop of Lindisfarne until his death in 687, was a pretty rad guy. So rad, in fact, that he deserved to have a set of Gospels created in his honor.
This may not sound like much, but no matter who you were in the Middle Ages, getting a book was kind of a big deal. The ink and dyes were expensive. The vellum was a bitch and a half to make. And the labor that went into it was nothing short of astonishing. Cuthbert, being dead, probably didn’t care, but the monks of Lindisfarne did, and hey, it’s never wise to try and stiff a saint. So they had one of their brothers, a monk named Eadfrith, start work on a beautiful illuminated Gospel series. And work Eadfrith did. This fly mother labored full time for two years over the manuscript, the sole creator of everything from the script itself to the tiny creatures in the margins.
It is one of the world’s finest examples of what’s known as Insular art; or, if you want to get fancy, Hiberno-Saxon art. After Rome skulked out of the British Isles in the fifth century, the native people began producing art in a style that wasn’t found anywhere else in Europe, combining so-called “Celtic” influences with Anglo-Saxon artistic traditions. And then, in the eighth century, Vikings pissed all over it. As they were wont to do. Mass sackings of monasteries derailed the production of Hiberno-Saxon art for decades, which eventually aided in the style’s absorption into Romanesque.
Bayeux Tapestry
Harold Swears Fealty to William, the Bayeux Tapestry. Unknown. c. 11th century A.D.
No. No, fuck you, I am not recapping the goddamn Norman conquest. It is long. It is convoluted. And I am really not amusing enough to keep your attention for the duration of the story. Suffice it to say: the Normans win, the Battle of Hastings happens, and King Harold catches an arrow with his face. A face which, if the Bayeux Tapestry is to be believed, had a bitchin’ ‘stache.
Presumably for the purpose of steering ye olde love machine.
But the work itself is not as easily pinned down. (...heh. Too soon?) To start with, it’s not actually a tapestry. It’s a bolt of cloth.
Just blew your mind, didn’t I?
Technically, a tapestry has the design woven into the fabric. The images on the Bayeux, uh, work, are embroidered on. And now, because that is out in the open, I feel okay with referring to it as a tapestry, for familiarity’s sake. But take note! Also, this sucker is gigantic: 225 feet long, almost, displayed in the round. I guarantee you that number will come in handy on your next art history test.
Anyway. Current scholarship holds that while it was commissioned by the half-brother of William the Conqueror, Bishop Odo of Bayeux Cathedral, the work itself was done by...Anglo-Saxon seamsters. Think about that for a minute. Your country has just been conquered by a mob of foreigners from across the Channel, as good as a world away--and now you have to spend years immortalizing that defeat, stitch by stitch, exactly the way your conquerors want it to be remembered.
I can’t overemphasize the importance of this work. Here we have what is arguably the turning point of English history, recreated by the hands of people who had seen the events unfold just a few decades before. There’s a slant to it, sure, but it’s scrupulously rendered, right down to the lack of insignia on the soldiers’ arms. It’s invaluable as a primary source. And as an internet meme. If you were wondering why it looks so familiar.
Reliquary Statue of Ste. Foy
Reliquary Statue of St. Foy. Unknown. Medieval artists had a distressing tendency not to sign their names. Or to really give a shit about signing their names. c. 900 A.D.
Let me tell you a little something about medieval monks. They are holy men. They are pious men. They are also the cattiest bitches you will ever run across in your entire life.
The Abbey of Conques was founded in 819 A.D. It sucked, as far as abbeys went. Zero draws for the average pilgrim, no sacred shrines, no relics, surrounded by scrubby woodland as far as the eye could see. This would not do, thought the monks. Other orders were balls-deep in tithes and donations, and with a little planning, that could be us.
And so they took action.
Remember that scene in The Parent Trap where Hailey Mills (or, if you are of my generation, Lindsey Lohan) sneaks into the other Hailey Mills’s cabin at camp and steals her things? And pours honey all over the rest?
Imagine that, right? But with a bunch of scheming, thirty-something virgins.
In 866, one of the Conques monks joined a monastery in Agen, which just so happened to possess the relics of St. Foy, a young female saint who was martyred under the Emperor Diocletian. He kept his head down for the better part of ten years, watching pilgrims flock to the relics. Then, when the time was right, he stole the shit out of them. ...The relics, not the pilgrims. Though really, I guess he did both. You see, when he returned to Conques, people practically broke down the abbey door in their rush venerate St. Foy’s relocated remains, and to petition her for cures to all sorts of ailments. And they brought their cash with them.
By the late 9th century, the relics were housed in a beautiful golden reliquary statue. That’s it, up there. The only surviving example of the statue reliquaries which were popular in the Middle Ages, these allowed the faithful to ground their spiritual experience in the physicality of the saints they venerated. It’s also the oldest existing statue in the western Christian tradition. Bits of Saint Foy’s skull are housed in a hollow in the back of the statue’s head.
But it wasn’t enough. Wealthy pilgrims jostled with one another for the chance to create more treasures for the abbey. Even Charlemagne got into it. Eventually the abbey had to be rebuilt in order to accommodate the crush of the faithful who came through every year, with open hearts and open wallets.
The monks, meanwhile, grinned and brushed their shoulders off and insisted it weren’t nothin’ but a thing.
Ghent Altarpiece
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Hubert van Eyck and Jan van Eyck. 1432 A.D.
When a Renaissance and a Middle Ages love one another very much, decide to get kinky, and invite the Netherlands to watch, this is what happens.
The altarpiece was commissioned by Joost “fuck vowels” Vijdt, for his private chapel in Ghent, Belgium. He was a merchant and financier, the kind of guy who could afford the very best. So he hired Hubert van Eyck, a guy who was so sure he was the very best that he added an inscription on the frame of the Ghent Altarpiece, describing himself as “maior quo nemo repertus,” a phrase which translates roughly as “greater than anyone”, or “no one is greater”. (Hubert’s brother was an artist too--Jan van Eyck, maybe you’ve heard of him--but was so whipped that when he was forced to finish the work after Hubert’s untimely death in 1426, he added his own little self-descriptive note to the frame: “arte secundus”: “second in the art.” Probably while scuffing the ground awkwardly with the toe of his sneaker.)
The upper row of panels depicts Christ the King enthroned, surrounded by Adam, Eve, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist. But the lower panels make up the more famous scene, the adoration of the Lamb of God by all men and nations, presided over by the Holy Spirit. When it’s closed up, an Annunciation scene is visible on the outside, along with donor portraits.
There’s more to this painting than a hot mess of Biblical references, though. Art historians often pinpoint this as the specific work which manages to capture the end of the medieval tradition and the stirrings of the Renaissance in one fell swoop. We see flickers of medieval idealization in the images, centuries of iconographic tradition: the Christ figure, for example, is not just the Son, but the Father and Spirit as well, as evidenced by the three levels of his crown, and his priestly vestments. But we also get a sense of the artistic movement to come, with the great care the van Eyck brothers put into accurately recreating the natural world.
So yeah. The Ghent Altarpiece. It’s kind of a big deal. Unfortunately, being kind of a big deal makes Hitler want to steal you. And Arsène Goedertier want to steal you. And random black market art thieves want to steal you. Also possibly Carmen San Diego.
Guys, this thing has been stolen thirteen times. It’s also been broken up, burned, fucked around with by iconoclasts, ransomed, forged, smuggled, and used in political dick-swinging contests. And after that, after all of that, guess where it is right now?
In St. Bevo Cathedral in Belgium. Just chilling. Totally fine. Having weathered shit that would kill a lesser painting. A little worse for wear, and missing a panel or two, but that’s like a grizzled Vietnam vet missing an eye. Losing it was the easy part, son. Now it takes a level in badass every day, and probably sleeps with your mom when you’re not around.
Unicorn Tapestries
The Hunt of the Unicorn. Unknown. c 1495-1505 A.D.
Like Romeo and Juliet, the series of tapestries that are now known collectively as the Unicorn Tapestries weren’t originally intended to hang together. They weren’t even part of the same work! It’s thought that they came from two or more separate series created in the Netherlands, but were collected and displayed together because someone figured, hey, it still makes a story, right? Trim the fat and get that unicorn caught in seven panels! And honestly, it still works. Most people can’t tell that the 16th century played mix and match with the tapestries, even when they’re looking right at them; I sure couldn’t.
So, let’s take a gander. I wish I could include all the images, but the Cloisters has already done an awesome job at their website. What we’ve got here is basically a delicious multi-layered symbolism cake. With buttercream frosting. Meaningful buttercream. The tapestries overflow with symbolism and interlocking stories, and the hunt for the unicorn is presented as being analogous to three things: the Passion and death of Christ, the seduction and entrapment of a man by his lady-love, and medieval pursuit of stag hunting.
I don’t suppose that we have to spend too much time with the unicorn-as-Christ thing. You guys get it. We can probably skip the stag hunting angle, as well. All you really need to know is that the images of the hunt correspond very closely with techniques laid out in Gaston Phebus’s ridiculously famous 15th century hunting manual, Le Livre de la Chasse. The unicorn is held at bay in the same manner as a stag might be, the same breeds of dogs are used, and on and on. It’s really quite interesting.
But not as interesting as sex.
Most of us have been aware of the sexual overtones in the unicorn story since that one kid in our fourth grade class kept interrupting the teacher’s lecture on the topic by repeating the word “horn” under his breath and snickering to himself, prompting us to spend that recess period sitting on a picnic bench, mourning our childhood.
Well, what we’ve got here would give that classmate of ours a nosebleed for the ages.
The unicorn can’t be taken by force; one of the tapestries depicts him going absolutely apeshit on the hunting dogs attempting to hold him at bay, goring them with his horn. So the hunters have to get creative.
And you know the rest. The virgin’s unsullied nature causes the unicorn to become docile, and allows the hunters to finally sneak up and kill it.
Medieval texts all agree on the necessity of a virgin’s presence if a party wants to capture a unicorn, but what the virgin has to do is a matter of debate. Sexy, sexy debate. Some say that she simply has to wait for the unicorn to come and lay his head in her lap. Others say that she really ought to be naked for this bit, so the unicorn will be able to detect the sexual difference in her humors. Still others write that no, clothes are okay, as long as she’s exposing her breasts. You know. So the unicorn can lick them.
...after a while you really start wondering how many of these texts were read one-handed.
Despite the unicorn’s death, however, the final tapestry (and the most famous one), depicts the animal alive, penned in at the castle of the virgin. He still has his horn, but honestly, how emasculating can you get? He’s the bridegroom, captured by his lover and forced to remain in sexual captivity for the rest of his days.
Did I mention that some scholars believe the tapestries were intended as wedding presents?
Burn.
Old English Hexateuch
Adam Naming the Animals. The Old English Hexateuch. Early 11th century. BL Cotton MS Claudius B IV, f. 4.
The Hexateuch is like a fancy Blu-Ray version of the Pentatuch. With SPECIAL FEATURES and DELETED SCENES! Basically they throw Joshua in there to make up for the snoozefest that is Deuteronomy. Which is a good move, honestly. You’ve got to give people a better incentive to sit through thirty-four chapters of desert-wandering hijinks than “If you wait long enough, God will lose His temper and do something crazy.” Fortunately, the Old English Hexateuch is rad enough to hold anyone’s attention, Joshua or no Joshua.
What we’ve got here is the earliest English version of the Old Testament. But before you scroll back up to the picture to see if you can read it, don’t bother. It’s Old English. Meaning that it’s just close enough to the language we speak to make you want to hit it repeatedly with a car when you can’t figure it out.
Unlike the other Biblical text on our list, the Lindesfarne Gospels, the Old English Hexateuch is the work of a whole bunch of people: two translators, two scribes, and a single, ridiculously hardcore artist. I am seriously nuts about that guy, whoever he was, and you should be too. He told iconographic tradition to go screw itself pretty much a hundred percent of the time, and went wild with his illustrations; each one strikes an amazing balance between the sensuality of human experience and the divine, instead of coming down hard on one side. This, coupled with the fact that the only other biblical translation available was the Latin Vulgate Bible, lends credence to the theory that the Old English Hexateuch may in fact have been commissioned by a layperson.
Whatever the case, the Hexateuch was probably compiled in Canterbury in the 12th century, and actually comes with another edition, which contained the Book of Judges, but not the illustrations. (It’s almost an even trade. Remember, Judges has Samson in. And death by tent peg.) There was obviously a demand for the word of God in the vernacular.
And man, if you’ve ever sat through a Catholic service...you’d be gunning for something you could read yourself too.
Tree of Jesse Window at York Minster
Jesse Tree panel, from York Minster. Unknown. c. 1150.
What you’re looking at right now is thought to be the oldest existing stained glass work in England. 1150 A.D. Predates the goddamn Magna Carta. Granted, it’s a fragment of a much larger window, the rest of which has been lost or destroyed, but let’s not let that undercut what little trooper this work is. It depicts a figure from the “Jesse Tree” or the “Vine of Jesse”, a motif which, after it’s earliest known representation in a 11th century Bohemian manuscript, exploded into European iconography.
Quick Sunday School lesson! According to Biblical tradition, Jesus, much like a prize Irish Setter, had a bloodline that could be traced back thousands of years. The Gospel of Matthew begins with a recitation of this bloodline, connecting Christ with everyone from King David to Abraham, and then right on back to Adam. The name of the motif originates in the Old Testament writings of the prophet Isaiah: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” Jesse was, of course, the father of King David (you can totally be excused if you didn’t know that; David was such a wrought-iron badass that he reduced everyone around him to bit players), and the “stump” of the verse refers to the fallen house of Israel, which medieval Christians believed to have found its messiah in Jesus Christ.
Vine of Jesse imagery was common, as you might imagine, in illuminated gospels (often at the beginning of Matthew or Luke). But it really took off in cathedrals, both in architecture and the glass. The bit in York Minster lacks the context of the entire image, but it’s obvious that the figure is one of Jesus’ royal ancestors, braced between two branches of a vine. See, like-- “vine of Jesse”? Actual vine? Right. Because medieval artists went one of two ways when depicting Biblical metaphor: blatantly obvious or bugnuts insane. Luckily, this is an example of the former.
It is very easy to tell when it is not. If you ever have to isolate the artdork on your flist and ask why the fuck that guy has a sword coming out of his mouth oh God, for example, chances are you are in the “bugnuts” category. Also, welcome to eschatology.
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So yeah. This is far from a comprehensive list. Unimaginably far. It is purely western, first off. Byzantium is not represented. There are no cathedrals here. Very little glass. And I left out the Book of Kells, which all art historians agree means that I should turn in my medievalist card at the city hall. But I hope you learned something, at least. And anyway, the omissions leave lots of opportunities for more posts in the future.
*Sexy Jesus is a thing, guys. A smokin’ hot Renaissance thing. It had to do with a new understanding of the Incarnation, and an increased comfort with Christ’s corporeal nature. There are books.
**The Middle Ages spanned the years between 476 to 1453 A.D. Ish. I will hear no other version of events. Well, okay, there’s some debate in scholarly circles, but the paradigm I’m using here is widely accepted. In case you were worried.
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Find somebody. Anybody. Go up to them. Say the phrase “Renaissance art”. I can guarantee you that the following thoughts will go through their head.
"Penises! Oh, uh, I--just kidding, um, I mean--the David! Leonardo da Vinci! Patronage! The Medici family! Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello and--fuck, I’m out of Ninja Turtles...oh, Caravaggio! Popes and shit! Sexy Jesus!*”
Look at that. Five artistic giants. A touchstone of Western sculpture. A basic understanding of the patronage system, and the name of a family who made the most of it. Familiarity with papal authority. Even a vague impression of a specific stylistic shift in the depiction of Christ. We are all carrying that information around in our heads, right now! And often, it is more a result of cultural osmosis than of having taken any class or read any scholarly works. This is an excellent thing. We may not be able to remember what we had for breakfast, sometimes, but damn if we couldn’t give a visiting alien race a basic rundown of the Renaissance.
Most of us are are inundated with Renaissance art and culture from the time we’re old enough to crack a book. Or go to church. Or be taken into a museum without completely humiliating our parents. It’s everywhere. Heck, I’m pretty sure the first naked guy I ever saw was Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave” on the cover of a coffee-table book. (It’s all been downhill from there.)
Western culture looks back on the Renaissance like a pudgy father of four looks back on his time as a college football giant: we were at the pinnacle of our potential. Everyone wanted to be us. Those were the glory days.
Now, let’s try this same exercise with medieval art.
“Cathedrals! Pictures of knights! Um. ...No, hang on, give me a second. Um. Plague! Wait, sorry, that’s not art...Uh. The...Cru..sades?”
We’ve got a problem here.
It’s not our fault, though! For a long, long time, Western culture was...kind of really fucking embarrassed of the centuries directly following 476 A.D. 476, of course, being the year the Roman Empire was kneed in the balls by Flavius Odoacer.
The Middle Ages: heralded by extreme force to the crotch.
In the West’s opinion, things only stopped being cringeworthy around the beginning of the 16th century, after the fall of Constantinople.**
To put it in modern terms:
The Renaissance was Ferris Bueller.
The Middle Ages was Cameron.
This thinking persisted for fucking ages, guys. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the medieval period began to be treated just like any other period in history, a period with its ups and downs, and its negative and positive aspects. It short, people finally realized it wasn’t all plague, all the time. And that the term “the Dark Ages” is moronic. But the lingering cultural stigma is what keeps the Middle Ages from permeating our consciousness in the same way that the Renaissance does.
So yeah. History and cultural attitudes have conspired to keep us from that cozy familiarity with medieval art. It straight-up blows. But there is hope!
ART: THIS SHIT IS CRAZY.
Seven works of western medieval art everybody needs to know. Seriously. It will help you get laid.
The Lindisfarne Gospels
Gospel of Matthew. Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne. Probably. 715 A.D. Also probably.
Quick, imagine a monk! Now put him in his natural monkish habitat! Is that habitat a grassy little spit of land with crashing whitecaps and craggy cliffs? Well, congratulations, you’ve just imagined Lindisfarne. In the Middle Ages, this place was home to a bunch of monks, and they spent their days doing monk stuff. There were also sheep, but they spent their days doing sheep stuff, and functioning as handy visual aids for the novices. Sort of like a flannelgraph that can shit on your foot.
Now, for those of you who are not familiar with the medieval monastic lifestyle, the aforementioned monk stuff consists of three things: text creation, praying, and brew-ups. No points for guessing which one God “totally likes best.” At some point, though, they sobered up long enough to remember that St. Cuthbert, who had been the Bishop of Lindisfarne until his death in 687, was a pretty rad guy. So rad, in fact, that he deserved to have a set of Gospels created in his honor.
This may not sound like much, but no matter who you were in the Middle Ages, getting a book was kind of a big deal. The ink and dyes were expensive. The vellum was a bitch and a half to make. And the labor that went into it was nothing short of astonishing. Cuthbert, being dead, probably didn’t care, but the monks of Lindisfarne did, and hey, it’s never wise to try and stiff a saint. So they had one of their brothers, a monk named Eadfrith, start work on a beautiful illuminated Gospel series. And work Eadfrith did. This fly mother labored full time for two years over the manuscript, the sole creator of everything from the script itself to the tiny creatures in the margins.
It is one of the world’s finest examples of what’s known as Insular art; or, if you want to get fancy, Hiberno-Saxon art. After Rome skulked out of the British Isles in the fifth century, the native people began producing art in a style that wasn’t found anywhere else in Europe, combining so-called “Celtic” influences with Anglo-Saxon artistic traditions. And then, in the eighth century, Vikings pissed all over it. As they were wont to do. Mass sackings of monasteries derailed the production of Hiberno-Saxon art for decades, which eventually aided in the style’s absorption into Romanesque.
Bayeux Tapestry
Harold Swears Fealty to William, the Bayeux Tapestry. Unknown. c. 11th century A.D.
No. No, fuck you, I am not recapping the goddamn Norman conquest. It is long. It is convoluted. And I am really not amusing enough to keep your attention for the duration of the story. Suffice it to say: the Normans win, the Battle of Hastings happens, and King Harold catches an arrow with his face. A face which, if the Bayeux Tapestry is to be believed, had a bitchin’ ‘stache.
Presumably for the purpose of steering ye olde love machine.
But the work itself is not as easily pinned down. (...heh. Too soon?) To start with, it’s not actually a tapestry. It’s a bolt of cloth.
Just blew your mind, didn’t I?
Technically, a tapestry has the design woven into the fabric. The images on the Bayeux, uh, work, are embroidered on. And now, because that is out in the open, I feel okay with referring to it as a tapestry, for familiarity’s sake. But take note! Also, this sucker is gigantic: 225 feet long, almost, displayed in the round. I guarantee you that number will come in handy on your next art history test.
Anyway. Current scholarship holds that while it was commissioned by the half-brother of William the Conqueror, Bishop Odo of Bayeux Cathedral, the work itself was done by...Anglo-Saxon seamsters. Think about that for a minute. Your country has just been conquered by a mob of foreigners from across the Channel, as good as a world away--and now you have to spend years immortalizing that defeat, stitch by stitch, exactly the way your conquerors want it to be remembered.
I can’t overemphasize the importance of this work. Here we have what is arguably the turning point of English history, recreated by the hands of people who had seen the events unfold just a few decades before. There’s a slant to it, sure, but it’s scrupulously rendered, right down to the lack of insignia on the soldiers’ arms. It’s invaluable as a primary source. And as an internet meme. If you were wondering why it looks so familiar.
Reliquary Statue of Ste. Foy
Reliquary Statue of St. Foy. Unknown. Medieval artists had a distressing tendency not to sign their names. Or to really give a shit about signing their names. c. 900 A.D.
Let me tell you a little something about medieval monks. They are holy men. They are pious men. They are also the cattiest bitches you will ever run across in your entire life.
The Abbey of Conques was founded in 819 A.D. It sucked, as far as abbeys went. Zero draws for the average pilgrim, no sacred shrines, no relics, surrounded by scrubby woodland as far as the eye could see. This would not do, thought the monks. Other orders were balls-deep in tithes and donations, and with a little planning, that could be us.
And so they took action.
Remember that scene in The Parent Trap where Hailey Mills (or, if you are of my generation, Lindsey Lohan) sneaks into the other Hailey Mills’s cabin at camp and steals her things? And pours honey all over the rest?
Imagine that, right? But with a bunch of scheming, thirty-something virgins.
In 866, one of the Conques monks joined a monastery in Agen, which just so happened to possess the relics of St. Foy, a young female saint who was martyred under the Emperor Diocletian. He kept his head down for the better part of ten years, watching pilgrims flock to the relics. Then, when the time was right, he stole the shit out of them. ...The relics, not the pilgrims. Though really, I guess he did both. You see, when he returned to Conques, people practically broke down the abbey door in their rush venerate St. Foy’s relocated remains, and to petition her for cures to all sorts of ailments. And they brought their cash with them.
By the late 9th century, the relics were housed in a beautiful golden reliquary statue. That’s it, up there. The only surviving example of the statue reliquaries which were popular in the Middle Ages, these allowed the faithful to ground their spiritual experience in the physicality of the saints they venerated. It’s also the oldest existing statue in the western Christian tradition. Bits of Saint Foy’s skull are housed in a hollow in the back of the statue’s head.
But it wasn’t enough. Wealthy pilgrims jostled with one another for the chance to create more treasures for the abbey. Even Charlemagne got into it. Eventually the abbey had to be rebuilt in order to accommodate the crush of the faithful who came through every year, with open hearts and open wallets.
The monks, meanwhile, grinned and brushed their shoulders off and insisted it weren’t nothin’ but a thing.
Ghent Altarpiece
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Hubert van Eyck and Jan van Eyck. 1432 A.D.
When a Renaissance and a Middle Ages love one another very much, decide to get kinky, and invite the Netherlands to watch, this is what happens.
The altarpiece was commissioned by Joost “fuck vowels” Vijdt, for his private chapel in Ghent, Belgium. He was a merchant and financier, the kind of guy who could afford the very best. So he hired Hubert van Eyck, a guy who was so sure he was the very best that he added an inscription on the frame of the Ghent Altarpiece, describing himself as “maior quo nemo repertus,” a phrase which translates roughly as “greater than anyone”, or “no one is greater”. (Hubert’s brother was an artist too--Jan van Eyck, maybe you’ve heard of him--but was so whipped that when he was forced to finish the work after Hubert’s untimely death in 1426, he added his own little self-descriptive note to the frame: “arte secundus”: “second in the art.” Probably while scuffing the ground awkwardly with the toe of his sneaker.)
The upper row of panels depicts Christ the King enthroned, surrounded by Adam, Eve, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist. But the lower panels make up the more famous scene, the adoration of the Lamb of God by all men and nations, presided over by the Holy Spirit. When it’s closed up, an Annunciation scene is visible on the outside, along with donor portraits.
There’s more to this painting than a hot mess of Biblical references, though. Art historians often pinpoint this as the specific work which manages to capture the end of the medieval tradition and the stirrings of the Renaissance in one fell swoop. We see flickers of medieval idealization in the images, centuries of iconographic tradition: the Christ figure, for example, is not just the Son, but the Father and Spirit as well, as evidenced by the three levels of his crown, and his priestly vestments. But we also get a sense of the artistic movement to come, with the great care the van Eyck brothers put into accurately recreating the natural world.
So yeah. The Ghent Altarpiece. It’s kind of a big deal. Unfortunately, being kind of a big deal makes Hitler want to steal you. And Arsène Goedertier want to steal you. And random black market art thieves want to steal you. Also possibly Carmen San Diego.
Guys, this thing has been stolen thirteen times. It’s also been broken up, burned, fucked around with by iconoclasts, ransomed, forged, smuggled, and used in political dick-swinging contests. And after that, after all of that, guess where it is right now?
In St. Bevo Cathedral in Belgium. Just chilling. Totally fine. Having weathered shit that would kill a lesser painting. A little worse for wear, and missing a panel or two, but that’s like a grizzled Vietnam vet missing an eye. Losing it was the easy part, son. Now it takes a level in badass every day, and probably sleeps with your mom when you’re not around.
Unicorn Tapestries
The Hunt of the Unicorn. Unknown. c 1495-1505 A.D.
Like Romeo and Juliet, the series of tapestries that are now known collectively as the Unicorn Tapestries weren’t originally intended to hang together. They weren’t even part of the same work! It’s thought that they came from two or more separate series created in the Netherlands, but were collected and displayed together because someone figured, hey, it still makes a story, right? Trim the fat and get that unicorn caught in seven panels! And honestly, it still works. Most people can’t tell that the 16th century played mix and match with the tapestries, even when they’re looking right at them; I sure couldn’t.
So, let’s take a gander. I wish I could include all the images, but the Cloisters has already done an awesome job at their website. What we’ve got here is basically a delicious multi-layered symbolism cake. With buttercream frosting. Meaningful buttercream. The tapestries overflow with symbolism and interlocking stories, and the hunt for the unicorn is presented as being analogous to three things: the Passion and death of Christ, the seduction and entrapment of a man by his lady-love, and medieval pursuit of stag hunting.
I don’t suppose that we have to spend too much time with the unicorn-as-Christ thing. You guys get it. We can probably skip the stag hunting angle, as well. All you really need to know is that the images of the hunt correspond very closely with techniques laid out in Gaston Phebus’s ridiculously famous 15th century hunting manual, Le Livre de la Chasse. The unicorn is held at bay in the same manner as a stag might be, the same breeds of dogs are used, and on and on. It’s really quite interesting.
But not as interesting as sex.
Most of us have been aware of the sexual overtones in the unicorn story since that one kid in our fourth grade class kept interrupting the teacher’s lecture on the topic by repeating the word “horn” under his breath and snickering to himself, prompting us to spend that recess period sitting on a picnic bench, mourning our childhood.
Well, what we’ve got here would give that classmate of ours a nosebleed for the ages.
The unicorn can’t be taken by force; one of the tapestries depicts him going absolutely apeshit on the hunting dogs attempting to hold him at bay, goring them with his horn. So the hunters have to get creative.
And you know the rest. The virgin’s unsullied nature causes the unicorn to become docile, and allows the hunters to finally sneak up and kill it.
Medieval texts all agree on the necessity of a virgin’s presence if a party wants to capture a unicorn, but what the virgin has to do is a matter of debate. Sexy, sexy debate. Some say that she simply has to wait for the unicorn to come and lay his head in her lap. Others say that she really ought to be naked for this bit, so the unicorn will be able to detect the sexual difference in her humors. Still others write that no, clothes are okay, as long as she’s exposing her breasts. You know. So the unicorn can lick them.
...after a while you really start wondering how many of these texts were read one-handed.
Despite the unicorn’s death, however, the final tapestry (and the most famous one), depicts the animal alive, penned in at the castle of the virgin. He still has his horn, but honestly, how emasculating can you get? He’s the bridegroom, captured by his lover and forced to remain in sexual captivity for the rest of his days.
Did I mention that some scholars believe the tapestries were intended as wedding presents?
Burn.
Old English Hexateuch
Adam Naming the Animals. The Old English Hexateuch. Early 11th century. BL Cotton MS Claudius B IV, f. 4.
The Hexateuch is like a fancy Blu-Ray version of the Pentatuch. With SPECIAL FEATURES and DELETED SCENES! Basically they throw Joshua in there to make up for the snoozefest that is Deuteronomy. Which is a good move, honestly. You’ve got to give people a better incentive to sit through thirty-four chapters of desert-wandering hijinks than “If you wait long enough, God will lose His temper and do something crazy.” Fortunately, the Old English Hexateuch is rad enough to hold anyone’s attention, Joshua or no Joshua.
What we’ve got here is the earliest English version of the Old Testament. But before you scroll back up to the picture to see if you can read it, don’t bother. It’s Old English. Meaning that it’s just close enough to the language we speak to make you want to hit it repeatedly with a car when you can’t figure it out.
Unlike the other Biblical text on our list, the Lindesfarne Gospels, the Old English Hexateuch is the work of a whole bunch of people: two translators, two scribes, and a single, ridiculously hardcore artist. I am seriously nuts about that guy, whoever he was, and you should be too. He told iconographic tradition to go screw itself pretty much a hundred percent of the time, and went wild with his illustrations; each one strikes an amazing balance between the sensuality of human experience and the divine, instead of coming down hard on one side. This, coupled with the fact that the only other biblical translation available was the Latin Vulgate Bible, lends credence to the theory that the Old English Hexateuch may in fact have been commissioned by a layperson.
Whatever the case, the Hexateuch was probably compiled in Canterbury in the 12th century, and actually comes with another edition, which contained the Book of Judges, but not the illustrations. (It’s almost an even trade. Remember, Judges has Samson in. And death by tent peg.) There was obviously a demand for the word of God in the vernacular.
And man, if you’ve ever sat through a Catholic service...you’d be gunning for something you could read yourself too.
Tree of Jesse Window at York Minster
Jesse Tree panel, from York Minster. Unknown. c. 1150.
What you’re looking at right now is thought to be the oldest existing stained glass work in England. 1150 A.D. Predates the goddamn Magna Carta. Granted, it’s a fragment of a much larger window, the rest of which has been lost or destroyed, but let’s not let that undercut what little trooper this work is. It depicts a figure from the “Jesse Tree” or the “Vine of Jesse”, a motif which, after it’s earliest known representation in a 11th century Bohemian manuscript, exploded into European iconography.
Quick Sunday School lesson! According to Biblical tradition, Jesus, much like a prize Irish Setter, had a bloodline that could be traced back thousands of years. The Gospel of Matthew begins with a recitation of this bloodline, connecting Christ with everyone from King David to Abraham, and then right on back to Adam. The name of the motif originates in the Old Testament writings of the prophet Isaiah: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” Jesse was, of course, the father of King David (you can totally be excused if you didn’t know that; David was such a wrought-iron badass that he reduced everyone around him to bit players), and the “stump” of the verse refers to the fallen house of Israel, which medieval Christians believed to have found its messiah in Jesus Christ.
Vine of Jesse imagery was common, as you might imagine, in illuminated gospels (often at the beginning of Matthew or Luke). But it really took off in cathedrals, both in architecture and the glass. The bit in York Minster lacks the context of the entire image, but it’s obvious that the figure is one of Jesus’ royal ancestors, braced between two branches of a vine. See, like-- “vine of Jesse”? Actual vine? Right. Because medieval artists went one of two ways when depicting Biblical metaphor: blatantly obvious or bugnuts insane. Luckily, this is an example of the former.
It is very easy to tell when it is not. If you ever have to isolate the artdork on your flist and ask why the fuck that guy has a sword coming out of his mouth oh God, for example, chances are you are in the “bugnuts” category. Also, welcome to eschatology.
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So yeah. This is far from a comprehensive list. Unimaginably far. It is purely western, first off. Byzantium is not represented. There are no cathedrals here. Very little glass. And I left out the Book of Kells, which all art historians agree means that I should turn in my medievalist card at the city hall. But I hope you learned something, at least. And anyway, the omissions leave lots of opportunities for more posts in the future.
*Sexy Jesus is a thing, guys. A smokin’ hot Renaissance thing. It had to do with a new understanding of the Incarnation, and an increased comfort with Christ’s corporeal nature. There are books.
**The Middle Ages spanned the years between 476 to 1453 A.D. Ish. I will hear no other version of events. Well, okay, there’s some debate in scholarly circles, but the paradigm I’m using here is widely accepted. In case you were worried.
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