And it appears in the manuscript just after a verse from Revelation 8:1, where the seventh seal of God has been broken and “there was silence throughout Heaven.” It features a rectangular frame painted plain yellow, with some thin black lines expanding from the edges. Let’s have a look at this rather strange visual object painted in a 12th century manuscript, probably in the monastery of Silos in Spain. This process itself is abstraction, and the visual images that were created can’t really be understood in their richness and meaning if we assume that “abstraction” was incompatible with medieval ways of thinking.Ĭan you give some examples of the kinds of images you are looking at? They were interested in moving from the sensory observation of something in the world to the idea of it, from specifics to more general and universal understandings. When I look at medieval philosophers, they inherited a notion of abstraction from antiquity, from Greek and Roman philosophy.
By “mimetic” I mean where there is an iconic relationship, a visual resemblance, between the created image and what it is supposed to represent. It was actually already very present in medieval philosophy and Christian theology, and the makers of medieval artworks frequently used abstract, non-mimetic devices for visually capturing the world. While we might consider abstract art, as a philosophical and artistic movement, to have been born in the context of the early 20th century, abstraction was not born with it.
I would say that “abstract art” is really modern, but abstraction in art is not. You’re saying this isn’t the case at all. The popular thinking goes that “abstraction” in art is a modern, say post-1900, phenomenon. This upends conventional narratives about the uniqueness of modern art it also, Debiais suggests, throws open radical new ways of interpreting centuries of medieval works.
MEDIEVAL ART PLUS
Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributorsĪ Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.Humanities Center fellow Vincent Debiais, an art historian at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, argues that abstraction-as an intellectual process and as a means of visually representing the world-pre-dates “Abstract Art.”.Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting.Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles.Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history