What are the Beauty Canons of medieval art?

A dark time. Little erudition. A rough and clumsy art. Very religious beings who were always praying... Those are the preconceived ideas we have of medieval times, partly spurred on by movies and novels. The reality, however, was very different.

The humans of the Middle Ages they had artistic sensibility, and had their own canons in relation to beauty. In fact, in many aspects these do not differ too much from antiquity, although the topics have tried to teach us otherwise.

How were the canons of beauty in the Middle Ages?

So that, What are the main canons of beauty in medieval art? What was considered beautiful in the Middle Ages? In the following article, and relying on authors as illustrious as Umberto Eco, we will try to outline a brief sketch of beauty in the Middle Ages and how it was reflected in their artistic works.

a symbolic universe

First of all, it is important to emphasize that we cannot compare medieval art, eminently symbolic, with the art of other times, much more naturalistic. What do we mean by this? Well, simply

what prevailed for medieval artists when creating was not how something was represented, but what was represented.

For this reason, it is frankly absurd to discuss whether the medieval they knew or not of perspective, or proportion, or symmetry. Do we consider this when we find ourselves before an Egyptian fresco? Probably not, and that is because we are used to seeing in Ancient Egypt a dogmatic civilization, not at all naturalistic.

So, if we are very clear that Egypt was a religious world and that the only intention they had to the time to create was to capture that spiritual universe, why are we so unfair to plastic medieval? Why do we compare the paintings of the Middle Ages with classical art, and frown and say that they "did not know how to paint", but we do not do the same with the art of the Egyptians?

In reality, the Egyptian and medieval worlds are not that far apart. We explain ourselves. For medieval men and women, the cosmos was God's creation, the perfect work of the perfect architect, and therefore everything was imbued with his divinity.

This meant that each element of creation was interconnected and everything had a deeper meaning than it had at first sight. For the medievals, an animal was not just an animal, but was covered with a symbology: the pelican, from who was believed to open her chest to feed her young with his blood, was a symbol of Christ and his sacrifice. The ostrich was the embodiment of the idea of ​​justice, since its feathers were strictly symmetrical. The ermine was purity, due to its immaculate white color. And so with a long etcetera.

In divine creation, nothing was found in the world by chance. The medieval mentality did not believe in chance, as the modern scientific mentality would later. Each element was subject to a cause, established by God, so sometimes the existence of something could only be understood by the Creator.

It was the case of ugliness, deformity, the monster, which by the way plague medieval art, especially in capitals and columns. If they existed, it was because God had given them a mission, a meaning. In the Middle Ages, nothing was superfluous and nothing was lacking in the world.

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An “unnaturalistic” art

This symbolic universe was constantly reflected in painting and sculpture. Obviously, we cannot look for naturalistic elements in medieval art. We have already said that the intention was not the how, but the what. The medieval artist does not capture, then, what he sees, but what he means reality. To do this, volumes, proportions and any other "academic" rule are dispensed with and, in this way, greater expressive freedom is acquired. Let us imagine that the medieval artist tried to represent Heaven and earth in a strictly naturalistic way. Impossible. How to capture concepts such as salvation, condemnation, God, Christ, immortality, resurrection??? To capture similar ideas, a symbolic language is necessary, and symbolic language cannot be subject to physical or mathematical rules, since, if he did, his expressive capacity would be reduced.

However, this does not mean that in the Middle Ages there was not a certain idea of ​​proportion and symmetry. Let us remember that the medievals knew much of the classical writings and were not so far removed from the ancient world that they did not see themselves reflected in it. Even in Romanesque art, which is so unnaturalistic, we find clear examples in which the artist has tried to represent reality with some accuracy.

This is the case of the reliefs and sculptures of the Moissac abbey, in France, where we find a Saint Paul and a Saint Jeremiah astonishingly naturalistic for the time, with their clothes clinging to the body and falling in folds that are inevitably reminiscent of the classical technique. On the other hand, the Eve by Soulliac, also in France, is an excellent reclining nude that quite naturally reproduces the breasts and the woman's body, which, by the way, destroys another rather hackneyed cliché: that in the Middle Ages "there was no naked”.

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Adaptation to space and symmetry

What is characteristic of medieval plastic arts is the adaptation of the figures to space. In this sense, the Middle Ages is quite strict: the one in charge is the building or the place where the work is destined, and this must be adapted to its characteristics. For this reason it is quite frequent that, in order to correctly locate the characters in a tympanum, archivolt or capital, scenes are deleted or altered.

On the other hand, the criterion of symmetry is quite present in medieval plastic arts. Umberto Eco, in his magnificent essay Art and beauty in medieval aesthetics, includes some interesting examples, such as that of Soisson, where one of the wise men is "eliminated" to exercise perfect symmetry with the juxtaposed scene. We see here a clear example of the rigidity with which the medievals contemplated the disposition and the symmetry of the figures, since the totality of the representation had to conform an absolutely perfect.

In the Middle Ages there was no room for innovation, at least during the first centuries. Medieval artisans repeat canons and forms and adapt their work to the space following clear precepts that are transmitted from generation to generation. A Pantokrator will always follow similar models, as well as a Virgin Theotokos or an Annunciation. We will have to wait until the end of the Gothic period for a new expression to emerge, which naturalizes the figures and expressions and attempts hints of perspective and recreation of spaces real.

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light and color

Another important aspect to understand what the medieval human being based the concept of beauty on is light and colour. The Middle Ages cannot be understood without these two elements, since, for its protagonists, God is light, and light is color..

Thus, everything becomes a chromatic expression: the walls and ceilings of churches and cathedrals, sculptures, clothing, banners, miniatures, jewels. Despite his conviction that beauty is supraterrestrial and that it exists beyond what is visible, the medieval human being is not indifferent to the attraction that sensitive beauty exerts on him. Suger himself, abbot of Saint-Denis, was amazed by the din of color and light that his church housed, since he linked it directly to divine beauty. Something that, by the way, Bernardo de Claraval and the Cistercians will consider dangerous for virtue and will try to eradicate from their buildings.

In medieval painting, color is pure, precisely because it is light. The human being of the Middle Ages does not conceive color "half"; the tones are pure, brilliant, clear. The use of gold reaches its peak during the so-called international Gothic, in which the funds are decorated with this hue, which represents God. Gems and precious stones are equally highly prized, not only for their economic value, but also because they "catch" color and light. In novels and troubadour poetry, the red cheeks of the beloved, her white complexion and her hair are exalted. blondes, and the nobles wear impossible combinations that include blues with greens and reds with yellows or violets. In short, contrary to what people (still) believe, the Middle Ages are a time that radiates light.

The new "gothic" beauty

The Romanesque expresses beauty through forceful and "solid" figures, inspired by iconographies of the Byzantine East., like the icons of the Virgin and the Christs in Majesty. Towards the end of the 13th century, the style shows clear signs of exhaustion, and a much more “stylized” ideal of beauty supervenes, characteristic of the Gothic.

This does not mean that verticality did not exist in the Romanesque. Another recurring cliché from the Middle Ages is that Romanesque churches are only horizontal, when there are numerous examples of cathedrals of the time that testify to the love for verticality (the ascent towards God). However, it is true that, during the Gothic period, the figures of plastic representations were "lengthen", thus obeying the canon of late-medieval human beauty, which corresponds to ten heads. As we can see, the resulting figure is excessively slender, if we take into account that, in classical times, the canon was reduced to seven and eight.

Verticality, then, is beauty during the Gothic. Cathedrals rise to infinity, stained glass windows take up more and more space (especially in northern Europe), and even fashions capture this fascination for the "elongated": peaked headdresses for the ladies and doublets narrow at the waist for the men that, complemented with Stockings and long shoes contribute to creating the ideal masculine beauty of the late Middle Ages: a tall and slim man like the tower of a cathedral. gothic.