The development of new ideas in the West Although there are discernable stylistic differences in Christian art that depend upon the time and location from which they emerge, pretty much all Christian figurative art from the time of its appearance until the end of the Romanesque (about 1200AD) conformed to the iconographic prototype.
The departure from the iconographic prototype occurred due to a different sense of the reliability of human experience. Information received through the senses, as a potential source of the grasping of truth. Tied in with this is the belief that that the world we live in, although fallen and imperfect, is nevertheless good, ordered and beautiful. So there may be evil and suffering in the world, and it may not be as good and beautiful as it ought to be, but it is nevertheless God’s creation and still good and beautiful. This ultimately caused the rise of naturalism in art and the development of science.
A number of factors combined to cause this. Around 1000AD the Latin West increased contact with the Greek East and Islam through trade and warfare (for example the crusades). These were forces that reinvigorated Western art quickly with a new Byzantine influence that became the Romanesque. Byzantine art at this time conformed to the iconographic prototype, just as the Western figurative art did, but relative to its Western counterpart, there was a greater degree of naturalism. The Romanesque reflected this greater naturalism, but did not depart from the iconographic principles. Nevertheless, it helped to create the move to naturalism that eventually dominated.
The Reconquista, or reconquest of Spain south of Santiago from the Moors (Toledo fell in 1085) gave Western Europe access for the first time to many of the treasures of ancient philosophy, particularly in the form of Arabic transcriptions of Aristotle. For the next hundred years Christian, Jewish and Moslem scholars would collaborate on the translation and interpretation of these texts. It was the friars, the new mendicant orders, both Franciscan and Dominican (who, thanks to the support of the Papacy, which had given them the task of combating heresy, were now dominating the new Universities in Paris and later Oxford), who managed to achieve this synthesis of the new learning with the tradition coming from St Augustine and the Church Fathers.
These syntheses were not always accepted. In Paris, for example, the work of St Albert the Great (1206-1280) and St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was brilliant but quickly condemned by the Bishop of Paris and not accepted until the canonization of St Thomas in 1323.
Franciscans in Oxford University, for example Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and Roger Bacon had a greater impact. Roger Bacon (1214-1294) particularly attacked both the superstitions of the masses and the hostility towards the science of the Paris schoolmen at that time. He called for the empirical investigation of nature and urged men to experiment, although he himself was unable to achieve very much in this field.1 Bacon had his own vision, so to speak, of the technical world of the future: ships without oarsmen, submarines, automobiles, aeroplanes, small magical gadgets for releasing oneself from prison, magical fetters (for use on other people), and devices for walking on water.2
The development of science and naturalistic art was not only as a result of a new intellectual outlook. It was driven also by a newly fired curiosity in the natural world. This intense curiosity came from the man who inspired the order to which Roger Bacon (and leading figures of the Renaissance) belonged: St Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). St Francis loved the natural world as God’s creation. This love and curiosity was a powerful driving force that affected Western society profoundly. In fact, an interesting case could be made for tracing the Renaissance and the civilization that followed it to the inspiration provided by St Francis. He inspired an energetic Christian curiosity about the natural world. An attitude that was subsequently reflected by his followers and became a driving force for change in art and for the development of what we now think of as scientific investigation.
The new curiosity and sense of wonder in the fallen, natural world that grew in this Christian society should be distinguished from paganism. St Francis’s life was a paradox. His spirituality was not just one of love of nature, but also a conscious spirituality of human and divine suffering. He was an ascetic who loved the world of nature and by his asceticism – his life of voluntary penance – he somehow managed to purge the ancient paganism, and made possible a new and innocent interest in the order of creation. He loved nature, but put it also in its proper place in relation to God.
For the pagan, the natural world is the ideal of beauty to which all else must strive to conform. If nature is the highest standard to which man can conform, then man’s work must necessarily fall short of this ideal. For the Christian, nature is not the highest form of beauty but one that points to something greater, the divine order. Once one sees nature as an imperfect, though still good, form of what it is meant to be. Man can speculate as to what nature ought to be and to the highest, that is, the divine order to which it points. Therefore man’s work can, through the grace of God, surpass the beauty of nature.
The new naturalism
The greater emphasis in direct observation in art was reflected first in the artistic style that we now call the gothic. The substrate to which this naturalism was fused was the iconographic. So, what began in the Romanesque as a more naturalist iconographic style (compared with earlier Western iconographic forms), became so naturalistic that it broke the boundaries of what constituted an icon (for example, through the introduction of cast shadow and the depiction of people in profile). Nevertheless, the gothic always owes something, stylistically to the iconographic. It retains, for example, that emotional distance in the portrayal of figures. If one looks even at very late gothic styles, such as in Hieronymous Bosch, we can see how much it owes to the iconographic style.
Most of this article, that is the part that is a discussion of the development of ideas, is based on a lecture given by Stratford Caldecott in Oxford, England.
- Although he is reputed to be the inventor of spectacles! [↩]
- The influence of these Franciscans was not always positive. William of Ockham proposed ‘nominalism’ in which good and evil were not objective qualities in themselves, but arbitrarily assigned good and evil by God. Nominalism is often seen as opening the door that Descartes and the modern philosophers who followed were to walk through. [↩]
