Medieval Master Craftsmen: tracing the lives of artists before the Renaissance

Aims

This course aims to:

• familiarise you with some of the artistic ‘masterpieces’ of medieval France and England, c.1100-1400
• reveal, and give you confidence reading, medieval texts/extracts about art, the artist, and artificer – and comparing these with some renaissance examples
• give you an understanding of the continuities between the medieval and Renaissance periods, and between renaissance and gothic styles of art

Course content

This course will introduce you to some of the artistic masterpieces of the European Middle Ages, with an eye, specifically, to the hands that crafted them. We’ll be looking at both the social reality of being an artist or craftsman in the medieval period; and at the idea of the ‘artist’ in this period. We’ll think about how the reality and the idea interact and cross over. And how, due to a mixture of social, economic, and intellectual factors, both undergo radical change between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries – long before the Italian renaissance, typically considered the cradle of the ‘artist’ in his modern guise – as creative ‘genius’. We’ll begin by zooming out to consider what the status and role of the artist reveals about a society and its imaginary – comparing ancient, romantic and modern ideas of artistry and situating the medieval against these. We’ll then traverse the European Middle Ages from the twelfth-century ‘renaissance’ (a designation we’ll probe); through thirteenth-century developments and the evolution of the idea of a leading ‘architect’; to the celebrity status achieved by late-medieval manuscript illuminators; and finally we’ll trace connections between French Gothic and trecento Italian styles. The course will be divided into thematic classes that also follow one another chronologically, and each class will bring together visual and textual sources – from manuscript illuminations, to craftsmen’s handbooks, to Aristotelian philosophy and cathedral labyrinths – which we’ll learn to read as a group to piece together the history of medieval making and makers: a history that is still largely unwritten. 

What to expect on this course

This course will be taught through a combination of lecture-style teaching, open seminar discussion, and individual and group activities. A class might begin with twenty minutes of lecturing, followed by a whole-group effort to read and analyse a primary source, followed by work in partners answering a set of questions on individual passages, or images, and a coming together to share our findings. There may be opportunity for short presentations. We’ll be working together to unpick a rich history. The emphasis will be on discovery, discussion, making new connections, and hopefully debate!

Course sessions

1. The Idea of the Artist in Culture and The Medieval Evidence : This class will introduce the topic and why it matters. We’ll begin by looking at some contrasting accounts of the role of the ‘artist’ from ancient times to romanticism, to get a flavour of the varied ways this figure has been discussed (as skilled craftsman, as genius, the ‘conceptual’ artist). This will help position the Middle Ages in a larger story – and we’ll survey how one goes about researching the ‘artist’ in this period, which has for so long been confused with the ‘Dark Ages’ and contrasted negatively with the Renaissance rise of the artist.

    

2. The Twelfth-Century Renaissance : We’ll launch into the so-called ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ in England and France and consider some key visual and verbal sources that give insight into artistry and the lives of artists in this period: from Theophilus’ practical handbook, On Various Arts, to Hugh of Saint-Victor’s discussion of mechanical arts (as counterparts to the ‘liberal arts’) in the Didascalicon, to the first medieval artist’s signature left by ‘Giselbertus’ on the Cathedral of Autun’s west façade, and the earliest naming of an illuminator in records describing the creation of the beautiful English Bury Bible.

    

3. Architects versus builders: Developments of the Thirteenth Century: Around 1200 the works of Aristotle, so far only available in the Arabic world, became available in Latin. They contained discussions of art as techne – meaning skilled and ‘rational’ work – which combined with social and economic transformations of the period began to change the status and respect ascribed to and experienced by artists. In this class we’ll examine the complex factors behind the growing status of the artist and especially architects in the thirteenth century – and the development of guilds. We’ll end with the curious case of the Mystery Plays which were put on by craft guilds in English towns (the Middle English Misterie meant ‘craft’) – perhaps even attempting a short re-enactment!

    

4. Luxury Manuscripts, their Artists and Patrons: We’ll explore transformations to manuscript production, which moved from monasteries to commercial urban workshops in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We’ll delve into the astonishing painted books commissioned by Blanche of Castille and her son King Louis IX; and then those painted by named and famed artists Jean Pucelle and the Limbourg Brothers, also thanks to court patrons. We’ll discuss how these painters revolutionised the genre of ‘Books of Hours’; and the irony that they earned their great celebrity by painting on an unprecedentedly tiny scale. What lay behind this shift from the macro (of the gothic cathedral) to the micro in the medieval arts?

    

5. Avignon and Italy: Finally, we’ll seek out the historical connection between these northern European artistic developments, with the first glimmerings of the Italian ‘Renaissance’. We’ll cast our eye south to Siena in Tuscany, home to Duccio di Buoninsegna, and known as the cradle of the Renaissance. But we’ll see how the ‘courtly’ Sienese style was also moulded in southern France in Avignon, where Simone Martini travelled in the 1330s to paint in the Gothic Palais de Papes. 

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• give an account of how, and what, we know about artists in the medieval period
• approach and analyse with confidence some key medieval European artistic formulas: such as what’s going on in a typical cathedral tympanum programme, or moralised bible page
• describe (in general terms) the changing status of the artist from premodern to modern times in European thought – and identify some key textual sources to support those ideas

Required reading

Martindale, Andrew, The Rise of the Artist in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (McGraw-Hill, 1972)