Medieval artists didn't know perspective: backward?
I disagree: their figures were flat because they wanted them to be. I remember seeing with my students a Romanesque image of the Romanesque virgin on a large golden background: no perspective...
Hieratic by default of the craftsman?
...But then I imagined how they really saw her in a chapel: perhaps in the darkness of a winter night in the Pyrenees. And I turned off the light and lit the candles... and the virgin advanced towards us!
So it's not that they didn't know perspective, it's that they didn't want to use it?
If you pass by a Romanesque image today at the MNAC or in any museum illuminated with spotlights, you will only see a flat virgin, and this one had a huge golden background, which seems like mere decoration...
Has art progressed and surpassed itself?
Wait: imagine yourself a devout believer prostrate before the icon of the miraculous mother in the light of the uncertain and tremolo flickering of the candles in the darkness, and you will see how the mother of God comes to extend her arm towards you. That golden background is not there by chance. It makes possible the exciting moment in which we feel praying with her.
A small miracle that will never get Instagram?
Although the experience of the contemporary image is more sophisticated, it is impossible today to make us feel that emotion...
Because?
Because of the rhythm in which we conceive perception today.
The higher the speed, the less emotion?
To see more in art, you don't have to go faster – more images in less time – but rather slower. Our challenge is to recover that slowness.
Wasn't medieval art a way to indoctrinate illiterate believers?
It is more complex than that simplicity. Their
Images do not replace any writing: they only say something else, an exciting language and another way of seeing it, now lost.
Was that virgin an intelligent abstraction or simply a naive creation?
Historians believed for centuries that these medieval images were so that illiterate people could “read” the doctrine of the Church, but if you stop, like them, before them, you see that they wanted to generate emotion with their instruments in their way of life.
And then they progressed?
The medieval artist does not have this perception of superiority with respect to the past or inferiority with respect to the future. Our conception of progress that prevails today is later and productivist, merely capitalist.
Were medieval artists abstract and primitivist without knowing it?
When we explain why Picasso explores the supposed primitivism of African art or modern abstraction, we want to believe that it is modern – a progress – and that prevents us from understanding that there was also abstraction long before...
Wasn't everything about imitating reality, mimesis, but rather transcending it to excite?
Medieval artists managed to be abstract before Picasso, because they subordinated the representation of reality to the transmission of an idea: they did not want to imitate reality, but rather go beyond it.
If you had wanted to represent a real woman, would you have represented her?
But they were more interested in subordinating this pretension of realism to the achievement of the emotion of praying with it.
But it is tempting to think that we are superior to them and so is our art.
On the other hand, understanding that virgin requires knowing how societies, guilds, learning, churches, towns were organized... Anthropology from when she was conceived, carved, painted...
Was the image the word of God?
And the Middle Ages is the age of diagrams and of transmitting complex ideas with strokes, letters and drawings that organize and transmit knowledge...
...That was sometimes complex?
Scholastic theology was to the highest degree. If you remember “The Annunciation” by Fra Angelico, already in the 15th century...
I'll Google it to remember it: such are the contradictions of history.
You will appreciate the tension between the realistic detail in the relief with which he paints the angel's wings and the river of colors: yellow, blue and green that emanates from the virgin's mantle. She was explaining theology.
What does it mean?
The mystery of the incarnation cannot be figurative and Angelico is a Dominican, a scholastic: he explains to us with art a complex truth beyond words.
