[19]. Histoire des Arts au moyen âge. Album. Vol. II. pl. lxxvii. Paris, 1864.
There are many other objects of medieval art not unworthy of being enlarged upon, which I intentionally pass over lightly, lest their multiplicity should distract us; thus I will say little of its pottery, its coins, or of its sculptures and bas-reliefs in stone. With regard to the first of them, M. Labarte observes: “It is not until the beginning of the fifteenth century that we find among the European nations any pottery, but such as has been designed for the commonest domestic use, and none that art has been pleased to decorate.” These are objects which the middle ages have in common with others; and they are objects in which a comparison will not be favourable to medieval art. Still, we must take care that a love of art does not blind us to the real value of such things; they are always interesting for the history of art, whatever their rudeness or whatever their ugliness; and, moreover, they are often, as the coins of various nations, of high historical interest. For examine, on our own series of barbarous Saxon coins we have not only the successions of kings handed down to us, in the several kingdoms of the so-called Heptarchy and in the united kingdom, but also on the reverses of the same coins we have mention made of a very large number of cities and towns at which they were respectively struck. For example, to take Cambridge, we find that coins were struck here by King Edward the Martyr, Ethelred the Second, Canute, Harold the First, and Edward the Confessor; also after the Conquest by William the First and William the Second. We are thus furnished with very early notices, and so in some measure able to estimate the importance of the cities and towns of our island in medieval times; though great caution is necessary here in making deductions; for no coins appear to have been struck in Cambridge after the reign of William Rufus. And this seems at first sight so much the more surprising when we bear in mind that money was struck in some of our cities, as York, Durham, Canterbury, and Bristol, quite commonly, as late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But, in truth, from the twelfth century downwards, the number of cities and towns in which lawful money was struck became comparatively small.
But I must not wander too far into numismatics. The art of enamelling, peculiarly characteristic of the later periods of the middle ages, is very fully treated of by M. Labarte, from whom I derive the following facts. The most ancient writer that mentions it is the elder Philostratus, a Greek writer of the third century, who emigrated from Athens to Rome. In his Icones, or Treatise on Images, the following passage occurs. After speaking of a harness enriched with gold, precious stones, and various colours, he adds: “It is said that the barbarians living near the ocean pour colours upon heated brass, so that these adhere and become like stone, and preserve the design represented.” It may, therefore, be considered as established that the art of enamelling upon metals had no existence in either Greece or Italy at the beginning of the third century; and, moreover, that this art was practised at least as early in the cities of Western Gaul. During the invasions and wars which desolated Europe from the fourth to the eleventh century almost all the arts languished, and some may have been entirely lost. Enamelling was all but lost; for between the third and the eleventh centuries the only two works which occur as landmarks are the ring of King Ethelwulf in the British Museum, and the ring of Alhstan, probably the bishop of Sherburne, who lived at the same time. These two little pieces, however, only serve to establish the bare existence of enamelling in the West in the ninth century. But in this same century the art was in all its splendour at Constantinople, and we possess specimens of Byzantine workmanship of even an earlier date. I cannot enter into the various modes of enamelling, which are fully described by M. Labarte; but merely mention, without comment, a few of the principal specimens, independently of the Limoges manufacture, which constituted the chief glory of that city from the eleventh century to the end of the medieval period. “This became the focus whence emanated nearly all the beautiful specimens of enamelled copper, which are so much admired and so eagerly sought after for museums and collections.” The principal earlier examples then are these; the crown and the sword of Charlemagne, of the ninth century, now in the Imperial Treasury at Vienna; the chalice of St Remigius, of the twelfth century, in the Imperial Library at Paris; the shrine of the Magi in Cologne, and the great shrine of Nôtre Dame at Aix-la-Chapelle, presented by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the latter part of the same twelfth century. Also the full-length portrait (25 inches by 13) of Geoffrey Plantagenet, father of our Henry II., which formerly ornamented his tomb in the cathedral, but is now in the Museum at Le Mans. The British Museum likewise contains two or three fine examples; and among them an enamelled plate representing Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, and brother of King Stephen.
Very fine also are the extant products of the goldsmith’s art in the middle ages; which date principally from the eleventh century, when the art received a new impulse in the West; those of earlier date, with very few exceptions, now cease to exist. They are principally chalices, reliquaries, censers, candlesticks, croziers and statuettes.
Nor can I pass over in absolute silence the armour of the middle ages. Until the middle of the ninth century it would appear to have resembled the Roman fashion, of which it is needless to say anything; but in Carlovingian times the hilts and scabbards of dress-swords were very highly decorated; and about this period, or rather later, the description of armour used by the ancients was exchanged for the hauberk or coat of mail, which was the most usual defensive armour during the period of the Crusades. The first authentic monument where this mail-armour is represented is on the Bayeux tapestry of Queen Matilda, representing the invasion of England by William Duke of Normandy in 1066; the most famous example of medieval tapestry in existence, though other specimens are to be seen at Berne, Nancy, La Chaise Dieu, and Coventry. The art of the tapissier, however, in the eleventh century, when the Bayeux tapestry was made, would appear to have been on the decline. In the beginning of the fourteenth century plate-armour began to come into use; and by and by this was decorated with Damascene work, a style of art applied to the gate of a basilica in Rome, which was sent from Constantinople, as early as the eleventh century, but which did not become general in the West till the fifteenth. To this I may just add, that sepulchral brasses, on which figures in armour are often elaborately represented by incised lines, are a purely medieval invention of the thirteenth century. Sir Roger de Trumpington’s brass at Trumpington is one of the very earliest examples. But time forbids me to say more of sepulchral brasses, a class of antiquities almost confined to our own country, of which we have some few specimens as late as the seventeenth century, or to do more than allude to the beautiful sepulchral monuments in stone of the medieval period, with which we are all more or less familiar.
The most remarkable art to which the middle age gave birth was oil-painting, the very queen of all the fine arts, though it was to the age of the Medici that its immense development was due. Previously painting had been subordinated to architecture; but now, while mosaics, frescoes, and painted glass remained still subservient to her, the art of painting occupies a distinct and prominent rank of its own. It used commonly to be said that the invention of painting on prepared panel was due to Margaritone of Arezzo, who died about 1290, and in like manner that John van Eyck invented oil-painting in 1410. Both these errors have been propagated by the authority of Vasari. But it is now well known, and has been conclusively proved, both by M. Labarte and by Sir C. Eastlake, that these modes of painting are mentioned by authors who lived more than a century before Margaritone, in particular by the monk Theophilus, who in the twelfth century composed a work entitled Diversarum artium schedula. Paintings in oil either are or lately were in existence anterior to John van Eyck; for example one at Naples, executed by Filippo Tesauro, and dated 1309. We must ascend to much earlier times to discover the true origin of portable paintings, and we shall find it in the Byzantine Empire. The Greeks, about the time that the controversy respecting images was rife, multiplied little pictures of saints; these were afterwards brought over in abundance by the priests and monks who followed the crusades, and from the study of them, schools of painting in tempera arose in Italy, in the twelfth century, at Pisa, Florence and other places. The Byzantine school, M. Labarte tells us, reigned paramount in Italy until the time of Giotto, i.e. the beginning of the fourteenth century, and also in the schools of Bohemia and Cologne, the most ancient in northern Europe, until towards the end of the fourteenth century. In this country we have two very early paintings, one of the beginning and the other of the end of the same fourteenth century, in Westminster Abbey. The former, probably a decoration of the high altar, is on wood; it represents the Adoration of the Magi and other Scriptural subjects, and is declared by Sir C. Eastlake to be worthy of a good Italian artist of the fourteenth century, though he thinks that it was executed in England. The latter is the canopy of the tomb of Richard II. and Anne, his first wife, representing the Saviour and the Virgin and other figures. The action and expression are declared by Sir C. Eastlake to indicate the hand of a skilful painter. In 1396, £20 was paid by the sacrist for the execution of the work. These remarks must suffice for a notice of medieval painting; the glorious period of its history belongs rather to the Renaissance, or post-medieval age.
The only archæological monuments of great importance which remain to be mentioned are those of architecture, in connection with the accessories of mosaics, frescoes, and painted glass. The two former descended from classical times, the last is the creation of the middle age. Mosaics having been originally used only in pavements, at length were employed as embellishments for the walls of basilicas, and, by a natural transition, of churches. Constantine and his successors decorated many churches in this manner, and in the East a ground of gold or silver was introduced below the glass cubes of the mosaics, and a lustre was by this means spread over the work which in earlier times was altogether unknown. Thus the tympanum above the principal door of the narthex of the Church of St Sophia, built by the Emperor Justinian at Constantinople, is adorned with a mosaic picture of the Saviour seated, the cubes of the mosaics being of silvered glass; it is accompanied by Greek texts. This and other later mosaics are figured by M. Labarte, in his last and most splendid work, entitled Histoire des Arts au moyen âge; among the rest a Transfiguration of the tenth century. The Byzantine art, with its stiff conventionality, prevailed every where till Cimabue, G. Gaddi, and Giotto imparted to its rudeness a grace and nobleness which marked a new era. In the vestibule of St Peter is a noble mosaic, partly after the design of Giotto, representing Christ walking on the water, and the apostles in the ship. But the very masters who raised the art to its perfection brought about its destruction. Painting, restored by these same great men, was too powerful a rival; and after the sixteenth century, when it still flourished in Venice under the encouragement of Titian, we hear little more of mosaics on any great scale.
Passing over frescoes, which were much encouraged by Charlemagne, and by various sovereigns and popes during the middle ages, because the ravages of time have either destroyed them altogether or left them in a deplorable condition, as for example in some parish-churches in England, I will make a few remarks on painted glass, so extensively used in the decoration of the later churches.
The art of painting glass was unknown to the ancients, and also to the early periods of the middle ages. “It is a fact,” says M. Labarte, “acknowledged by all archæologists, that we do not now know any painted glass to which an earlier date than the eleventh century can be assigned with certainty.” Two specimens, and no more, of this century, are figured by M. Lasteyrie. The painted windows of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are nearly of the same character. They consist of little historical medallions, distributed over mosaic grounds composed of coloured (not painted) glass, borrowed from preceding centuries. Fine examples from the church of St Denys and La Sainte Chapelle at Paris, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are figured by M. Lasteyrie, and also by M. Labarte, who has many beautiful remarks on their harmony with the buildings to which they belong, on the elegance of their form, the richness of their details, and the brilliancy of their colours. In the fourteenth century, when examples become common, the glass-painters copied nature with more fidelity, and exchanged the violet-tinted masses, by which the flesh-tints had been rendered, for a reddish gray colour, painted upon white glass, which approached more nearly to nature. Large single figures now often occupy an entire window. The improvement in drawing and colouring is a compensation for the more striking effects of the brilliant yet mysterious examples of the preceding centuries; and the end of the fourteenth century is one of the finest epochs in the history of painted glass. Painting on glass followed the progress of painting in oils in the age which followed; and artists more and more aimed at producing individual works; and in the latter half of the fifteenth century buildings and landscapes in perspective were first introduced. The decorations which surround the figures being borrowed from the architecture of the time have often a very beautiful effect. But the large introduction of grisailles deprives the windows of this period of the transparent brilliancy of the coloured mosaics of the earlier glass-painting. In the sixteenth century, however, glass was nothing more than the material subservient to the glass-painter, like canvas to the oil-painter. Small pictures very highly finished were executed after the designs of Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and the other great painters of the Renaissance. “But,” as M. Labarte truly says, “the era of glass-painting was at an end. From the moment that it was attempted to transform an art of purely monumental decoration into an art of expression, its intention was perverted, and this led of necessity to its ruin. The resources of glass-painting were more limited than those of oil, with which it was unable to compete. From the end of the sixteenth century the art was in its decline, and towards the middle of the seventeenth was” almost “entirely given up.” Our own age has seen its revival, and though the success has been indeed great, we may hope that the zenith has not yet been reached. “It is,” says Mr Winston, “a distinct and complete branch of art, which, like many other medieval inventions, is of universal applicability, and susceptible of great improvement.” I have been a little more diffuse on glass-painting than on some other subjects, as it is a purely medieval art, and one which has now acquired a living interest. Various examples of the different styles will easily suggest themselves to many, or, if not, they may be studied in the splendid work of M. Lasteyrie, entitled Histoire de la Peinture sur Verre d’après ses monuments en France, and on a smaller scale in Mr Winston’s valuable Hints on Glass-painting.
With regard to the architectural monuments of the medieval world, I may, in addressing such an audience, consider them to be sufficiently well known for my present purpose, which is to give an indication, and little more, of the archæological remains which have come down to our own days. Medieval architecture is in itself a boundless subject; and as I have not specially studied it, I could not, if I would, successfully attempt an epitome of its various forms of Byzantine, Saracenic, Romanesque, Lombardic, and of infinitely diversified Gothic. For a succinct yet comprehensive view of all these and more, I must refer you to Mr Fergusson’s Handbook of Architecture. Yet when we let our imagination idly roam over Europe, and the adjoining regions of Asia and Africa, what a host of architectural objects flits before it in endless successions of variety and beauty! Think of Justinian’s Church of St Sophia, which he boasted had vanquished Solomon’s temple, and again of St Mark’s at Venice, as Byzantine examples. Think next of the mosque of the Sultan Hassan, and of the tombs of the Memlooks mingled with lovely minarets and domes at Cairo; of the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem; of the Alhambra in Spain, with all the witchery of its gold and azure decorations. Float, if you will, along the banks of the Rhine or the Danube (as many of us have actually done), and conjure up the majestic cathedrals, the spacious monasteries and the ruined castles, telling of other days, with which they are fringed. Let the bare mention of the names of Milan, Venice, Rome; again of Paris, Rheims, Chartres, Amiens, Troyes, Rouen, Avignon; and in fine those of Antwerp, Louvain, and Brussels, suggest their own stories. Yet the magnificent structures, secular and ecclesiastical, which I have either named or hinted at, need not make us ashamed of our own country. We are surrounded on all sides by an archæology which is emphatically an archæology of progress, and we may justly be proud of it as Englishmen. In this University and its immediate neighbourhood we have fine specimens of Saxon, Norman, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles of Gothic architecture; and as regards the last of them, one of the most splendid examples in the world. In the opinion of competent judges the English cathedrals, while surpassed in size by many on the Continent, are in excellence of art superior to those of France or of any country in Europe. “Nothing can exceed the beauty of the crosses which Edward I. erected on the spots where the body of Queen Eleanor rested on its way to London.” Some of these, Waltham for example, are quite equal to anything of their class found on the Continent. “The vault of Westminster Abbey” (says Mr Fergusson, on whose authority I make almost every statement relating to medieval architecture) “is richer and more beautiful in form than any ever constructed in France;” the triforium is as beautiful as any in existence; and its appropriateness of detail and sobriety of design render it one of the most beautiful Gothic edifices in Europe.