Durandus next devotes a whole chapter to the symbolism of the altar, and another to the significance and function of ornaments, pictures, and sculpture. The latter opens with the words: “The pictures and ornaments in a church are the texts and scriptures (lectiones et scripturae) of the laity.” This chapter is long; it explains how Christ and the angels, also saints, Apostles and others, should be represented, and describes the proper kinds of church ornament and utensils. Much of the detail is symbolical.
Thus Durandus devised or brought together meanings to fit each bit of the church edifice, its materials and furnishings. In the work of a contemporary are stored the allegorical meanings of the subjects of Gothic sculpture and painted glass. The thirteenth century had a weakness for the word “Speculum,” and the idea it carried of a mirror or compendium of all human knowledge. The chief of mediaeval encyclopaedists was Vincent of Beauvais, a protégé of the saintly King Louis IX. An analysis of his huge Speculum majus is given elsewhere.[90] It was made up of the Mirror of Nature, the Mirror of human Knowledge and Ethics, and the Mirror of History. The compiler and his assistants laboured during the best period of Gothic art, and from their work, industry may draw an exhaustive commentary upon the series of topics presented by the sculpture and glass of a cathedral.[91]
The Mirror of Nature appears carved in the sculpture of Chartres or Bourges. In rendering the work of the Six Days, the Creator is shown (under the form of Christ)[92] contemplating His work, or resting from His toil; here and there a lion, sheep, or goat, suggests the animal creation, and a few trees the vegetable world. This is the necessary symbolism of the sculptor’s art. But Gothic animals and plants sometimes have other definite symbolic meanings, as in the instance of the well-known signs of the four Evangelists, the man, the lion, the ox, the eagle. The allegorical interpretations of Scripture were an exhaustless source of symbolism for Gothic sculptors; another was the Physiologus and its progeny of Bestiaries, with their symbolic explanations of the legendary attributes of animals. Intentional symbolism, however, did not inhere in all this carving, much of which is sheer fancy and decoration. Such was the character of the splendid Gothic flora, of the birds and beasts that move in it, and of the grotesque monsters. They were not out of place, since the Gothic cathedral was itself a Speculum or Summa, and should include the whole of God’s creation, not omitting even the devils who beset men’s souls.
Vincent may have drawn from Hugo of St Victor the current doctrine that the arts have part in the work of man’s restoration; a doctrine abundantly justifying the presence of the sciences and crafts (composing the Mirror of Knowledge) in the sculpture and painting of the cathedral. There the Seven Liberal Arts are rendered, through allegorical figures; and the months of the year are symbolized in the Zodiac and the labours of the field which make up man’s annual toil. Philosophy is shown and Fortune’s wheel; the Virtues and Vices are represented in personifications, and even their conflict, the Psychomachia, may be shown.
At last the Mirror of History is reached. This will teach in concrete examples what has been learned from the figures of the abstract Virtues and Vices. Its chief source is the Bible. Those Old Testament incidents were selected which for centuries had been interpreted as prefigurements of the life of Christ; and each was presented as a pendant to the Gospel scene which it typified. These make the chief subjects of the coloured glass of Chartres and Bourges and other cathedrals where the windows are preserved. Here may be seen the Passion of Christ, surrounded by scenes from the Old Testament typifying it; likewise His Resurrection and its ancient types; and other significant incidents in the life of the Saviour and His virgin mother.[93] The latter is typified by the burning bush, by the fleece of Gideon, by the rod of Aaron, even as in the hymns of Adam of Saint-Victor.[94] Besides these incidents, leading personages of the Old Testament are presented as prefigurative of Christ, as in the great series of statues of Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, on the north portal of Chartres; while the four greater and twelve minor prophets are shown as types of the four Evangelists and the twelve Apostles. Christ himself is depicted on a window at St. Denis, between the allegorical figures of the Ancient Law and the Gospel,—figures which are allied to those of the uncrowned and blinded Synagogue and the triumphant Church, so frequently seen together upon cathedrals. Everywhere the tendency to symbolize is strong. Parts of the Crucifixion scene are rendered symbolically, and many of the parables. That of the Good Samaritan constantly appears upon the windows, and is always designed so as to convey the allegorical teaching drawn from it in Honorius’s sermon.[95]
Obviously this Mirror of History was chiefly sacred history. Pagan antiquity was scantily suggested by the Sibyls, who stand for the dumb pagan prophecy of Christ. Scenes from the history of Christian nations were more frequent; but they always told of some victory for Christ, like the baptism of Clovis, or the crusading deeds of Charlemagne, Roland or Godfrey of Bouillon. God’s drama closed with the Last Judgment, the damnation of the damned and the beatitude of the elect. The Last Judgments, usually over-arching the tympanums above cathedral doors, are known to all—as at Rheims, at Chartres, at Bourges. They are full of symbolism, and full of “historic” reality as well. The treatment becomes entirely allegorical when the sculptor enters Paradise with the redeemed, and portrays in lovely personifications the beatitudes of the blessed, as on the north portal of Chartres.
Those bands of nameless men who carved the statues and designed the coloured glass which were to make Gothic cathedrals speak, faithfully presented the teachings of the Church. They rendered the sacred drama of mankind’s creation, fall, redemption, and final judgment unto hell or heaven: they rendered it in all its dogmatic symbolism, and with a plastic adequacy showing how completely they thought and felt in the allegorical medium in which they worked. They also created matchless ideals of symbolism in art. The statuary of the portals and façades of Rheims and Chartres are in their way comparable to the sculptures of the pediment of the Parthenon. But unlike those masterpieces of antique idealism, these Christian masterpieces do not seek to set forth mortal man in his natural strength and beauty and completeness. Rather they seek to show the working of the human spirit held within the power and grace of God. Theirs is not the strength and beauty of the flesh, or the excellence of the unconquerable mind of man; but in them man’s mind and spirit are palpably the devout creatures of God’s omnipotence, obedient to His will, sustained and redeemed by His power and grace. Attitude, form, feature, alike designed to express the sacred beauty of the soul, are not invested with physical excellence for its own sake; but every physical quality of these statues is a symbol of some holy and beautiful quality of spirit. These statues attain a symbolic, and not a natural, ideal in art. Yet many of them possess the physical beauty of form and feature, inasmuch as such may be the proper envelope for the chaste and eager soul.[96]
On the other hand, in the filling out of the illustrative detail of life on earth, of handicraft and art, the sculptor showed how he could carve these actualities, and present earth’s beauty in the cathedral’s wealth of vine and flower and leaf. The level commonplace of humanity is deftly rendered, the daily doings of the forge and field and market-place, the tugging labourer, the merchant with his stuffs, the scholar with his scrolls. He knew life well, this artist, and had an eye for every catching scene, also for Nature’s subtle beauties. Sometimes a certain passing show was represented because a window was given by some drapers’ guild, desirous of seeing its craft shown in a place of honour; and the artist loved his scenes from busy life, as he loved his ornament from Nature. Such scenes (which rarely held specific allegory) were not unconnected with the rest of the drama of creation and redemption mirrored in the cathedral, nor was the exquisitely cut leaf and rose without its suggestion of the grace incarnate in the Virgin and her Son. Daily life and natural ornament had at least an illustrative pertinency to the whole, of which they were unobtrusive and lovely elements; and since that whole was primarily a visible symbol of the unseen and divine power, these humble elements had part in its unutterable mystery, and were likewise symbols.
Finally, have not these nameless artists—even as Dante and our English Bunyan—presented by their art a synthesis of life’s realities? Their feet were on the earth; with sympathy and knowledge their hands worked in the media of things seen and handled, and fashioned the little human matters which are bounded by the cradle and the grave. Such were the materials from which Dante formed his Commedia, and Bunyan drew the Progress of his Pilgrim soul to God. Yet as with Bunyan and Dante, so with these artists in stone and coloured light, the mortal and the tangible were but the elements through which the poem or story, or the carved or painted picture, was made the realizing symbol of the unseen and eternal Spirit.
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