An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

The paintings were altogether different from those of to-day, and consisted chiefly of illustrations in the books, called illuminations. Just as the books had all to be laboriously written out by hand, so each picture was painted on the parchment page with tiny brushes and usually in brilliant colors with a generous use of gold. And as the monks wrote out the books, so it was, in general, the monks who painted the pictures. The books that they adorned were chiefly those used in the church services, especially the breviary, the psalter, and the book of hours. Naturally these pictures usually dealt with religious subjects and illustrated the lives of the saints or the events of biblical history. Virtue was encouraged by representations of the joys of heaven and also stimulated by spirited portrayals of the devil and his fiends, and of the sufferings of the lost.

In secular books.

Secular works, too, were sometimes provided with pictures drawn from a wide variety of subjects. We find in their pages such homely and familiar figures as the farmer with his plow, the butcher at his block, the glass blower at his furnace; then, again, we are transported to an imaginary world, peopled with strange and uncouth beasts and adorned with fantastic architecture.

The artist governed by fixed rules.

The mediæval love of symbols and of fixed rules for doing things is strikingly illustrated in these illuminations. Each color had its especial significance. There were certain established attitudes and ways of depicting various characters and emotions which were adhered to by generation after generation of artists and left comparatively little opportunity for individual talent or lifelike presentation. On the other hand, these little pictures—for of course they were always small[169]—were often executed with exquisite care and skill and sometimes in the smaller details with great truth to nature.

Beside the pictures of which we have been speaking, it was a common practice to adorn the books with gay illuminated initials or page borders, which were sometimes very beautiful in both design and color. In these rather more freedom was allowed to the caprice of the individual artist, and they were frequently enlivened with very charming and lifelike flowers, birds, squirrels, and other small animals.

A Romanesque Church

Sculpture subservient to architecture.

The art of sculpture was more widely and successfully cultivated during the Middle Ages than painting. Mediæval sculpture did not, however, concern itself chiefly with the representation of the human figure, but with what we may call decorative carving; it was almost wholly subservient to the dominant art of the Middle Ages, namely, architecture.