The best thing the Dark Ages did for civilization was to learn the builders’ trade and teach it to a great many people. It was a general service, for to make a people industrious is, sooner or later, to make them skilful and law-abiding.
It is curious that Saint Martin who, even while he was a bishop, lodged in a hut covered with boughs, should head the great line of builders who jointly and severally developed French Gothic. In standing for the integrity of the relic, which was literally the seed of early Christian art, Saint Martin gave a new and a higher impetus to life, and with it, very indirectly, to art. Seventy years after Martin’s death, to his blessed memory Saint Perpetuas built “the most beautiful church in existence,” at least so Gregory of Tours affirms. We will not inquire on what lines, for this was at the beginning of the Dark Ages, when nothing beautiful was made.
A supreme recognition of the bold old iconoclast comes to us from devotees of the classic; from certain artists and connoisseurs of the Renaissance. This unexpected tribute to iconoclasm is published upon a monument far removed from old Gaul in time and place, in ideal and execution.
From the Certosa of Pavia.
One of the Most Elaborate Monuments
of Catholicism.
In a monastery dowered with the gold of two reigning dynasties of tyrants, dowered by the genius of two reigning dynasties of painters and sculptors, amid surroundings perhaps the richest in the world, where fifty monks might dream away their lives in silence, in that lordly and exclusive playhouse for the soul of the Renaissance, wherein the exuberance of the Gothic takes on the maturity of the Renaissance in an elaboration which for once does not cloy,—in the [Certosa di Pavia] we find a tribute to crude, old Saint Martin, the iconoclast.
On a mural of one of the side chapels of this Certosa behold him represented in the garb of a fifteenth century monk, with his sanctity emphasized by a large, glittering nimbus, to which the aerial perspective of the otherwise maturely realistic painting is deliberately sacrificed, calmly superintending a gilded youth of the Renaissance while he smashes a fine Grecian statue! How did this rude act find endorsement in a temple of art? How did the coarsest of the saints win a place in the heart of the Renaissance? Was it because in him they saw a reflection of the subtlest honesty of Art, that god of the Renaissance? Was it because, above all else, Saint Martin especially stood for the integrity of the ideal?
Though this little scene on the chapel wall may have been simply historic in its import, nothing is plainer than that the picture is intended to honor an uncompromising bishop of the early Church.
Through the confusion that disintegrated empire, Saint Martin was a rude standard-bearer of two ideals broad enough to rebuild nations—Sincerity and Brotherhood. “First he wrought and after that he taught”—and first the spirit of his teaching was put into rude pictures, because in Gaul so few people could read and still fewer could condense an idea into forceful words.