European Middle Ages

The “Middle Ages” in Europe—ca. 400 AD-1400 AD—often described (wrongly) as a “dark” chaotic period “in the middle” between ancient Greco-Roman culture and the revival of Greco-Roman culture in the Renaissance

•Middle Ages was inventive and brilliant in its own right.   •Mediaeval thinkers and artists had culturally relative ideas that valued the spiritual world more than the material world of wealth or nature.   •Mediaeval art synthesized Christian values with older, pre-Christian art traditions, including those of European tribal cultures, and selected aspects of Greco-Roman culture.

In the Middle Ages, art becomes very important as a social and political status symbol.  These expensive Anglo-Saxon luxury objects (found at Sutton Hoo, England) represent the wealth and power of their owner, a 7th-century AD Anglo-Saxon king.

• Anglo-Saxon style
• The Sutton-Hoo objects were discovered in England in 1939, part of the “ship burial” of the Anglo-Saxon king Raedwald, who died in 625 AD.

“They laid their dear lord, the giver of rings, deep within the ship by the mast in majesty; many treasures and adornments from far and wide were gathered there.  I have never heard of a ship equipped more handsomely with weapons and war-gear, sword and corselets; on his breast lay countless treasures that were to travel far with him into the waves’ domain.” 

–description of a ship burial from the Anglo

Saxon story of Beowulf, 7th century AD

• Celtic and Viking designs are found throughout European mediaeval art—ex: the Viking Old Stave Church, Norway, 1000s
  • Viking ships—like theOseberg Ship—have similar style characteristics: graceful curves, linear interlace & animal designs, & symmetry—very “organic” forms (forms that look like the forms of living things).
  • Celtic “manuscript illumination” is most beautifully embodied in the Irish Book of Kells, late 700s/early 800s AD (ink and pigment on vellum, now at Trinity College, Dublin)
    • The most famous image (in theBook of Kells) is the
      Chi-rho-iota” Page ( the initials of “Christ” in Greek), which begins the Nativity story in the Book of Matthew (autem generatio: “Now this is how the birth of Christ came about”). 

Gothic Architecture