The Waning of the Middle Ages/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX
THE ÆSTHETIC SENTIMENT
The study of the art of an epoch remains incomplete unless we try to ascertain also how this art was appreciated by contemporaries: what they admired in it, and by what standards they gauged beauty. Now, there are few subjects about which tradition is so defective as the æsthetic sentiment of past ages. The faculty and the need of expressing in words the sentiment of beauty have only been developed in recent times. What sort of admiration for the art of their time was felt by the men of the fifteenth century? Speaking generally, we may assert that two things impressed them especially: first, the dignity and sanctity of the subject; next, the astonishing mastery, the perfectly natural rendering of all the details. Thus we find, on the one hand, an appreciation which is rather religious than artistic; on the other hand, a naïve wonder, hardly entitled to rank as artistic emotion. The first to leave us critical observations on the painting of the brothers Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden was a Genoese man of letters, of the middle of the fifteenth century, Bartolomeo Fazio. Most of the pictures he speaks of are lost. He praises the beautiful and chaste figure of a Virgin, the hair of the archangel Gabriel, “surpassing real hair,” the holy austerity expressed by the ascetic face of Saint John the Baptist, and a Saint Jerome who “seems to be alive.” He admires the perspective of the cell of Jerome, a ray of light falling through a fissure, drops of sweat on the body of a woman in a bath, an image reflected by a mirror, a burning lamp, a landscape with mountains, woods, villages, castles, human figures, the distant horizon, and, once again, the mirror. The terms he uses to vent his enthusiasm betray merely a naïve curiosity, losing itself in the unlimited wealth of details, without arriving at a judgment on the beauty of the whole. Such is the appreciation of a medieval work by a mind which is still medieval.
A century later, after the triumph of the Renaissance, it is just this minuteness in the execution of details which is condemned as the fundamental fault of Flemish art. According to the Portuguese artist, Francesco de Holanda, Michelangelo spoke about it as follows:
“Flemish painting pleases all the devout better than Italian. The latter evokes no tears, the former makes them weep copiously. This is not a result of the merits of this art; the only cause is the extreme sensibility of the devout spectators. The Flemish pictures please women, especially the old and very young ones, and also monks and nuns, and lastly men of the world who are not capable of understanding true harmony. In Flanders they paint, before all things, to render exactly and deceptively the outward appearance of things. The painters choose, by preference, subjects provoking transports of piety, like the figures of saints or of prophets. But most of the time they paint what are called landscapes with plenty of figures. Though the eye is agreeably impressed, these pictures have neither art nor reason; neither symmetry nor proportion; neither choice of values nor grandeur. In short, this art is without power and without distinction; it aims at rendering minutely many things at the same time, of which a single one would have sufficed to call forth a man’s whole application.”
It was the medieval spirit itself which Michelangelo judged here. Those whom he called the devout are people of the medieval spirit. For him the ancient beauty has become a thing for the small and the feeble. Not all his contemporaries thought as he did. In the North many continued to venerate the art of their ancestors, among them Dürer and Quentin Metsys, and Jan Scorel, who is said to have kissed the altar-piece of the Lamb. But Michelangelo here truly represents the Renaissance as opposed to the Middle Ages. What he condemns in Flemish art are exactly the essential traits of the declining Middle Ages: the violent sentimentality, the tendency to see each thing as an independent entity, to get lost in the multiplicity of concepts. To this the spirit of the Renaissance is opposed, and, as always happens, only realizes its new conception of art and of life by temporally misjudging the beauties and the truths of the preceding age.
The consciousness of æsthetic pleasure and its expression are of tardy growth. A fifteenth-century scholar like Fazio, trying to vent his artistic admiration, does not get beyond the language of commonplace wonder. The very notion of artistic beauty is still wanting. The æsthetic sensation caused by the contemplation of art is lost always and at once either in pious emotion or a vague sense of well-being.
Denis the Carthusian wrote a treatise, De venustate mundi et pulchritudine Dei. The difference of the two words of the title at once indicates his point of view: true beauty only appertains to God, the world can only be venustus—pretty. All the beauties of creation, he says, are but brooks flowing from the source of supreme beauty. A creature may be called beautiful in so far as it shares in the beauty of the divine nature, and thereby attains some measure of harmony with it. As a starting-point of æsthetics, this is large and sublime, and might well serve as a basis for the analysis of all particular manifestations of beauty. Denis did not invent his fundamental idea: he founds himself on Saint Augustine and the pseudo-Areopagite, on Hugues de Saint Victor and Alexandre de Halès. But as soon as he tries really to analyse beauty, the deficiency of observation and expression is apparent. He borrows even his examples of earthly beauty from his predecessors, especially from Hugues and Richard de Saint Victor: a leaf, the troubled sea with its changing hues, etc. His analysis is very superficial. Herbs are beautiful, because they are green; precious stones, because they sparkle; the human body, the dromedary and the camel, because they are appropriate to their purpose; the earth, because it is long and large; the heavenly bodies, because they are round and light. Mountains are admirable for their enormous dimensions, rivers for the length of their course, fields and woods for their vast surface, the earth for its immeasurable mass.
Medieval theory reduced the idea of beauty to that of perfection, proportion and splendour. Three things, says Saint Thomas, are required for beauty: first, integrity or perfection, because what is incomplete is ugly on that account; next, true proportion or consonance; lastly, brightness, because we call beautiful whatever has a brilliant colour. Denis the Carthusian tries to apply these standards, but he hardly succeeds: applied æsthetics are seldom successful. When the idea, of beauty is so highly intellectualized, it is not surprising that the mind passes at once from earthly beauty to that of the angels and of the empyrean, or to that of abstract conceptions. There was no place, in this system, for the notion of artistic beauty, not even in connection with music, the effects of which, one would have supposed, could not fail to suggest the idea of beauty of a specific character.
Musical sensation was immediately absorbed in religious feeling. It would never have occurred to Denis that he might admire in music or painting any other beauty than that of holy things themselves.
One day, on entering the church of Saint John at Bois-le-Duo, while the organ was playing, he was instantly transported by the melody into a prolonged ecstasy.
Denis was one of those who objected to introducing the new polyphonous music into the church. Breaking the voice (fractio vocis), he says, seems to be the sign of a broken soul; it is like curled hair in a man or plaited garments in a woman: vanity, and nothing else. He does not mean that there are not devout people whom melody stimulates into contemplation, therefore the Church is right in tolerating organs; but he disapproves of artistic music which only serves to charm those who hear it, and especially to amuse the women. Certain people who practised singing in melodic parts assured him they experienced a certain pleasurable pride, and even a sort of lasciviousness of the heart (lascivia animi). In other words, to describe the exact nature of musical emotion the only terms he can find are those denoting dangerous sins.
From the earlier Middle Ages onward many treatises on the æsthetics of music were written, but these treatises, con- structed according to the musical theories of antiquity, which were no longer understood, teach us little about the way in which the men of the Middle Ages really enjoyed music. In analysing musical beauty, fifteenth-century writers do not get beyond the vagueness and naïveness which also characterized their admiration of painting. Just as, in giving expression to the latter, they only praise the lofty character of the treatment and the perfect rendering of nature, so in music only sacred dignity and imitative ingenuity are appreciated. To the medieval spirit, musical emotion quite naturally took the form of an echo of celestial joy. “For music”—says the honest rhetorician Molinet, a great lover of music, like Charles the Bold—“is the resonance of the heavens, the voice of the angels, the joy of paradise, the hope of the air, the organ of the Church, the song of the little birds, the recreation of all gloomy and despairing hearts, the persecution and driving away of the devils.” The ecstatic character of musical emotion, of course, did not escape them. “The power of harmony”— says Pierre d’Ailly—“is such that it withdraws the soul from other passions and from cares, nay, from itself.”
The high valuation of the imitative element in art entailed graver dangers for music than for painting. Composition of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries really suffered from the craze for naturalistic music, such as the caccia (whence English “catch”), originally representing a hunt with baying and yelping hounds and blowing horns. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a pupil of Josquin de Prés, Jannequin, composed several “Inventions” of this stamp, representing, amongst others, the battle of Marignano, the street-cries of Paris, the singing of birds and the chattering of women. Fortunately, the musical inspiration of the epoch was far too rich and alive to be enslaved by such an artificial theory; the masterpieces of Dufay, Binchois or Okeghem are free from imitative tricks.
Substituting for beauty the notions of measure, order and appropriateness offered a very defective explanation of it. One other means at least satisfied deeper æsthetic instincts: the reduction of beauty to the sensation of light and splendour. To define the beauty of spiritual things, Denis the Carthusian always compares them to light. Wisdom, science, art, are so many luminous essences, illuminating the mind by their brightness.
This tendency to explain beauty by light sprang from a strongly marked predilection of the medieval mind. When we leave definitions of the idea of beauty aside, and examine the æsthetic sense of the epoch in its spontaneous expressions, we notice that nearly always when men of the Middle Ages attempt to express æsthetic enjoyment, their emotions are caused by sensations of luminous brightness or of lively movement.
Froissart, for example, is not, as a rule, very susceptible to impressions of pure beauty. His endless narratives leave him no time for that. There are one or two spectacles, however, which never fail to enrapture him: that of vessels on the sea with their pavilions and streamers, with their rich decoration of many-coloured blazons, sparkling in the sunshine; or the play of reflected sunlight on the helmets and cuirasses, on the points of the lances, the gay colours of the pennons and banners, of a troop of cavaliers on the march. Eustache Deschamps has expressed his sense of the beauty of mills in movement and of a ray of sunlight scintillating in a dewdrop. La Marche was struck by the beauty of reflected sunlight on the blonde hair of a cavalcade of German and Bohemian noblemen. These displays of æsthetic sentiment are important, because in the fifteenth century they are extremely rare.
This fondness for all that glitters reappears in the general gaudiness of dress, especially in the excessive number of οf precious stones sewed on the garments. After the Middle Ages this sort of ornament will be replaced by ribbons and rosettes. Transferred to the domain of hearing, this partiality for brilliant things is shown by the naïve pleasure taken in tinkling or clicking sounds. La Hire wore a red mantle covered all over with little silver bells like cow-bells. At an entry in 1465, Captain Salazar was accompanied by twenty men-at-arms, the harness of whose horses was ornamented with large silver bells. The horses of the counts of Charolais and of Saint Pol were adorned in the same way, also those of the lord of Croy, at the entry of Louis XI into Paris in 1461. At festivals jingling florins or nobles were often sewn on to the dress.
To determine the taste in colours characteristic of the epoch would require a comprehensive and statistical research, embracing the chromatic scale of painting as well as the colours of costume and decorative art. Perhaps costume would prove to be the best clue to the nature of the taste for colour, because there it exhibits iteelf most spontaneously. Now, we have very few specimens of the materials used at that time, except in church vestments. Descriptions of costumes for tournaments and festivals, on the other hand, are very numerous. The following summary aims only at giving a provisional impression, based on an examination of these descriptions. It is necessary to observe that they refer to garments of state and of luxury, differing, as to colour, from ordinary costume, but showing the æsthetic sense more freely. When we consult the accounts published by Monsieur Coudero of a great Parisian tailor of the fifteenth century, we find that the quiet colours, grey, black and violet, occupy a large place, whereas in festal garments the most violent contrasts and the most vivid colours abound. Red predominates; at some princely entries all the accoutrements were in red. White comes next in popularity. Every combination of colours was allowed: red with blue, blue with violet. In an “entremets” described by La Marche a lady appeared in violet-coloured silk on a hackney covered with a housing of blue silk, led by three men in vermilion-tinted silk and in hoods of green silk.
Black was already a favourite colour, even in state apparel, especially in velvets. Philip the Good, in his later years, constantly dressed in black, and had his suite and horses arrayed in the same colour. King René, who was always in quest of what was refined and distinguished, combined grey and white with black. Together with grey and violet, black was far more in vogue than blue and green, whereas yellow and brown are, as yet, almost completely wanting. Now, the relative rarity of blue and of green must not be simply ascribed to an æsthetic predilection. The symbolic meaning attached to blue and green was so marked and peculiar as to make them almost unfit for usual dress. They were the special colours of love. Blue signified fidelity; green, amorous passion.
“Il te fauldra de vert vestir,
C’est la livrée aux amoureux….”[1]
“Li uns se vest pour li de vert,
L’autre de bleu, l’autre de blanc,
L’autre s’en vest vermeil com sanc,
Et cilz qui plus la veult avoir
Pour son grant dueil s’en vest de noir.”[2]
Although other colours also had their meaning in amorous symbolism, a man exposed himself specially to raillery by dressing in blue or in green, above all in blue, for a suggestion of hypocrisy was mixed up with it. Christine de Pisan makes a lady say to her lover who draws attention to his blue dress:
“Au bleu vestir ne tient mie le fait
N’a devises porter, d’amer sa dame,
Mais au servir de loyal cuer parfait
Elle sans plus, et la garder de blasme.
… Là gist l’amour, non pas au bleu porter,
Mais puet estre que plusieurs le meffait
De faulseté cuident couvrir soubz lame
Par bleu porter….”[3]
That is probably why, by a very curious transition, blue, instead of being the colour of faithful love, came to mean infidelity too, and next, besides the faithless wife, marked the dupe. In Holland the blue cloak designated an adulterous woman, in France the “cote bleue” denotes a cuckold. At last blue was the colour of fools in general.
Whether the dislike of brown and yellow sprang from an æsthetic aversion or from their symbolic signification remains undecided. Perhaps an unfavourable meaning was attributed to them, because they were thought ugly.
“Gris et tannée puis bien porter
Car ennuyé suis d’espérance.”[4]
Yellow meant hostility. Henry of Wurtemberg passed before Philip of Burgundy with all his retinue dressed in yellow, “and the duke was informed that it was meant for him.”
After the middle of the fifteenth century, there seems to be a temporary diminution of black and white in favour of blue and yellow. In the sixteenth century, at the same time when artists begin to avoid the naïve contrasts of primary colours, the habit of using bizarre and daring combinations of colours for costume vanishes too.
In so far as art is concerned, it might be supposed that this change was due to the influence of Italy, but the facts do not confirm this. Gerard David, who carries on most directly the tradition of the primitive school, already shows this refinement of colour-sentiment. It must therefore be regarded as a tendency of a more general character. Here is a domain in which the history of art and that of civilization have still a great deal to learn from each other.
- ↑ You will have to dress in green, It is the livery of lovers….
- ↑ Some dress themselves for her in green, Another in blue, another in white, Another dresses himself in vermilion like blood, And he who desires her most Because of his great sorrow, dresses in black.
- ↑ To wear blue is no proof Nor to wear mottoes, of love for one’s lady, But to serve her with a perfectly loyal heart And no others, and to keep her from blame…. Love lies in that, not in wearing blue. But it may be that many think To cover the offence of falsehood under a tombstone, By wearing blue….
- ↑ I may well wear grey and tan For hope has only brought me pain.