Origins and Spread of Romanesque & Gothic Style in France, Germany & Northern Europe. 10

Gothic Northern Exposure: Medieval Architecture & Painting in Norway.

It might seem strange to encounter medieval art in the cold climes of Norway, but Gothic art and architecture does play an unmistakeable part in its history. During a peaceful interlude in the country’s history, King Hâkon Hâkonson (1217-1263) was friendly with the English sovereign Henry III, thus an “Anglo- Norwegian” style evolved.¹ Norway’s most famous saint, Olaf, enjoyed a cult in England; the Nidaros Cathedral,(above)  at Trondheim, was built over his burial site. Standing in front of Nidaros’s west front, one could be standing at Wells or Lincoln because it is constructed in the “Early English Gothic” style; this takes us right back to the first slide since builders from Lincoln Cathedral were actually brought in from abroad to help the project. Generally, painting in 13^th century Norway falls into three groups: frescoes on stone, of which only a few survive because there were relatively few stone churches, and in many of these the frescoes were whitewashed over; paintings on wood, mostly in the stave (wooden) churches; lastly, the altar frontals. Unlike Paris and Prague, hardly any book illuminated art has survived. It is difficult to isolate specific schools of painting in Norwegian art, though Bergen in the west produced much altar art; Trondhiem, the “spiritual capital” also had workshops containing sculptors and glassmakers.² Trondheim and Bergen were also visited by the English artist, the Benedictine monk, Matthew Paris (1200-1259) in 1248; but other sources would have included manuscripts in France. As for paintings, some clues are provided by an extant Icelandic painting manual which recommends several techniques: overlaying silver and gold over a chalk base, or applying an oil-based glaze, to give the effect of gilding; but this constituency was not yet the oil made famous by the Van Eyck brothers.

1The term is used by Martin Blindheim in his The Stave Church Paintings: Mediaeval Art from Norway (Italy, 1965), 6.

2Ibid, 10.