Origins and Spread of Romanesque & Gothic Style in France, Germany & Northern Europe. 5

From Animal to Human in Medieval Art.

“But as a result the body changed its status. It ceased to be the mirror of divine perfection and became an object of humiliation and shame. The whole of medieval art is proof of how completely Christian dogma had eradicated the image of bodily beauty.” Kenneth Clark.¹

In the Romanesque period strange misshapen beasts appear, contorted and agonised, symbols of the lower nature of humans; the strange figures known as gargoyles obviously represented this symbolic monstrous trend, though some art historians have refused to see them as nothing but functional; the word gargoyle comes from the French for throat and out of this orifice water drained away- sculpture with a utilitarian purpose. But in the Gothic era the beasts are different, a clear separation is made between human and animal as it if to foreground the human, partly because as Camille says, the human body becomes “emblematic of the horror of the flesh.”² In Gothic art the animal sphere is distinctly separated from the human, except in the case of the hybrids known as “babewyns” (baboons) which join the upper parts of human bodies to animal lower parts as can be seen in book illustrations.³ With the animal component, attention was directed to the human body which the Church considered tainted and fallen because of Adam and Eve whose nakedness was the sign of sin. So naturalism displaced the grotesque with representations of Adam and Eve becoming more realistic; as in the case of Adam from Notre-Dame and Eve at Autun Cathedral (above), though both are covered in fig leafs signifying shame. These two thirteenth-century sculptures were created during a century when artists were not only studying foliage, flowers and birds closely, but also the naked human body. This trend suggests that human beings were beginning to take the place of bulls and multi-headed monsters on Gothic architecture, the kind that drew the wrath of St Bernard. However, artists were still mainly ignorant of human anatomy due to the Church banning the dissection and analysis of corpses.⁴ Thus there was a struggle between churchmen and artists since, as Camille says, “only when it had become food for worms could the human body become a subject for art.”⁵ There was a “sub-genre” of scientific illustration which exemplified by the book Anatomy of Guido de Vivegano, the eponymous Guido being an anatomist/engineer and Surgeon to the Queen of France which may be why his dissections were permitted, she being a powerful figure; he is shown in one plate dissecting the body hurriedly before it decomposes completely.⁶

1The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (Penguin, 1956), 301.

2Gothic Architecture, 151.

3Ibid.

4Clark, The Nude, 306.

5Gothic Architecture, 153-4.

6Guido borrowed tools from carpenters, and his anatomical practice therefore had links with the artisanal culture of the fourteenth-century, Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (Rutgers University Press, 1990, trans. By Rosemary Morris), 106-107.