Origins and Spread of Romanesque & Gothic Style in France, Germany & Northern Europe. 7

Medieval Art, Symbolism & the Popular Mind

“The abundance of images in which religious thought threatened to dissolve itself would have only produced a chaotic phantasmagoria , if symbolic conception had not worked it all into a vast system, where every figure had its place.” Jan Huizinga.¹

In his aim of wanting to let more of the public into St Denis, Abbot Suger sounds more like a modern museum director with a dash of P.T. Barnum showmanship; but who were this public, and how did they understand the medieval art they could see in and around churches? In seeking to understand the constitution of the medieval audience, it is necessary to pose a collateral question: what did the populace make of the art around them; what did its symbols mean to them? To take one example- the humble hedgehog from a quatrefoil on the west front of Amiens Cathedral. Following are a number of interpretations of this animal symbol: (1) the perfect Christian; (2) a weather prophet; (3) an emblem of churchmen who accumulate wealth – the hedgehog climbs high and hoards food- whilst ignoring the people; (4) an animal with five stomachs, symbolising five ways of meditating on God. And the list goes on, but as historians of medieval art like Emile Mâle and G.G. Coulton have stressed, there was not only confusion about the interpretation of these symbols on the part of the people but also in the minds of the clergy which may have had “popular instincts” at the back of their more cultivated minds to borrow Coulton’s phrase.² Another arresting example is the so-called “tooth-ache” capital at Wells Cathedral which became connected with the legend of Bishop Bytton who died in 1274 and whose tomb lies nearby. This place was frequented by sufferers from toothache, though it is thought that the capital dates from after Bytton’s death; and that this grotesque (along with others) showing its teeth was created to commemorate the dental miracles. But due to their similarity with grotesques showing medical ailments in Switzerland, it could be argued that they are nothing to do with Bytton, and more likely typify an architectural trend in Europe wherein grotesques represent aspects of medieval medicine, though that still remains firmly within the realm of speculation. What might be the case is that, in this instance, the popular mind turned Bytton into the “patron of toothache” because the people hungered for miracles, an idea the Church would be keen to claim for its own purposes.³

1The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries ( Penguin, orig pub 1924, this edition 1976 trans F Hopman), 193-194.

2The Art of the Reformation, 252.

3Ibid, 281.