The Styles of Painting in Gothic Culture.
“It should be observed that, if we were to confine our discussion exclusively to Gothic art we might justifiably ignore most twelfth-century painting, for there is scarcely anything in the entire gamut that one can comfortably call “Gothic.”Andrew Martindale.1
Following Martindale we can omit the 12th century and proceed to the next whose main form of painting is book illustration which boasted beautiful decoration with initials and floral motifs owing something to the Byzantine tradition; the Munich Psalter is a good example of this. We can also identify the hieratic style in a number of figures like the Enthroned Christ as in the Westminster Psalter (c.1200) and the Crucifixion from the Weingarten Missal (c.1216) which shows the persistence of the Byzantine style well into the 13th century. In this century, painting in France achieves eminence with the Parisian style thanks to the patronage of kings like Louis XI. Next, the early 14th century in France produced the artist Jean Pucelle (c. 1300- 1355) whose most famous work is the illustration for the Hours of Jeanne D’Evreux, Queen of France which combine recognisable iconography with figures from reality that may be symbolic.2 The styles of the court of Paris and Italy would be dispersed into Germany and Austria; the Italian influence emerges strongly, in a series of panel paintings added to the enamels of Nicolas of Verdun, the whole making up the Klosterneuberg altarpiece (1324-1329). This structure has also been connected to the iconography used by Giotto transmitted through medieval pattern books.3
1Gothic Art, 67.
2On the “layers of realism” in this prayer book Craig Harbison, The Art of the Northern Renaissance (Everyman, 1995), 28.
3Martindale, Gothic Art, 143.
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