Painting
Gothic pictorial art interacted with architecture and displayed a
surprising variety of form. With stained-glass
windows artists were able to exploit the opportunity created by vast
openings in the wall to fill them with light, colour, and narrative.
In France, the pictorial culture of the 13th and 14th centuries is
represented far more strongly by the stained-glass masters of
Chartres, Bourges, and the Sainte-Chapelle than by fresco painters.
Gothic painting developed its own rich style, both religious and
secular, north of the Alps. A fluid linear quality typified
manuscript drawing, while an increasing naturalism replaced the
exaggerated Romanesque style. While only vestiges of wall paintings
remain, these, along with the illuminations, reveal subject matter
mainly from the Old Testament, the Apocalypse, the childhood of
Christ, the life of the Virgin, the Passion and the Last Judgment.
Pictorial art in Italy followed a different course, emerging as
altarpieces, fresco cycles, and painted crosses. The great
altarpieces. which were particularly characteristic of central
Italy, became progressively structured in large compositions, yet
most have since been broken up and dispersed into private and museum
collections. Furthermore, many of the fresco cycles have suffered
irreparable over-painting and erasures throughout the years. In
Spain, the principal medium for pictorial culture was the reredos, a
large compartmentalized screen behind the altar, either painted or
sculpted. On the Iberian peninsula, this genre attained a level of
experimentation and grandiosity unknown anywhere in Europe, to the
point of becoming a major architectural element. At this time, the
most readily communicated art form throughout Europe was the
miniature. The popularity of illustrated books grew to become an
expression of the ideas and tastes of the rich and scholarly. These
books typified Gothic art. which increasingly favoured naturalistic
forms and miniature scenes from everyday life. The complex profile
of Italian painting was dominated by a radical change that took
place at the end of the 13th century in Umbria and Tuscany (Assisi,
Florence, Siena); this was the arrival of a new artistic language
that marked the confluence of various influences. Of these, the most
significant were the Romanesque tradition of western Europe,
concentrated in the Po Valley; the Byzantine, along the Adriatic and
in the south; and the classical, still active, especially in Rome
and the surrounding regions. The historical importance of the
renewal of the figurative arts - led in painting by
Giotto and
Cimabue, and in sculpture by the great Pisano brothers and Arnolfo di Cambio - lies therefore not so much in the artists' rejection
of the late Byzantine influence as in the richness of their realistic
synthesis.
