Gothic and Flemish Primitives: Art History
Gothic Art
Gothic architecture replaced walls with large windows, reducing the space for fresco painting. Therefore, glass, books illustrated with miniatures, and board, used in the Romanesque, became the media of painting. The altarpiece underwent a comprehensive development, evolving over time and showing a great variety. The number of tables could be leaflets, brochures, or polyptychs if there were more, and they could be fixed or have folding doors.
Gothic art began in the 13th century. Linear or Francogothic is characterized by maintaining the features of Romanesque painting and their own issues, but they gave way to naive naturalism, typical of the era.
Italian Primitives: Giotto
The fact that Italian Gothic architecture predominates the wall above the doorway allows, along with the use of panel painting, for painting to develop fresh and distinctive features from the rest of Europe. In parallel to the linear Gothic of Europe, in Italy, due to Byzantine influence, forms arose during the 13th century which would be specified in the 14th, the renovation of Trecento painting, whose schools, Sienese and Florentine, influenced all European painting.
In the 14th century, painting or Trecento refreshing features are noted as:
- Concern about the representation of depth.
- Anatomical studies and the representation of mental states, through gesture and attitude, leading to a new physicality and movement.
- Assessment of light and color grading permit the desired volume.
The Sienese school, more attached to the Byzantine (gold backgrounds, symmetry in the composition, detail, isocephaly, conventional faces, especially virgins, sinuous lines, hieratic, etc.), is represented by Duccio and Simone Martini.
The grand master of the Florentine school is Giotto, a true disciple of Cimabue and the originator of modern painting. He consciously directed painting to the domain of spatial representation of the anatomy in terms of soul expression and light to create volumes. He drew on nature, breaking with the Byzantine stylization and stressing the primacy of the human figure. Before his burly characters and great divine figures of Masaccio and Michelangelo, no one before him had such deep scenes of dramatic sense. He introduced landscape paintings with architecture. He worked in Assisi and Rome, but his masterpiece is the frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, with scenes from the Gospels (Kiss of Judas, Flight into Egypt, etc.), the Last Judgment, and allegories of virtues and vices. He later worked in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, with songs dedicated to San Francisco and St. Johns. He also cultivated panel painting.
Flemish Primitives
In the first third of the 15th century, while the Renaissance was taking place in Italy, an important school of painting was born in Flanders. Its components are known by the name of the Flemish Primitives, a term that refers to their pioneering nature. For some art historians, it is a Renaissance painting which they call “northern revival”; for others, it is the latest manifestation of Gothic. In bourgeois Flanders, with a huge economic boom, priority is given to material values over ideal or spiritual ones.
Flemish painting stems from the ways of international Gothic (late 14th and 15th centuries), characterized by the stylization of the figures, love of the curve in folds and movements, detailed and meticulous technique, a trend to a language of symbols, and assessment anecdotal, all based on Flemish painting.
The main contribution of Flemish painting is the use of oil. Its binder, oil, permits, to be clear, a greater range of colors by the combination of two or more of them and more brightness and luminosity. It does not hide the target used in the preparation of the board or canvas. To dry slowly makes possible great detail because it can work slowly and touch for a long time.
Style characteristics are:
- Detail-magician, played by the interest in objects of everyday life: furniture, paintings, etc., using some, such as convex mirrors or metals, to reflect areas that, without them, would be out of sight of the viewer.
- Using a prototype of female beauty: blond, long curly hair, fair complexion, high forehead, etc.
- Prevalence of religious themes.
- Development of the portrait, even in religious painting as donors.
- Importance of symbolism, reaching its peak with Bosch.
- Love the landscape.
- Prevalence of painting on wood, usually triptychs of small proportions.
- Importance of dress, with lots of sharp folds, called “metal folds.”
- Naturalism, which brings us to the Renaissance, but in the Gothic features that survive statism, the lengthening of the typical figures of international style, the poor relationship between them, etc.
In the last third of the 15th and early 16th centuries, a group of painters worked to evolve a distinctive feature, emphasizing, among them, Hugo van der Goes and Hieronymus Bosch.
The most original painter of Flemish art is Bosch, who brings a whole strange world of monsters and fantasy figures that intertwine with the human language used allegorical satire and irony-laden pursuing a moralizing purpose.