Understanding Gothic Art: Characteristics, Styles, and Key Artists
Understanding Gothic Art
Gothic art: The decoration contributed to churches and cathedrals. Mural painting led to painting of stained glass, altarpieces, and miniatures.
French Gothic Style
The main fields were stained glass painting and miniature. Prevalence of line drawing over color or flatness characterizes the figures. The colors are pure, without gradations. The subjects have a greater naturalism. Technique uses tempera (or clear egg as a binder of the egg color).
Stained Glass: Romanesque walls are replaced by large stained glass windows of beautiful bright colors, whose figures are locked into medallions. Highlighting the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Sainte Chapelle in Paris, Notre-Dame of Paris. In Spain, the Cathedral of Leon.
Miniatures: Use of gold. “Belleville Breviary” by Jean Pucelle. Literary works in Spain by Alfonso X el Sabio (Book of Astronomy, Book of Chess) and illustrated Bibles.
Italian Gothic
In Italy, mural painting dominated. Painting on wood and miniatures were grown. Distinguish: the Ducento where Pietro Cavallini and Cimabue are the leading painters. In the Trecento, the school of Siena is important with Duccio and Simone Martini. The school of Florence is stressed, Giotto belongs to it, advancing in the field of light-color, composition, of monumental figures. He is considered the precursor to future Renaissance painting.
Flemish Gothic Painting (15th Century)
In major cities of Flanders, an extraordinary school of painting emerged. Early Flemish painters. The main features:
- Small works to decorate household stays.
- Triptychs: comprise three tables, where the side boards serve as doors to the central panel.
- Thoroughness, attention to detail: works made to be covered by detail, the painters recreated in detail petty, insignificant things.
- Naturalism: the painters made a truthful representation of reality.
- Love of scenery: mountains, roads, forests, green meadows, usually appear at the bottom of the paintings, when the scene takes place in a room, a landscape is sensed through a window or door.
- Taste for the representation of objects: they stop at little things that fill daily life, furniture, lamps, objects of glass, mirrors, fabrics.
- Introduction of the oil technique: use oil as a binder of the color. It enables higher brightness to the colors and detail of the details.
The low ratio of the figures displayed frontally and dominance situate us in detail Gothic art.
Major Authors and Works
The brothers Van Eyck, pioneers of this style, made the Mystic Lamb Polyptych. Jan Van Eyck painted Rolin. The work of Roger Van der Weyden is important, introducing the concern for the feelings, great compositions which uses the color gold, getting the viewer contemplates emotions, feelings emanate of the characters faces. His work is The Descent from the Cross, is in the Prado Museum.
Quote Patinir and landscapers as Bruegel. The most original was Hieronymus Bosch, inspired by creating a strange world, with allegorical subjects. Create an imaginary world, of fantastic dreams. His best known work is the triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights, Hell, The Haywain in the Prado Museum.