Northern Gothic Devotion vs. Renaissance Humanism
Part One: Let's look at Gothic art
Starting in the middle of the 14th century, two distinct styles of painting emerged in Europe that were very notably influenced by two entirely different philosophical movements. Today we’re embarking on a series of posts that will explore not only these contrasting styles of art, but the underlying philosophies between the Christian spirituality of the Gothic1 and the rise of Humanism, naturalism and materialism of the Renaissance in Florence.
We’re going to try to clear up some of the confusion about these often overlapping movements in art and start making some sense of the amazing complexity of the various Gothic movements and styles in painting, sculpture and architecture. While they bleed into each other, it is possible to make some distinctions.
In this series we’ll try to work out answers to the questions;
What is Gothic art and when?
What is Early Gothic?
What is International Gothic?
What is Late Gothic?
What is Northern and Flemish Gothic?
What is the Florentine Renaissance?
What is Italian Gothic (“Duecento” and “Trecento”)?
What is Northern Renaissance?
What are the principal philosophical and religious (and political) influences on all these? What does it all mean?
These questions are all pretty big and complex, and it would be easy to fall down a deep rabbit hole. We’ll keep things as simple and clear as possible, but we’re going to have to take this in parts. In this first part we’ll focus on the Gothic, when and what and who.
As always, we’ll look at some of the principal figures and works to get a good idea of what sort of thing we’re talking about; no shortage of images. What will become clear, I hope, are the great divergences of philosophy between these two art movements, how much of a departure from Christian ideas of sacred art the Renaissance was, and even more fundamentally, how important philosophy is to understanding art in general.
It’s a pretty big cookie to get through, so we’ll take it in small bites. Today we’re just going to get oriented about what and where and when. How many posts we’ll end up with is anyone’s guess.
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Today’s featured drawing from my shop is “Christus Patiens”, my own rendition of a corpus for a 13th century Umbrian style panel crucifix. Graphite on paper. You can order a high quality art print of it and other items at my shop.
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