2. European Art of the Middle Ages. Introduction

When Jesus of Nazareth, through his death on the cross, laid the foundation for a new, deeply spiritualized world view in Jerusalem, the ancient world experienced a secondary flowering of art. In the distant space around Palestine, more and more were being erected, decorated with sculpture and painting, luxurious buildings - works of Greek art, enriched in the East, and Oriental art, which was affected by the breath of Hellas. In Rome itself, pagan artistic creativity, fertilized by the Hellenistic East, had not yet said its last word; Moreover, when in the silence of the Roman catacombs the first Christian symbols and the most ancient images of Holy Scripture, which we can trace in their interconnection, have already received their pictorial or plastic expression, the Eternal City still lacked a number of the most magnificent of its buildings - the term of Caracalla and Diocletian, The Pantheon and others, the Hellenistic sculpture has not yet given the world its last, full of expression creatures, such as, for example, the type of the Orcined Greek youth Antinous or the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and the antique inventory continued to produce such wonderful creations in the technical sense, as the latest Hellenistic-Egyptian mummies with portraits as mosaics of the villa of Hadrian, and numerous murals of which is enough to mention at least the tombs landscapes Latin roads.

Christianity initially did not give the art of new art forms, it has invested in the old new content. This is true of architecture, which in its religious buildings, intended for the gathering of believers and divine services, has become more than ever before, the art of the interior; This is especially true of plastic art, which, under the hands of Christian masters, carefully avoided pagan images and scenes, with the exception of purely decorative figures, replacing them first with symbolic and then real images of the Savior, apostles and events of the Old Testament, which were considered as prototypes events of the New Testament, and already quite early - the New Testament scenes. At the same time, the reproduction of sacred images and events in mosaics and frescoes, in relief and round plastics, regardless of decorative value, throughout all the Middle Ages was also justified by the need to visually acquaint illiterate people with the Sacred history, with the lives of saints and martyrs. The tradition of the peoples of the Mediterranean to honor the Deity in images contributed to the emergence of Christian artistic cycles. The place of the pagan Olympus was taken by Christ and the apostles, and the ancient cult of heroes imperceptibly turned into the veneration of saints, whose faces were decorated with halos and radiant crowns, like the heads of ancient astral deities. But sacred images arose again (although often adjoining the same types), as a new tradition developed. Already the first persecutions of Christians created whole crowds of martyrs who, as the most ancient heroes of religion, converted to Christian art, and then every century brought a host of new saints, whose circumstances, for the most part profoundly amazing, delivered to the Christian art an unexpected variety of new and new faces and events. The study of the images of these persons and events (Christian iconography) constitutes a special branch of the history of art, which, of course, we can touch on in this book only in passing.

Along with this, some innocent images of pagan mythology were retained in Christian art, such as, for example, the gods of the sun, moons, sea and river gods, who in some cases were admitted as the personifications of nature throughout the Middle Ages. Further, scholastic philosophy introduced its own personifications of virtues, art, and sciences, which, together with other similar allegories, maintained the connection between the ancient and medieval worlds; In addition, world history, poetry and everyday life (the latter was primarily due to the portrait art) began to be delivered quite early by secular motives for decorating civil buildings, utensils and books. But the history of the art of Christian peoples, like the history of non-Christian art, can be traced mainly in relation to its religious monuments. What is most sacred to the people, its artists at all times depicted in the most worthy manner, and its guards were able to protect it from destruction.

We said that the emerging world religion, as such, did not bring with it new artistic forms; this is primarily due to the fact that the Jewish religion, from which it came out, allowing the magnificent temples to be erected to the Divine, did not allow any of His images. However, the fact that Christian art originated in an epoch that seems to us to be an epoch of the decline of ancient artistic creativity, emanating from individual forms, perhaps, did not even serve as a hindrance for the development of this art. The direction of the Late Antique art, which, if Riggl is right, is characterized by a desire for a general effect, understood in the sense of the new time, was also perceived by Christian art, which grew and developed along with the Late Antique. It is easy to understand that the individual forms should have declined as more and more attention was paid to the whole and its content. This new movement, at first barely noticeable, lasted until the art of the Renaissance of the XV century, in which the so-called revival of the antika was reduced to borrowing Roman-Hellenistic architectural and ornamental forms, and the understanding of nature was the result of centuries-old independent work.

The architecture, which quickly adopted, after the Milan edict on religious tolerance of 313, for the development of new (although adjacent to the eastern, Hellenistic and Roman models) types, already because it served the most immediate Christian need, determined throughout all the Middle Ages the direction of the visual arts . Since its immediate task was, as stated above, the creation and dismemberment of new enclosed spaces, which in the East as central-domed buildings, and in the West as basils, reached the highest feasibility and beauty, the decline of its individual forms during the first millennium. But in the late Middle Ages, Western architecture triumphantly overcame the rudeness of its external forms. The Romanesque and Gothic medieval cathedrals belong to the noblest, and the Gothic at the same time to the most original monuments of world history of architecture. But the legacy of antiquity was still stronger than the acquisitions of the Middle Ages, and we will see that the antique style put an end to the rule of the Gothic in Europe only after its two centuries of domination. As clear as in architecture, the regression of forms and in art. Before returning to the frontal style (see the beginning of t. 1), this regression occurs, however, only in sculpture, and even then in some cases. Traces of the freedom of movement of bodies developed by the Greek art were retained in the plastic of the “darkest” pores of the Middle Ages. On their own, re-starting from "contrepos" (movement of a figure resting on one leg; see Vol. 1, Fig. 363 and 365), Gothic sculpture acquired a mature domination over form, which is able to combine high idealism of design with loyalty to nature. But with the same fullness as in antiquity, the feeling of reality appears in Christian plastic only at the same time as the revival of the antiquity of forms, although independently of it.

The main task of painting was a return to a lost understanding of spatial relationships. If the Hellenistic art, the spatial illusion of planar images, which can be achieved only by a comprehensive knowledge of perspective, brought only to a known, although rather high degree of development, then nothing new appeared in this direction in ancient Christian art. But, of course, painting no longer returned - except when it was required for decorative reasons - to the childish techniques of the initial period of art, and if it completely lost its ability to have plans, yet in the drawing of separately depicted buildings and other objects there were attempts at perspectives and projections, reminiscent of old promising techniques; some figures still retain traces of modeling, and in groups already quite early come across modern painting effects. We will see that throughout the whole centuries in the history of the development of painting, both in the north and in the south of Europe, the question of placing on the plane of a spatial form on the foreground was at the forefront, finally resolved by the style that, considering each artistic image as a segment from the vast world of phenomena, created a linear and aerial perspective, which even antiquity did not know.

The history of the art of the Christian peoples during the first 1500 years, to which the present volume is dedicated, dazzles with breaks that violate the laws of the onward movement and deviations from the direct path; but it is also rich in unexpected successes — the results of a favorable set of circumstances or the fruits of exceptional individual efforts. In some cases, the development of forms occurred, of course, from certain artistic principles, and then progressing in one direction or another; but often also (as we assert, contrary to the opinion of some other researchers), being determined by invisible, mental order influences, it arose simultaneously in several places in the same direction, branched into separate currents, again merged into one channel and, finally, throughout the national characteristics within the same style. The great masters, whose creations, despite the fact that they are imprinted with the spirit of the epoch, the offspring recognize lasting importance, appear as innovators of Christian art only after more than a thousand years of collective preparatory work. The discovery of binding threads everywhere is undoubtedly one of the main tasks of the history of art, as we understand it, and we see that in the 90s. XIX century. scientific research, weary of the black work of previous generations, more zealously than before, sought to establish an internal connection between individual moments of historical and artistic development. Of course, such attempts, if they are convincing to us, meet with complete sympathy on our part; we just will not let ourselves be blinded by unproven hypotheses. First of all, we must let the facts speak for themselves and admit in the gaps of our knowledge rather than for the sake of preconceived opinions, both the old and the newest, in a hurry to pass off untested theories as historical truth.

Since we are convinced that in the highest creations of art of all times and peoples the form and content should correspond to each other, we must, of course, recognize that in ancient Christian and medieval art many of the artistic requirements remain unfulfilled. But it is precisely the struggle of already established content for its corresponding form, which is encountered everywhere, wherever there is a movement forward, will focus our attention on itself; in the end, the simple, but full of high spirituality, the content of Christian monuments will produce on us a deeper and even more artistic impression in the still not free forms of the first centuries of Christianity and the Middle Ages, than the content of many dandyly finished later works. But the spring freshness of Quattrocento will completely captivate us. In it, the evolution of artistic ideas, which we must trace in this volume, reaches its apogee. Later times return to this epoch, as a spring of young forces, when they strive to blot out their mistakes and perk up after stagnation.