Gothic in painting Automatic translate
For 300 years of the existence of Gothic, the development of the idea of space was generally very insignificant: Gothic adopted the Romanesque scheme and only modified it. New architectural designs and a new understanding of spatial resolution appear only in “hall temples”. Wherever you live - today you have the opportunity to order or buy a painting in finished form, in any genre, with delivery to your home.
In the Notre Dame Cathedral, which has been under construction for more than a hundred years since its foundation in 1163, the cubic base, especially its altar part, is dissected, and the structural system of pillars and lancet arches serves only as an excuse for the transfer of plastic functions. The base of the building is overgrown with forests, like a ship standing in a shipyard; behind these forests is an architectural body. Plurality stands in place of unity, art departs from simplicity and regularity.
High Gothic did not see the point in the search for articulations and the rhythmic construction of groups of plastic bodies, since the isolation of the body did not exist. Simplicity and uniformity are alien to Gothic, which in its forms always strives for liveliness and a variety of forms. Gothic does not know a group in which parts are born from a single whole, it does not compare such quantities. It is usually limited to piling up. The real ratio of the individual parts, the chapels, is not essential for it, however, this does not exclude an unusually delicate calculation of the optical scales. Moreover, small quantities always serve as large ones. In other words, not subordination reigns in it, but a pyramidal pile.
The Gothic building is understood and interpreted as an organic function of the individual parts directed upwards, and this movement was not based on the willful overcoming of the material, but is a kind of comprehension of the physical and mental movements of man. It follows that the sculptural decorations of the building are embedded in this organic movement and sometimes replace it. The human body does not become architecture - rather, individual parts of this architectonic island take the form of a human body. Columns of portals turn into saints and prophets, frozen, harsh and fettered. The movement of these sculptures gains more freedom only as the dynamics in the plastic details of the building increase. An example of such a solution is the sculptural decoration of the portal of the cathedral tower in Regensburg, where the ring of figures on the protruding pillar resembles a cup of flower from which the petals grow.
The bounding plane loses its meaning if neither space nor the clarity of the plastic body have value. As an example of a planar style in painting, Egyptian painting can be called, in which its relationship with space and volume clearly stands out. On the contrary, Gothic painting was basically not planar, since it did not reveal or emphasize the plane. It would be wrong to think that everything linear must certainly be flat. Gothic painting destroys with its purely linear dynamics the plane of the wall and the plane of the arches. The late Gothic ornament of Israel by van Mackenen consists of completely thin lines - spirals, which could divide the plane of the sheet into independent parts. But the artist is mainly interested in the curls of the serrated foliage. The whole ornament resembles a plexus of veins under a removed skin cover. The Renaissance ornament divides, divides and strengthens the plane. Gothic ornament always gives the impression of forcibly squeezed live growth, trying to break out of the space allotted to it. The ornament does not rest on a plane; it is, as it were, behind it. Its depth is uncertain - many leaves are precisely compressed, others protrude outward or go back. Animals and people turn the dark background into an indefinite environment, similar to the twilight spaces of the "hall churches."
Monumental painting also does not give a clear idea of the plane bounding the space. It would be wrong to consider the flat and unpromising Gothic paintings as elements of a purely planar division. And here there are only linearly expressed functions that penetrate the mass of the wall with their ligature. True, the mural of the beginning of the 14th century of the church of the Cartesian Monastery in Vinhausen near Hanover divides the choir’s wall into horizontal stripes, but these stripes are not connected with the architectural division, they do not coincide with the division of the window. Scenes from the history of the creation of the world, the worship of Mary on a narrow wall of a room covered with four cross vaults, as well as wriggling ribbons of sayings - all this is interpreted perfectly ornamental. In the arches, this play of lines is continued by a floral ornament, filling them with a spiral of vines only.
I deliberately chose an example showing the Extreme expression of spatiality in painting, barely accessible to northern (Gothic) people. Countless Gothic monuments in Germany, France and Scandinavia are decorated with one ornamental endless vine. It quietly moves from wall to ceiling, while not observing caesures between horizontal and vertical planes, although this is of great importance for a clear understanding of space. The same functional game - both in the drawings of fabrics and in the art of stained glass of that era. There is no division of the plane, based on the relationship of height and width, there is no awareness of the plane itself in relation to the unity of space and mass, to the spatial and plastic body, there is an exclusively functional play of lines and plastically isolated small units.
The Gothic style seems to us the most spiritualized, for each form is full of internal forces that reflect the psychology of the era. However, this conclusion is not entirely fair. Next to the "active soul" (anima activa) there is a quiet and calm "contemplative soul" (anima contemplativa).
FINDINGS. The development of space in Gothic is not very significant. Art focuses on plastic topics. The latter is understood and developed as a function. Therefore, it is easily replaced by an elongated human figure. The wall is interpreted as a non-space-limiting plane; it is also permeated with functionality. Ornament, wall painting, fabrics, stained-glass windows serve as an expression of similar planar functions.
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