Art in the 13th Century, the medieval period, was more or less always based on the Bible. Art was for monasteries, churches and such like; people didn’t have it necessarily in their houses, so therefore the main theme would be religion.
Although the art of this time is beautiful, I actually want focus on how different the artists were at this time compared with other periods, like the Renaissance.
First of all, medieval artists were brought up in a very different way. They would start by being apprenticed to a master artist. The artist would be taught techniques by the master and eventually would paint unimportant parts of the painting…under instruction from the master of course. The artist would then learn how to paint apostles, and the Virgin Mary. The artist would then probably be taught how to copy and rearrange scenes from old books into new frames, until he could paint a scene without a pattern/model at all.
With these techniques under an artist’s belt, he could paint any piece of artwork created in the medieval period. However if you asked this artist to sketch the landscape in front of him, he couldn’t do it. This is because artists of this period simply did not sketch. This seems a strange idea to you and me because if you think of an artist you think of them doodling and sketching the whole time.
They also never seem to do actual portraits, which seems strange considering portraits make up a lot of art. The way in which they would show who they were drawing was to add a crown, or a mitre, and just to make sure they would even write the name below!
It had never seemed to occur to them to sit down in front of the object/person and paint them. This is such a weird idea to me considering some of the greatest pieces art was done like this. So is it right to compare these pieces of art to the paintings of Raphael or Michelangelo? It is important to remember that many techniques had been conquered by the time the Renaissance had come along. But all the same, surely some of the medieval paintings look like sketches when compared to things like the Sistine chapel or paintings of the Madonna.
Both periods have interesting paintings that are good to analyse, but if you had to pick and compare pieces of art from these 2 periods, you would probably say that you think the renaissance art is more ‘arty’ than medieval art, I think I would. Is this because we see ‘art’ as representing scenes of life, therefore art should be representational of the world. Does this mean medieval art isn’t really art? Your decision…
A last point; without 13th century would the renaissance have happened?
oil onthe canvas 