Ashrunken historical perspective – Eliot’s ‘provincialism of time’ – is an unfortunate side effect of trying to keep up with rapidly changing fashions, be they artistic, scientific or political. The resultant cultural amnesia places a huge barrier between us and great art, and our loss is all the more for being unrecognized. Thus, if Jane Austen’s English, for example, is considered the same as ours, then, completely unnoticed, much of her artistry is lost.1 The words may be the same, but the world to which they refer has changed so much that their richer meanings disappear. Over time, the visual language of art has changed even more than written language.
Rapidly changing fashions give the impression that the modern world offers limitless diversity. Yet, at the same time, real diversity is eroding faster than ever because almost identical choices are now available across the whole world. And the availability of reproduced music and images obscures the fact that fewer people than ever are actually making music or images. Paradoxically, it is as if the modern consumer’s diverse options spawn a creeping uniformity, while, in stark contrast, the traditional producer’s avoidance of diversion – working with a limited number of themes and materials – was instrumental in achieving unity.
The difference between uniformity and unity is central to understanding the difference between the modern and traditional worlds and overcoming the ‘provincialism of time’. Uniformity, imposed from outside, initially appears impersonal and arbitrary. However, once accepted, its familiarity offers comfort until, insidiously, its monotony numbs the spirit. On the other hand, unity is a quality that arises naturally from within when diverse things coexist in harmony. It comes in many forms, perceived differently by everyone, yet it cannot help but be personal – if it excludes the individual, it simply disappears.
Today, a bewildering variety of digital images come to us on reassuringly uniform screens, but our voracious consumption of them proves that they lack the unity that alone satisfies. We arguably see nothing inherently special about whatever electronic gadgets are made of, nor do we see anything special about wood or parchment, about oil, egg or gum, or about the white rust of lead metal. Yet the ways these materials were seen in the Middle Ages made them worthy vehicles for the most sublime images and ideas. The historic work of art’s physical components contributed to its unity – binding Christ, the Virgin and saints together with Nature and innumerable aspects of the viewer’s life.
In this book I have tried to show how artists’ materials can add meaning to their paintings. Invisible values were evident in the Metz Pontifical’s carefully controlled use of two culturally different but practically identical powdered rocks. The Macclesfield Psalter’s physical ingredients suggested that the artists’ whole palette could be a source of inspiration and subject for private meditation. The Wilton Diptych’s extraordinarily rich materials were a lesson in the differences between what is and what could be, with its materials helping the painting fulfil its devotional function. The Westminster Retable embodied a very public statement that differences between materials were nothing compared to the skills of a dedicated artist. Finally, the Thornham Parva Retable used people’s knowledge about the colour of everyday materials to encourage respect, to navigate conflict and, ultimately, to find peace.
The people who commissioned and made these paintings saw their materials as the venerated ‘mother’ of the work. In contrast, the modern approach to paintings – and most other ‘man-made’ objects – tends to ignore the mother, choosing instead to focus on the ‘father’, that is, the idea or form of the work. Today, the materials that deliver images are valued only for their utility or novelty. Digital images are then materially enhanced only when seen on the very latest versions of fashionable devices. The separation of images from their vehicles – messages from messengers, form from matter – is significant because it allows us to forget that both are equally necessary and it encourages priority of one to be spuriously asserted over the other.
The traditional science that wed the materials and methods of painting to the meaning of paintings was gradually eclipsed and had all but disappeared by the eighteenth century. Apprenticeships were replaced by academies and by self-taught artists whose experimentation in the studio aped the experiments that spawned the Industrial Revolution. The downgrading of materials and craft skills was a symptom of a rift between the physical and metaphysical worlds. Several centuries later, the social and ecological impact of that downgrade has become evident.2 So, it is worth considering what can be learned from art in which spiritualized materials and embodied skills still played major roles.
Most importantly, the coming together of artists’ inspiration and artists’ materials was a marriage of opposites. For the artist – and patron – the creation of art was both serious and trivial. It was work, but not as most of us know it. It was a bit like sport, which can be played for fun and in absolute earnest, following simple rules that unfold towards unpredictable results. Sport can be professional or amateur – literally done for love or amor – but it is always competitive, whereas the creation of art is collaborative. Art is more like children’s or adults’ games of make-believe, which are played out with negotiated rules that define sophisticated realities.3
Creating medieval art involved extremely sophisticated rules, some of which are still with us. For example, the rules of perspective now have the entire Westernized world’s visual experience in a stranglehold.4 On the other hand, rules that surrounded materials – that encouraged their intimate exploration and enabled them to be used as vehicles for meditation – have been discarded. Together, these rules put riddles at the heart of the European visual arts, so that although creating art was a serious business, it was also fun. It may not have involved too many belly laughs but when the game was well played it did, and still can, involve the involuntary gasps that escape when beauty prompts the soul to shift and rearrange itself within the body.
Expectation-defying riddles are inescapable in figurative paintings because landscapes and portraits seem to be places or faces while they are really just a few grams of pigment distributed over panels or canvases. No representation can be what it represents. A map is not the territory and a painting is not what it is. Or, put another way, a painting is what it is not. At the end of a book about the riddles presented by what pictures are – in a material sense – it must be admitted that their greatest riddle is about what they are not.5
Today, the complete separation between viewers and the way modern images are made means that this quandary can be negative. Thus, for example, the veracity of photos can be undermined by digital airbrushing. But, in the Middle Ages, the very same quandary could have a positive effect, due in large part to the traditional science that connected the viewer, the way the depiction was made and the nature of the thing that was depicted.
Every single thing in the traditional world was made from mixtures of earth, water, air and fire. Paintings that depicted those things were tempered from the very same four elements. Anybody who contemplated such depictions was naturally disposed towards a melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine or choleric temperament – with a tendency to resonate with earth, water, air or fire, respectively. These elemental interactions could sympathetically bind the viewer, the depiction and the depicted.6 For example, the Virgin’s robe in the Wilton Diptych reflected a blue colour that entered the eye to resonate with the receptive soul and it came from a pigment that could also be taken by mouth to lower fevers. Lapis lazuli’s psychological and physiological properties were exactly what one would expect from the doorstep of Paradise and the mineral embodiment of elemental water. When that water was tranquil, as in the depiction of the Virgin’s robe, it offered a perfect reflection of Heaven, allowing a faithful view of spiritual realities and informing prayers that could be answered, thus reinforcing the Virgin’s merciful nature.
When pictures were so fundamentally tied to the nature of the things they depicted and to viewers, then the riddle-like fact that an image was not what it was (or was what it was not) paradoxically added to its truthfulness.
In the outside world, an image’s colours may be from the doorstep of Paradise, ground up and mixed with egg, or they may be inks from a laser printer. Yet once those colours enter the eye, they become something else and take on a life of their own. If the picture is a portrait or a landscape, then it becomes a face or a place, even though it obviously is not made of flesh and blood or rock and soil.
If we were to travel to Paris and queue through the Louvre pyramid to discover that the Mona Lisa had been switched for a photographic replica, we would feel cheated. For the visitor, the images might be to all intents and purposes indistinguishable, but the price tags on the product of Leonardo’s workshop and the product of a modern machine suggest that there is a very real difference between them. Yet the difference between patches of colour and a real woman with an enigmatic smile is incomparably greater than the difference between medieval pigments and modern inks. We make that switch, however, without batting an eyelid. In a world where most of us do not understand the workings of laser printers or electronic screens, the transformation of areas of colour into an identifiable face is just one more incomprehensible thing that we take in our stride.
The modern world puts a premium on knowing about things, so such a lack of understanding is a failure. Admittedly, few of us lose much sleep over failing to understand how digital images are made and, if we spent the time, we might even be able to improve our knowledge. Nevertheless, absolutely nobody in the world knows how something that obviously is not made of flesh and blood can become a face.
Whether painted on a cave wall thousands of years ago or flickering from the very latest gadget, images form inside our eyes and effortlessly leap from depiction to depicted. The transformation is as profound as it is mysterious. The modern world shuns mysteries, trying to ‘explain them away’, and generally wants to put things into neat categories. Pictures, however, resist categorization. As meaningful patches of colour, their colours lie in the outside world, while their meanings reside within us. They themselves live in limbo. Portraits are not patches of pigment and they are not a face – they are both patches of pigment and a face. Today, we are nowhere near solving the mystery of pictures.7 They defy reason.
Reason always wants to know, but reason’s running hither and thither – between ‘is it a painting?’ and ‘is it a face?’ – was likened by Nicholas of Cusa to the behaviour of a dog. So, rather than chasing our tails asking unanswerable questions, most of us tactfully overlook the strangely uncertain status of pictures. Pictures are like Nicholas of Cusa’s lofty wall of opposites that ‘no genius can scale’, yet they are scaled effortlessly everyday by everybody. Moreover, because we are constantly turning depictions into what they depict, we take the miracle of pictures for granted.
On the other hand, the traditional world – in which the Pontifical, Psalter, Diptych and Retables were made – was happier to recognize and embrace mystery. It also expected to find the miraculous hidden in the mundane. If something was strange, then the tradition of xenia said that its strangeness should be welcomed. When the contradictory nature of imagery is welcomed, images can participate in the coincidence of opposites that millennia of mystics have seen as a doorway to ultimate truth.
After all, why worry about whether a picture is patches of pigments or a landscape when it is constructed from bits of animal, vegetable and mineral and when the place it depicts is just somewhere in a cycle between sea beds and mountaintops? Why worry about whether it is patches of pigments or a face when the portrait and the person are both food for the fire or the worms? We can effortlessly accept that images are ‘at once both and neither’ this and that, just like Hermaphroditus. We don’t have to choose between the depiction and the depicted, just as Odysseus – the lord who looked like a beggar – did not choose to engage with either Scylla or Charybdis. Odysseus was notoriously crafty and he evaded the dangers of thinking things must be this or that, along the middle way which, appropriately enough, had no name.8
The paintings considered in this book are extraordinarily rich combinations of materials, and their individual ingredients were collected, purified and assembled under the guidance of a unified science. Yet ‘the lesser is always outshone by the greater’ and the forms they depict transcend the matter that carries them (which is why aspects of them can live on in this book’s materially different illustrations). All physical pictures hang suspended in the material world midway between the immaterial image envisaged by the artist and the immaterial image conjured in the viewer. They are merely the material stepping stones that enable immaterial images to complete their journeys from artists to viewers. They are riddles because they are ‘at once both and neither’ material pigments and immaterial depictions. Also, welcoming their strangely ill-defined status can take us on journeys worth making because, as Odysseus knew, what lies between well-defined things like Scylla or Charybdis, is our way home.