I work as a scientist in a restoration studio and I study paintings as physical objects, identifying painters’ materials and methods. Such knowledge helps guide their conservation, but it also throws light on artists’ mysteries lost for centuries. This book explores some of those mysteries.
Today, the apparent accessibility of art seems to demystify it. We do not have to travel all the way to Paris and file slowly through a glass pyramid in order to see the Mona Lisa: its image is a few keystrokes away, and regularly pops up in adverts and Sunday magazines. However, if we actually bothered to visit Paris, we could come home and enjoy the image a bit longer, with a Mona Lisa T-shirt or tea towel. The apparent ubiquity of some works of art makes them seem like public property. Yet, of course, they are not, and periodically the news carries stories – in the slot reserved for light relief – about the astronomical sums of money they command. Ownership of such art is like ownership of football clubs; so most of us have to be content with the postcard.
There is a difference between an original work of art and an image of it, just as there is a difference between seeing a football match in a stadium or from the sofa. Even though images of art are more or less instantly accessible on screen, every year in Britain more people visit museums and art galleries than attend football matches. Government statistics report that the vast majority of overseas visitors to the UK say that they come to see historic sites, museums and galleries, so art wields enormous economic power. Works of art remain glamorous investments today, and art on public display influences travel plans for many of the rest of us.
Since modern culture places such a high value on utility, the continuing power of apparently non-utilitarian art is one of its mysteries. It may owe something to the fact that art is a very tangible way of reflecting and reinforcing identity. For example, the names of long-dead Florentine bankers are known today only because of their patronage of artists. Acquiring and displaying art shows an individual’s or a state’s economic or military powers.
The spread of Italian Renaissance paintings across the world reflects those same powers, harnessed centuries later to forge national identities. Yet the assertion of status by displaying another culture’s artefacts obviously depends upon the ownership of the originals. Those originals have found new roles to play in today’s more complex political world. Museums are the engines of what has become known as ‘cultural diplomacy’, where travelling exhibitions and loaned artworks continue the age-old tradition of giving artwork as diplomatic gifts, promoting international relations and engaging the public. Such powers are not restricted to originals, though, because censorship and copyright indicate the power of reproduced images (including brand logos, for example) to reflect and reinforce cultural values. Our preferences for particular images help define who we are, both in terms of group membership and in more nebulous, personal ways.
This book explores what works of art can say to us and about us. It focuses on the visual products of one culture – northwestern Europe in the Middle Ages – which is sufficiently distant to give a clear view, but is sufficiently close for many of us to remain accessible. It involves questioning the assumptions that we bring to our interpretation of visual imagery. What a work of art has to say to us depends on what we think the work is (as a physical object), what an image is (as a reproduced aspect of the physical object) and what we are (as receptive people).
The book examines what was thought about this art at the time it was made. It starts by looking at a single artist’s material as an integral part of everyday life, introducing some differences between the world in which we live and the world from which the art came. Chapters Two and Three look at how materials were used to illuminate two exquisite manuscripts – an extremely impressive, quite impersonal pontifical and a rather bizarre, very private psalter. From ensembles of hundreds of illuminated folios in manuscripts, the fourth chapter considers the meaning of materials embodied in a diptych – a portable altarpiece painted for King Richard II. Chapter Five gradually approaches and then examines the painting in front of which Richard II was crowned. Finally, moving from the political centre to the provinces, the last chapter explores the life-changing messages hidden in the decorations of an altarpiece made in a modest market town. Drawing upon the physical evidence teased out from these masterpieces, an Epilogue briefly reviews the paradoxical nature of images and their crucial role in mediating between those who produce and those who consume them.
The selection of images considered in this book requires some explanation. No one knows who painted any of them. Whatever value they have is their own – they do not bathe in the glory of celebrity artists. Only one of them, the diptych, is widely known – the others have profound beauty but are relatively unfamiliar. The manuscripts and panel paintings that we will look at are not cherry-picked following the pronouncements of experts. The selection is much more personal and largely serendipitous. All but one come from southeast England (the pontifical was painted in northeast France). I have analysed first-hand the materials of all but one of them and, since I live and work in southeast England, for me the images are ‘local produce’.
Yet the focus on local produce is not parochial. After the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the greatness of individual talents, you would have to travel miles to see the works of famous artists, as we might now go to Paris to see the Mona Lisa. However, in the Middle Ages, great art was less personality-driven and could be found more or less wherever you lived. The images chosen for this book were created at a time when Europe and the world were at their most open, when art and artists circulated widely and pictures of similar stature were being produced everywhere. In the Middle Ages, local art might have had a distinctive flavour, but it also had qualities that completely transcended the provincial.
Those works that survive have now travelled the world. Planes and trains can take us to them, books and screens can bring them to us and their timeless beauty has a powerful pull. To a significant extent, however, their most valuable aspects have become much less accessible owing to what T. S. Eliot identified as a ‘provincialism, not of space, but of time’.1 This book tries to see how images were appreciated by the people who commissioned and made them. It does so by interpreting the results of modern scientific analysis in the light of medieval manuals for artists and a selection of literature that is widely acknowledged to have a timeless quality. The task is worthwhile because art’s greatest and most mysterious powers are only accessible if we can overcome our ‘provincialism of time’.