This remarkable rapid shift in ideas is bound up
with social and economic developments of Christendom in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries. They include the well-known growth of
towns. There is also the steady enrichment of the
countryside. The water mill became a supplement to animal power,
introduced to several countries of northwest Christendom by the
Cistercians and was followed shortly by the windmill. The
techniques of metallurgy and mining advanced. In many regions,
feudal control of the peasantry began to losing its force. The
steady development of trade, both south and north, in Italy and
Flanders and on the Baltic coast, distributed textiles, rare
commodities, resources that enriched and knitted together the lands
touched by it. A growing money economy in the towns is one
condition of that progress. Almost the only lands that are in decay
are southern Italy and southern France, both ruined by endless
violence.
Elsewhere, enough new wealth was created to
provide for all manner of crusades and wars, with enough over to
allow of the extraordinary episode of cathedral building. A
slowly growing population supported banditry and wars and provided
recruits to the towns and to the new mendicant orders. Secular
powers found it convenient to turn to bankers and money-changers to
mobilize wealth for some extravagant enterprise or other. Last but
not least, these secular powers, whether king or baron or
municipality, were in fact becoming stronger, and larger.
The great increase in wealth of
thirteenth-century towns and their guilds allowed a spill-over of
resources into municipal building, often on a grand scale,
decorated with Gothic styles and motifs. The textile centres of
north-west Europe offer many examples, such as the palatial Cloth
Hall at Ypres, of these kinds of civic project. Such
buildings provided models for the Gothic Revival public works of a
heritage- minded nineteenth century. This fact alone
illustrates the principle of how the great visual characterising
features of European culture have persisted so as to have a place
in our heritage.
Naturalism
is the term used to describe the pervasive climate of
cultural awareness that seeped into European life from the 1200s in
the wake of the above economic changes. It was a world
dominated by Christian ideals and ideologies, comprising many
segments of society, unrelated and different from one
another. Groups were all becoming aware of themselves as
secular institutions and the cultural novelties of naturalism are
made possible by the steady underlying accumulation of new urban
populations and/or their resources.
The first images of nature as most people would
recognise it emerged in European sculpture within the space of a
few decades around 1200.
Up to then, the conventions of church sculpture
have a general family likeness to which we give the name of
Romanesque. This style has its origins in Constantinople. It
spread into the West via sixth-century Ravenna and the changing
cultural norms of the ninth-century Carolingian kingdom.
Romanesque sculpture is heavily stylised.
This is evident in the gesture of a figure, the rendering of facial
expression, the stiff posture of a divine judge, the patterning of
drapery, the near-abstraction of elaborate foliage or of mystic
creatures adorning a pillar. It also has a heavily loaded
language, which is hieratic, symbolic, and not quite of this
world. It tells us about supernatural things, and the terms
it uses are formalized to deliver sacred import. Nature, particular
the human form, is in fact transformed into mystic symbols, and
representation is subordinated to moral significance.
The new sculpture that emerges in the figures
that decorate the cathedral of Chartres bears movingly human
expressions. Gestures lose their stiffness; the folds of a
robe flow not only beautifully but in obedience to the laws of
Nature. A leaf is recognizably a leaf of a known species of tree
and not an elaborate part of mystic ornamentation. These poses,
faces, draperies, leaves, are evidence that a craftsman is
capturing the forms around him in a new way, and there are more and
more craftsmen following the fashion and developing it. The
craftsmen gradually turn their backs on an age-old tradition,
adventuring into new language and presenting the viewers with a new
kind of everyday experience. For example, there is a
contemporary Parisian story, written for the urban man in the
street, about two countryfolk who have come to see the statuary at
Notre- Dame. One says to the other in his patois, 'Look!
That's King Pepin! There's Charlemagne!' and as they stand
absorbed, gazing upwards, a cutpurse relieves them of their
savings. Such a glimpse of a scene, which looks trivial, is in fact
quite revealing. To begin with, the 'sightseers' in Paris are
carrying coins in a purse: a hundred years earlier the money
economy is so little developed as to make that detail unlikely.
More to the point, before the thirteenth century no one, clerk or
rustic, would have been expecting to look up at a church and see on
it a row of historical figures representing, and looking like
heroes of the age and not merely symbolic figures.
The first piece of profane literature which
presents naturalism in a striking way is Jean de Meung's famous
continuation (1275) of the Roman de la Rose—a poem written by
Guillaume de Lorris in Paris in 1235. In its original form it
is an allegory of love. Jean de Meung transforms the original
intention of the poem when he adds his fourteen thousand extra
lines. Instead of an allegory of refined courtesy, he gives us a
philosophy in which 'Nature' is personified as really the creator
and mover of all things. The potency of Nature is closely woven in
with the theme of generation— sexuality. The modern
expression is of this medieval justaposition is Carl Orf's musical
extravaganza, Carmina Burana.
At a slightly earlier date, probably around 1220,
St. Francis of Assisi, far away from Paris, composes his
unforgettable rhapsodies to 'Brother Sun' and to the birds and
beasts and beauties of God's creation. We must suppose that an echo
of this joy is carried across Christendom by some at least of
Francis's wandering band of followers, the Fraticelli.
A little earlier than Francis's hymn, a quite
different kind of person, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, writes his
eyewitness chronicle of the Conquest of Constantinople (between
1205 and 1213). His book is the first great work of historical
prose to be written in French instead of Latin. Is this
narrative there is evidence that public affairs are beginning to be
seen in a more 'naturalist' way than formerly. In common with many
others of his day, he is prepared to stand his ground and offer his
own reading of the will of God. By the mid-thirteenth century, the
Dominicans made it respectable to take a curious interest in
Nature.