North of the Alps
ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS.
PUCELLE.
see also collection:
Illuminated Manuscripts
We are now in a position to turn once more
to Gothic painting north of the Alps. What happened there during the
latter half of the fourteenth century was determined in large measure by
the influence of the great Italians. Some examples of this influence can
be found even earlier, such as the Annunciation (fig.
532) from the private prayer book—called
a "book of hours'—illuminated by
Jean
Pucelle in
Paris about 1325-28 for Jeanne d'Evreux, queen of
France. The style of the figures still recalls Master Honore (see fig.
514) but the architectural interior clearly
derives from Duccio (fig. 517). It had taken less
than 20 years for the fame of the Maesta
to spread from Tuscany to the Ile-de-France.
In taking over the new picture space, however,
Jean
Pucelle had to
adapt it to the special character of a manuscript page, which lends
itself far less readily than a panel to being treated as a window. The
Virgin's chamber no longer fills the entire picture surface. It has
become an ethereal cage that floats on the blank parchment background
(note the supporting angel on the right) like the rest of the ornamental
framework, so that the entire page forms a harmonious unit. As we
explore the details of this framework, we realize that most of them have
nothing to do with the religious purpose of the manuscript: the kneeling
queen inside the initial D is surely meant to be Jeanne d'Evreux at her
devotions, but who could be the man with the staff next to her? He seems
to be listening to the lute player perched on the tendril above him. The
page is filled with other enchanting vignettes. The four figures at the
bottom of the page are playing a game of tag outdoors; a rabbit peers
from its burrow beneath the girl on the left; and among the foliage
leading up to the initial we find a monkey and a squirrel.

532.
JEAN
PUCELLE. Betrayal of
Christ and Annunciation, from the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux.
1325-28. Tempera and
gold leaf on parchment, each page,
(8,9
x 6.2 cm).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Cloisters Collection,
Purchase,
1954
DROLERIE.
These fanciful marginal designs—or
droleries— are a characteristic feature of
Northern Gothic manuscripts. They had originated more than a century
before Jean Pucelle in the regions along the English Channel, whence
they spread to Paris and all the other centers of Gothic art.
Their subjects encompass a wide range of motifs: fantasy,
fable, and grotesque humor, as well as acutely observed scenes of
everyday life, appear side by side with religious themes. The essence of
drolerie is its playfulness, which marks it as a special domain where
the artist enjoys almost unlimited freedom. It is this freedom,
comparable to the license traditionally claimed by the court jester,
that accounts for the wide appeal of drolerie during the later Middle
Ages.
FRESCOES AND PANEL PAINTINGS.
As we approach the middle years of the fourteenth century, Italian
influence becomes ever more important in Northern Gothic painting.
Sometimes this influence was transmitted by Italian artists working on
Northern soil, for example
Simone Martini. The delightful frescoes with
scenes of country life in the Palace of the Popes at Avignon (fig.
533) were done by one of his Italian followers, who must have been thoroughly
familiar with the pioneer explorers of landscape and deep space in
Sienese painting. His work shows many of the qualities we recall from
the Good Government fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (see fig.
528).

533.
Italian follower of SIMONE
MARTINI (MATTEO GIOVANNETTI?).
Scenes of Country Life (detail),
ñ. 1345.
Fresco. Palace of the Popes, Avignon
Another gateway of Italian influence was the city of Prague, which in
1347 became the residence of Emperor Charles IV
and rapidly developed into an international cultural center second only
to Paris. The Death of the Virgin (fig.
534),
made by an unknown Bohemian painter about 1360,
again brings to mind the achievements of the great Sienese masters,
although these were known to our artist only at second or third hand.
Its glowing richness of color recalls Simone Martini (compare fig.
524), and the carefully articulated architectural
interior betrays its descent from such works as Pietro Lorenzetti's
Birth of the Virgin (fig. 525), but it lacks
the spaciousness of its Italian models. Italian, too, is the vigorous
modeling of the heads and the overlapping of the figures, which
reinforces the three-dimensional quality of the design but raises the
awkward question of what to do with the halos. (Giotto, we will
remember, had faced the same problem in his Madonna Enthroned;
compare fig. 523). Still, the Bohemian master's
picture is not just an echo of Italian painting. The gestures and facial
expressions convey an intensity of emotion that represents the finest
heritage of Northern Gothic art. In this respect, our panel is far more
akin to the Death of the Virgin at Strasbourg Cathedral (fig.
488) than to any Italian work.

534. BOHEMIAN MASTER. Death of
the Virgin. 1350-60.
Tempera on panel, 39 3/8 x
28" (100 x
71 cm).
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
William Francis Warden
Fund; Seth K. Sweetser Fund,
The Henry C. and Martha B. Angell Collection,
Juliana Cheney
Edwards Collection, Gift of Martin Brimmer,
and Mrs. Frederick Frothingham; by exchange
|
The International Style
BROEDERLAM.
Toward the year 1400, the merging
of Northern and Italian traditions gave rise to a single dominant style
throughout western Europe. This International Style was not confined to
painting—we have used the same term for the
sculpture of the period—but painters clearly
played the main role in its development. Among the most important was
Melchior
Broederlam (flourished ñ. 1387-1409), a
Fleming who worked for the court of the duke of Burgundy in Dijon.
Figure 535 shows the panels of a pair of shutters
for an altar shrine that he did between 1394 and
1399. Each wing is really two pictures within one
frame. Landscape and architecture stand abruptly side by side, even
though the artist has tried to suggest that the scene extends around the
building. Compared to paintings by Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti,
Broederlam's picture space still strikes us as naive in many ways. The
architecture looks like a doll's house, and the details of the landscape
are quite out of scale with the figures. Yet the panels convey a far
stronger feeling of depth than we have found in any previous Northern
work. The reason for this is the subtlety of the modeling. The softly
rounded shapes and the dark, velvety shadows create a sense of light and
air that more than makes up for any shortcomings of scale or
perspective. This soft, pictorial quality is a hallmark of the
International Style. It appears as well in the ample, loosely draped
garments with their fluid curvilinear patterns of folds, which remind us
of Sluter and Ghiberti (see figs.
499 and
508).
Our panels also exemplify another characteristic of the International
Style: its "realism of particulars." It is the same kind of realism we
encountered first in Gothic sculpture (see fig.
492) and somewhat later among the marginal
droleries of manuscripts. We find it in the carefully rendered foliage
and flowers, in the delightful donkey (obviously drawn from life), and in the rustic figure of St. Joseph, who looks and behaves like a
simple peasant and thus helps to emphasize the delicate, aristocratic
beauty of the Virgin. This painstaking concentration on detail gives
Broederlam's work the flavor of an enlarged miniature rather than of a
large-scale painting, even though the panels are more than five feet
tall.

535.
MELCHIOR
BROEDERLAM.
Annunciation and Visitation; Presentation in the Temple;
and Flight into
Egypt.
1394-99.
Tempera on panel, eaeh 65 x
49
1/4" (167
x 125 cm). Musee de la Ville, Dijon
THE LIMBOURG
BROTHERS.
Book illumination remained the leading form of
painting in Northern Europe at the time of the International Style,
despite the growing importance of panel painting. Thus the International
Style reached its most advanced phase in the luxurious book of hours
known as Les Tres Riches Heures du Due de Berry, produced for the
brother of the king of France, a man of far from admirable character but
the most lavish art patron of his day. The artists were Pol de Limbourg and his two brothers, a group of Flemings who, like Sluter
and Broederlam, had settled in France early in the fifteenth century.
They must have visited Italy as well, for their work includes numerous
motifs and whole compositions borrowed from the great masters of
Tuscany.
The most remarkable pages of Les Tres Riches Heures
arå those of the calendar,
with their elaborate depiction of the life of humanity and nature
throughout the months of the year. Such cycles, originally consisting of
12 single figures each
performing an appropriate seasonal activity, had long been an
established tradition in medieval art (compare fig.
492). Jean Pucelle had enriched
the margins of the calendar pages of his books of hours by emphasizing
the changing aspects of nature in addition to the labors of the months.
The
Limbourg brothers, however, integrated all these elements into a
series of panoramas of human life in nature. Thus the February miniature
(fig. 536), the earliest
snow landscape in the history of Western art, gives an enchantingly
lyrical account of village life in the dead of winter. We see the sheep
huddled together in their fold, birds hungrily scratching in the
barnyard, and a maid blowing on her frostbitten hands as she hurries to
join her companions in the warm cottage. (The front wall has been
omitted for our benefit.) In the middle distance is a villager cutting
trees for firewood and another driving his laden donkey toward the
houses among the hills. Here the promise of the Broederlam panels has
been fulfilled, as it were: landscape, architectural interiors, and
exteriors are harmoniously united in deep, atmospheric space. Even such
intangible things as the frozen breath of the maid, the smoke curling
from the chimney, and the clouds in the sky have become paintable.
The illustration for the month of October (fig.
537) shows the sowing of winter
grain. It is a bright, sunny day, and the figures—for
the first time since classical antiquity—cast
visible shadows on the ground. We marvel at the wealth of realistic
detail, such as the scarecrow in the middle distance or the footprints
of the sower in the soil of the freshly plowed field. The sower is
memorable in other ways as well. His tattered clothing, his unhappy air,
go beyond mere description. He is meant to be a pathetic figure, to
arouse our awareness of the miserable lot of the peasantry in contrast
to the life of the aristocracy, as symbolized by the splendid castle on
the far bank of the river.
Several of the calendar pages are devoted to the life of the
nobility. The most interesting perhaps is the January picture, the only
interior scene of the group, which shows the duke of Berry at a banquet
(fig. 538).
He is seated next to a huge fireplace, with a screen to protect him and,
incidentally, to act as a kind of secular halo that sets him off against
the multitude of courtiers and attendants. His features, known to us
also from other works of the period, have all the distinctive qualities
of a fine portrait, but except for the youth and the cleric on the
duke's right, the rest of the crowd displays an odd lack of
individuality.
They are all of the same type, in face as well as stature: aristocratic
mannequins whose superhuman slenderness brings to
mind their counterparts in the mosaic of Justinian and his court (see
fig. 323). They are
differentiated only by the luxuriance and variety of their clothing.
Surely the gulf between them and the melancholy peasant of the October
miniature could not have been greater in real life than it appears in
these pictures!

536.
THE LIMBOURG
BROTHERS.
February,
from Les
Tres Riches Heures du Due de Berry.
1413-16. Musee Conde, Chantilly, France
537.
THE LIMBOURG
BROTHERS. October,
from Les
Tres Riches Heures du Due de Berry.
1413-16. Musee Conde, Chantilly, France
538.
THE LIMBOURG
BROTHERS. January, from
Les
Tres Riches Heures du Due de Berry.
1413-16. Musee Conde, Chantilly, France
GENTILE DA FABRIANO.
See also COLLECTION:
Gentile da Fabriano
From the courtly throng of the January page it
is but a step to the altarpiece with the three Magi and their train by
Gentile da Fabriano (c. 1370-1427),
the greatest Italian painter of the International Style
(fig. 539). The costumes
here are as colorful, the draperies as ample and softly rounded, as in
Northern painting. The Holy Family on the left almost seems in danger of
being overwhelmed by the festive pageant pouring down upon it from the
hills in the far distance. The foreground includes more than a dozen
marvelously well-observed animals, not only the familiar ones but
hunting leopards, camels, and monkeys. (Such creatures were eagerly collected by the princes of the period, many of whom kept private zoos.)
The Oriental background of the Magi is further emphasized by the
Mongolian facial cast of some of their companions. It is not these
exotic touches, however, that mark our picture as the work of an Italian
master but something else, a greater sense of weight, of physical
substance, than we could hope to find among the Northern representatives
of the International Style.

539.
GENTILE DA FABRIANO. The
Adoration of the Magi. 1423.
Oil on panel, 9'10 1/8" x 9'3" (3
x 2.8
m). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Despite his love of fine detail,
Gentile da Fabriano
is obviously a painter used to working on a monumental scale, rather
than a manuscript illuminator at heart. Yet he, too, had command of the
delicate pictorial effects of a miniaturist, as we see on turning to the small panels decorating the base, or predella, of his
altarpiece. In The Nativity (fig.
540),
the entire picture is dominated by the new
awareness of light as an independent factor, separate from form and
color, that we first observed in the October page of Les Tres Riches
Heures. Even though the main sources of illumination are the divine
radiance of the newborn Child ("the light of the world") and of the
angel bringing the glad tidings to the shepherds in the fields, their
effect is as natural as if the Virgin were kneeling by a campfire. (Note
the strong cast shadows.) The poetic intimacy of this night scene opens
up a whole new world of artistic possibilities that were not to be fully
explored, however, until two centuries lat

540.
GENTILE DA FABRIANO. The
Nativity, from the predellaof the Adoration of the Magi.
1423.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
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