The New Murrey and Blue blog

All great comments to your post Viscountessw, and I second the rubbish about H7’s assertion he descended from the noble Welsh! The Mortimers (including Richard, duke of York and his children, thru his mother, Anne Mortimer) had more Welsh blood than H7.

Another area of likely loss of evidence for the “renaissance” in England is long before the Great Fire, just consider the utter devastation in what Eamon Duffy called in his book, The Stripping of the Altars, if one looks at just the loss of the artworks and architecture alone. As reservoirs of a vast array of artworks, for centuries, the abbeys, monasteries, cathedrals, parish churches, and personal collections, are not examples of a “gothic” art stuck in time, say around 1200ad, people are not like that nor are the artists who created works, on vellum parchment, or on walls (fresco) in stained glass neatly pigeon-holed as “gothic” artists.

Just one example, I had a terror of art history classes dealing with the “middle ages” because no one professor actually could tell us when they started or ended – some placed them when the dear Vikings were bought off (think what is France today, the province of Normandy, literally handed over to that ravaging horde in lieu of their incessant summer raiding down the Seine; it worked btw) while others say it wasn’t until the technology for the great cathedrals emerged (c late 1100’s with Abbot Suger: the astonishing Basilique Cathedrale de Saint-Denis) and others even include the painter Giotto as still Gothic! (there is always one crank in every university department).

Now, I see Giotto as the first modern artist (painter; he was active around 1300ad) which certainly complicates things, doesn’t it! Aside from a few oddballs in art history who chronologically refuse to move him out of the medieval time frame he lived in, others tend to see him as the “proto-renaissance” or what we could call early Renaissance (by 150 years!)

But Giotto was modern, anyone reading this would immediately recognize his innovations, they are used in every comic strip, every graphic novel, every standard movie frame – the visual language he created in fresco is STILL in use to this day, with overlapping figures, the idea of a low horizon picture plane, identifiable characters (all wearing the same costume from one panel to the next, ahem, does Batman have 12 different Batman ensembles? Does even James Bond have a totally different look (surfer grunge stoner; fey innocent toyboy; Homer Simpson lookalike? I think not!) from one scene to the next, one film to the next; Giotto gave us ENCLOSED panels, with all the figures and action turning inward, to the main narrative or Subject itself (usually Christ, Giotto was after all, a religious painter).

Although Giotto predates what we call proper geometric or linear perspective (after 1420’s ad; that window to the world, where if you look out your window the objects decrease in scale and clarity the further away from you the Viewer they are, until they finally reach that bluish horizon – and yes, the horizon is bluish, painters were not messing with you, our eyes cannot see the full spectrum of color that far out) Giotto employed what could be called optical perspective, something not unlike what the ancient Romans and Greeks employed and one I use myself, mostly because if I can convince you that the space shown is believable, and so are the people atop of each other, than hey, beats the arduous use of ruling out the orthogonals and 3 pt perspective (don’t ask!) – illusion = art = Viewer believes what they see = so it’s good enough for me! Giotto taught us all that!

Whole books are written about Giotto’s innovations that we USE to this day, but like stained glass, and fresco, architecture is fragile, and the loss of thousands of artifacts in the Reformation is literally mind boggling. One simply can’t dismiss such losses as just “gothic stuff” – likely they weren’t – another example would be the norther painter Jan van Eyck, a master of what we know as oil paint – active in the 1430’s and we label as “gothic” OMG … what he did with oil, like many of his norhtern brethren was heart stopping, likely a influence from the Low Countries mastery, sheer brilliance, with illuminated manuscripts, where miniatures were simply adopted on a far grander scale with a portrait superimposed as the rationale for the painting (usually on wood now) – painters like Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden created the portrait pose and manner and understanding of what it means to present oneself FOR a portrait to this day! It was not my dear Leonardo, he borrowed it from them! His so-called Mona Lisa is a direct steal from van der Weyden’s highly popular methods – BUT – also highly unusual, indeed, unheard of for an Italian, Leonardo painted this small panel portrait on wood … in oil!
“Oh mio Dio!!!!”

And Leonardo changed the very possibilities of what can be done in oil, on wood, or canvas (linen) or anything else, with that one simple adjustment; which Raphael (sigh) then ran off to the races and further experimented with, going so far afield from what was considered seemly or appropriate to a Van der Weyden or Van Eyck that WE like to say, well, Raphael was finally a renaissance painter, those guys are stuck in a gothic sensibility. (One could say the patrons of Van Eyck or Weyden would not want their portrait to betray private moments of reflection, anguish, snide superiority, longing, melancholy, etc, such Raphael, and his ilk, were obsessed with exposing – that in itself is an interesting sea change, the “light of the mind” did not belong exclusively to any one era, it simply expressed itself in different ways which “we” art historians I regret to say too often refuse to recognize!)

So, are Van der Weyden and Van Eyck NOT the Renaissance? Who ever painted the original portrait we all know of Richard was using methods put down by these two artists at least 3 decades before our boy was even born! And the copyist in the 1500’s did not need to update the portrait and make it conform to the new stylistic trends (think Holbein) but literally just copy what was there, since the 3/4 view, from head to about mid chest, had been Van der Weyden’s bread and butter for a good 40-50 years BEFORE Leonardo decided to use it for his Mona!

I do wonder though, how many other portraits were lost, in that rush to destroy everything that came before. If you recall when the Taliban blew up ONE rock inset of sculptures of Buddha the world was rightfully outraged, horrified at the cultural destruction, one need not have been Buddhist to be disgusted. Now magnify that by what was lost when Harry 8 went loco, and it wasn’t always human destruction with that toxic nightmare!

(sorry for the rant, but really!)

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