The Gothic image : religious art in France of the thirteenth century

456 Pages·1958·68.192 MB·English

by  Emile Mâle

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HARPER TORCHBOOKS
Augustine/Przywara AN AUGUSTINE SYNTHESIS TB/35
Roland H. Sainton THE TRAVAIL OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY TB/30
Karl Barth THE WORD OF GOD AND THE WORD OF MAN TB/13
Nicolas Bcrdyaev THE BEGINNING AND THE END TB/14
Martin Buber ECLIPSE OF god: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and
Philosophy TB/12
Martin Buber MOSES: The Revelation and the Covenant TB/27
Jacob Burckhardt THE CIVILIZATION OF THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY: Vol. I,
TB/40; Vol. 11, TB/41
F. M. Cornford FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY: A Study in the Origins of
Western Speculation TB/20
G. G. Coulton MEDIEVAL FAITH AND SYMBOLISM TB/25
G. G. Coulton THE FATE OF MEDIEVAL ART IN THE RENAISSANCE AND REFOR-
MATION TB/26
Adolf Deissmann PAUL: A Study in Social and Religious History TB/15
C. H. Dodd THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE TB/43
Johannes Eckhart MEISTER ECKHART: A Modern Translation tb/8
Morton S. Enslin CHRISTIAN BEGINNINGS TB/5
Morton S. Enslin THE LITERATURE OF THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT TB/6
Austin Farrer, ed. THE CORE OF THE BIBLE TB/7
Ludwig Feuerbach THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY TB/ii
Harry Emerson Fosdick A GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE TB/2
Sigmund Freud ON CREATIVITY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS: Papers on the Psychol-
ogy of Art, Literature, Love, Religion TB/45
Edward Gibbon THE END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE WEST TB/37
Edward Gibbon THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTENDOM IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE TB/46
Edgar Goodspeed A LIFE OF JESUS TB/i
J.
Herbert C. Grierson CROSS-CURRENTS IN 17TH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE: The
J.
World, the Flesh, and the Spirit TB/47
William Haller THE RISE OF PURITANISM TB/22
Adolf Harnack WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? TB/17
Edwin Hatch THE INFLUENCE OF GREEK IDEAS ON CHRISTIANITY TB/i8
Karl Heim CHRISTIAN FAITH AND NATURAL SCIENCE TB/i6
F. H. Heinemann EXISTENTIALISM AND THE MODERN PREDICAMENT TB/28
Stanley R. Hopper, ed. SPIRITUAL PROBLEMS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE TB/21
Johan Huizinga ERASMUS AND THE AGE OF REFORMATION TB/19
S0ren Kierkegaard EDIFYING DISCOURSES: A Selection TB/32
S0ren Kierkegaard PURITY OF HEART TB/4
Alexandre Koyré FROM THE CLOSED WORLD TO THE INFINITE UNIVERSE TB/31
Emile Mâle THE GOTHIC IMAGE: Religious Art in France of the i^th Century
TB/44
H. Richard Niebuhr CHRIST AND CULTURE TB/3
Josiah Royce THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY TB/29
Auguste Sabatier OUTLINES OF A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION BASED ON PSYCHOLOGY
AND HISTORY TB/23
George Santayana INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND RELIGION TB/9
George Santayana WINDS OF DOCTRINE and
PLATONISM AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE TB/24
F. D. E. Schleiermacher ON RELIGION: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers TB/36
Henry Osborn Taylor THE EMERGENCE OF CHRISTIAN CULTURE IN THE WEST: The
Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages TB/48
Paul Tillich DYNAMICS OF FAITH TB/42
Edward Burnett Tylor THE ORIGINS OF CULTURE TB/33
Edward Burnett Tylor RELIGION IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE TB/34
Evelyn Underbill WORSHIP TB/io
Wilhelm Windelband A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY I: Greek, Roman, Medieval TB/38
Wilhelm Windelband A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY II: Renaissance, Enlightenment, Mod-
ern TB/39
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MÂLE
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translated by Dora Nussey
Cathedral Library
HARPER TORCHBOOKS
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
THE GOTHIC IMAGE
This translation was made from third French edition
and is reprinted here by arrangement with E. P. Button
& Company,which originally published it in 1913 under
the title religious art in France of the thirteenth
CENTURY, A Study in Mediaeval Iconography and its
Sources of Inspiration.
First Harper Torchbook edition published 1958
Library of Congress catalog cardnumber:LC58-10152
Title page photo byEwing Galloway
A
MONSIEUR GEORGES PERROT
Ancien directeur de l'École normale supérieure,
Secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
Hommage d
affection et de respect.

PREFACE
To the Middle A—ges art was didactic. All that it was necessary that
men should know the history of the world from the creation,'the dogmas
of religion, the examples of the saints, the hierarchy of the virtues, the range
—
of the sciences, arts and crafts all these were taught them by the windows
of the church or by the statues in the porch. The pathetic name of Biblia
pauperum given by the printers of the fifteenth century to one of their earliest
books, might well have been given to the church. There the simple, the
ignorant, all who were named " sancta plebs Dei," learned through their eyes
almost all they knew of their faith. Its great figures, so spiritual in concep-
tion, seemed to bear speaking witness to the truth of the Church's teaching.
The countless statues, disposed in scholarly design, were a symbol of the mar-
vellous order that through the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas reigned in the
world of thought. Through the medium of art the highest conceptions of
theologian and scholar penetrated to some extent the minds of even the
humblest of the people.
But the meaning of these profound works gradually became obscure.
New generations, with a different conception of the world, no longer under-
stood them, and from the second half of the sixteenth century mediaeval art
became an enigma. Symbolism, the soul of Gothic art, was dead.
The Church was ashamed of the once beloved legends, in which for so
many centuries Christianitv had been nurtured. The council of Trent
marks the end of the old artistic traditio—n, and we know from a bo—ok full of
the spirit of the council, that the writer Molanus the theologian had lost
the key to the art of the Middle Ages.^
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Benedictines of Saint-
Maur, when writing of the ancient churches of France, displayed an ignorance
which was anything but creditable to their order's reputation for learning.
In his Monuments de la monarchiefrançaise Montfaucon reads into the cathedral
façades scenes from the history of France and portraits of her kings.
And what can one say of those who speak of Gothic bas-reliefs and
statues as they might speak of the antiquities of India. Some have imagined
^ Molanus, De historia sand. imag. et picturarum. The first edition was published in 1580. See the
Louvain edition of 1771, with Paquot's notes.
vii
PREFACE
that they read the secret of the philosopher's stone in the porch at Notre
Dame at Paris.' At the end of the eighteenth century Dupuis found in the
Zodiac at Notre Dame an argument in support of his famous theory of the
solar origin of all religions, and his pupil Lenoir read the legend of Bacchus
into a series of bas-reliefs relating to St. Denis.*
The true meaning of mediaeval art, which had grown more obscure
than hieroglyphics, has had to be laboriously re-discovered in our time. To
those who come without preparation the portals of Amiens or the north
A
porch at Chartres are a closed book. guide is a necessity. Since 1830
many mysteries have been solved through the labours of archaeologists like
Didron or Cahier, but even their researches have left secrets still undis-
closed, and their work needs to be co-ordinated and welded into an
organic whole.
This book is an attempt to give systematic form to their researches,
and wherever possible to complete them. It is hoped that it may prove
of service to historians of art, for to study mediaeval art, as is sometimes
done, without reference to the subject-matter and with attention wholly
given to progress in technique, leads to misunderstanding and confusion of
the aims of successive periods.* Gothic sculptors had a very different con-
ception of art from that of a Benvenuto Cellini. They did not believe that
choice of subject was a matter of indifference, and they did not think of
a statue as merely intended to give momentary pleasure to the eye. In
mediaeval art every form clothes a thought * one could say that thought
;
works within the material and fashions it. The form can not be separated
from the idea which creates and animates it. Work of the thirteenth cen-
tury interests us even when inadequately executed for we feel there is some-
thing in it akin to a soul. Some understanding of the aims of the artists
must precede the right to pass judgment on them. For this reason the
natural introduction to the study of mediaeval art is a methodical review of
the subject-matter in which that art delighted. It is a vast enterprise, for
all that was best in thirteenth-century thought assumed plastic form. All
that was laid down as essential by the theologian, the encyclopaedist, the inter-
We
preter of the Bible, was expressed in sculpture or in painted glass. shall
• Gobineau de Montluisant, alchemist of the seven- ' This for instance is Lubke's error in the chapters
teenth century. His treatise was published in the which he devotes to mediœval art {Geschichte tier
Annalesarchéologiques, xxi. pp. 139-199. Plastik, i. and ii., Leipzig, 1880, 8vo).
* Alexandre Lenoir, Description historique et chrono- * We do not refer to purely decorative art. In
logique des monumens de sculpture réunis au musée des Book L we shall show that it has no symbolic
monumensfrançais, .An. X., sixth edition, p. 120. value.
viii