Gothic Church Artwork: Stained Glass and Sculpture

The Gothic Cathedral were repositories for virtually every art form which Medieval culture produced; just as the buildings themselves were an art form, so too were the images created for them. The works of art covered in this course express a new set of theological and philosophical ideas which at the same time reached as high to the heavens as its engineers were capable and at the same time replaced stone with colored glass which filtered the sacred light of the sun, the holy lumen for Scholastic theologians. Stone sculpture and precious sculpture were products of the goldsmiths arts and often inlaid with ivory and enamel. The Gothic style brought with it a marked “softening” in the images of authority and devotion; whether these were royal images of religious, their functions and images became identical. At the same time, a greater recovery of Greco-Roman Classical conventions in art occurred. We can see this in Gothic sculpture’s emerging from reliefs to the round, the distribution of weight in the distinctive Gothic S-curve and the first glimmers of contrapposto, and an unprecedented degree of individualism which approaches portraiture. Already in the stained glass and sculpture of the High Middle Ages, we see signs of the great sea-changes which will define the subsequent era of history, the Renaissance. We must beware of drawing a line between Medieval and Renaissance however even for its most basic characteristics. Instead, keeping these precocious examples in mind, we can chart a more nuanced approach to artistic influences and developments in the dynamic environment of the European Middle Ages.