Middle Ages: Beauty and God
To the Medieval mind, Beauty was not a flexible concept. It was neither easily amenable to change, nor susceptible to individual quibbles regarding its fundamental nature and purpose. It was incontestable as a fixed quantity, though not necessarily agreed upon unanimously in its details. It was employed almost uninterruptedly as the guiding aesthetic principle in the creation of Western Art from the days of its medieval infancy.
Beauty, as it was conveyed through the artistic medium, was invariably put to use in the service of that one, supreme governing principle; that value of all values, eternal and immutable, the ideal par excellence, which itself legitimated Beauty, and rendered meaningful all attempts to pursue it: god .
In the medieval conception, man, though created in god’s image, partook in none of his divine energy. He and god stood at opposite ends of the cosmic spectrum. While man was firmly planted on Earth, god dwelt far above him, in heavenly realms remote and inaccessible. A helpless creature who rarely lived beyond 50 and was constantly threatened by illness and other scourges, man could do no better, in this life, than submit himself to the Divine will, and could expect to have no more decisive a hand in his own destiny than that granted him by god through prayer. In Art as in life, man was a mere tool in god’s cosmic vision. Most notable works of twelfth and thirteenth-century art – from the Gothic cathedrals of Reims and Chartres, to Pérotin’s sacred chants, to the mosaics of Cimabue – were conceived in order to make manifest god’s goodness and the moral order he bestowed in the world. There was little room, here, for individual whim. The artist’s job was to capture the beauty of the divine, not to indulge an inner impulse for creative self-expression. His ego took backseat to the duty he served, and artistic license was foregone in favour of the aesthetic certainty afforded by clear and straightforward stylistic guidelines.
The result was an Art that reflected the divine order of things. In Art as in the cosmos at large, god held dominion over man; thus subject matter triumphed over the form and style with which it was represented, yielding an Art stripped of all manneristic indulgences. In Cimabue’s Santa Trinità Maestà (1290), the virgin Mary is portrayed holding the infant Jesus. She sits squarely in the centre on her celestial throne, flanked on three sides by angels and prophets. It’s a two-dimensional depiction, lacking all depth and perspective. Its protagonists are dry and lifeless, with vacuous facial expressions and limbs twisted at unnatural angles. Their positioning around the virgin-with-child is highly figurative, representing, not physically reality, but the strict hierarchical order of the heavenly realm.
Some ninety years earlier, the world had seen a musical rendering of the same cosmic distribution in Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes (1198) – a reproposal of an older Gregorian chant in an emerging, rudimentary style of polyphony known as organum. Here a fundamental remains fixed and unmoving in the bass, like the all-seeing eye of god itself. Above it, the higher voices of saints and angels weave a sparse and austere filigree, often bumping into each other at dissonant intervals, and coming to rest only at bare, lifeless harmonic Fourths and Fifths.
In both the Trinità and the Viderunt, the aesthetic message is the same: Art is no place for man’s caprices. There is an underlying divine structure to the world, and it is the Artist’s sole task to bow in solemn deference to it. If the realm of man was chaotic, unpredictable and full of suffering, one could find solace from it in the solid logic of god’s firmament. Here, the all-knowing and all-powerful logos sat on its Cimabuan throne, its constant cosmic energy humming outwards in all directions, like Pérotin’s fundamental, pervading the fabric of all things and bestowing order and meaning. Beauty, for the medieval artist, was precisely this: the inescapable, absolute moral Truth of the divine mind.
