In a previous post, I mentioned how I was drawing inspiration from medieval European religious art. Some tropes, like robes and golden halos are easy spot. But, I am also exploring the way in which medieval art collapses narrative space and time into a single image. It’s honestly, one of my favourite parts of era’s art.
Medieval art tends to take an entire story and compress it into one picture. A single fresco, for instance, might show the entire sequence of the Procession of Christ. It’s sort of like a comic, but not quite and not always. The narrative in the image may not flow in a linear timeline. It may not even represent the story the way Europeans read (left to right, moving downwards). This wasn’t a big problem. Most of the people people in the Middle Ages couldn’t read. At the time, religious art had a specific purpose, one that wasn’t really meant to be interpreted without guidance.
A lot of medieval religious art served as a sort of Power Point slideshow. It was there to support the priests’ efforts to save souls. A priest’s sermonising would be echoed and supported by the art in the church, helping parishioners remember to stay on the short and narrow path. Likewise, manuscript illumination was part learning aid, part mnemonic device, and often a way to earn the favour of powerful patrons. All of this is to say that linear narratives and consistent timeline weren’t necessarily the most important consideration. Art at the time had other, higher, holier goals.
Hieronymus Bosch, is a master of this. His most famous paintings, The Garden of Earthly Delights, churns with bodies, moral lessons, and idiosyncratic weirdness. It’s amazing, but also hurts the brain a little. My point, though, is that it’s easy to see The Garden of Earthly Delights as a snapshot of a single moment of chaos. But this would not be how Bosch’s contemporaries would have seen it. To them, it would appear more like a compilation of a stories or parables to be considered individually, within the context of the wider work and the church it was placed in.
Seeing artwork this way flies in the face of how we see pictures in the modern world. The camera, for all its virtues, has taught us to see a picture as representing something frozen in time and space, as a moment captured by the lens of the camera or the eye of the painter (think Vermeer). Instead, a lot of medieval art has everything happening all at once.
This is not something unique to European art. Chinese, Japanese, and Indian art does similar things at different times. Roman. Egyptian. Sumerian. Heck, if you really want to go back, there are echoes of the overlapping imagery of pre-historic cave art or rock carvings. It’s not a way of making and reading art that is totally lost. Street art murals often do the same thing.
For me though, it’s just fun to play around with these centuries old ideas and mix in my own weirdness, like a one man heresy factory.
