Medieval Art: Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic
This domain covers Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic art. The exam tests your ability to link building systems to structural logic, to read a programme (portal, apse, mosaic) as theology, and to date and place works from formal markers rather than guesswork.
Early Christian
- Basilica plan (Santa Sabina, Santa Maria Maggiore): nave, aisles, clerestory, apse, transept; adapted from Roman civic halls.
- Centralized martyria and baptisteries (Santa Costanza, Lateran baptistery) use domes and ambulatories.
- Catacomb painting is schematic and symbolic: Good Shepherd, orant, fish, anchor - private and funerary, not public display.
- Ravenna mosaics (Galla Placidia, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, San Vitale) shift to gold ground and imperial ceremony.
Byzantine
- Hagia Sophia (532-537): pendentives carry the dome, forty windows at its base create a floating light effect; Justinian's imperial church.
- Iconoclasm (726-843) destroys images; after 843 the icon returns with a theology of the prototype.
- San Vitale: Justinian and Theodora panels, frontal, jewelled, fusing imperial and sacred authority.
- Pantocrator, Theotokos, Deesis; gold ground, inverse perspective, flattened space, elongated figures.
Romanesque
- Barrel vault and groin vault, thick walls, small windows, tribunes; stone roofs demand mass.
- Pilgrimage plan: ambulatory with radiating chapels (Santiago de Compostela, Conques, Toulouse).
- Portal programme: tympanum, lintel, archivolts, trumeau; Moissac and Autun Last Judgements.
- Historiated capitals with didactic, moralising function for a largely illiterate audience.
Gothic
- Pointed arch, rib vault, flying buttress: thrust is channelled outward, walls become screens for glass.
- Chartres, Amiens, Reims: three-portal west front, rose windows, verticality, integrated sculpture.
- Stained glass as the book of the poor; Suger's theology of light at Saint-Denis.
- Rayonnant (Sainte-Chapelle), English Decorated and Perpendicular, Spanish and German variants.
Worked example. A Romanesque tympanum shows a frontal Christ in a mandorla, four winged creatures around him, rows of small figures below. Reasoning: the creatures are the tetramorph (Matthew's man, Mark's lion, Luke's ox, John's eagle), so the subject is Christ in Majesty; the elders with vials and harps come from Revelation 4-5; the portal faces west, confronting the congregation entering and leaving; shallow relief and dense drapery place it c. 1100-1130 in Burgundy or Languedoc.
Traps. Calling Hagia Sophia a basilica; saying Byzantine space is flat without explaining inverse perspective; confusing the flying buttress with a wall buttress; dating Romanesque to the thirteenth century; forgetting iconoclasm; describing a portal without naming its parts.