Medieval art (Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic)
Medieval art in the PAU runs from the 4th century to about 1500 and is tested as four linked systems: Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic. The examiner wants to see how a building's structure dictates its imagery, and how a change in vaulting changes what can be painted, glazed or carved.
Early Christian
The first churches take Roman forms for new needs. The longitudinal basilica (Santa Sabina, Rome, 422–432) gives a congregational nave with clerestory, side aisles and a timber roof; the centralized plan serves martyria and baptisteries. Painting is symbolic rather than illustrative: the orante, the Good Shepherd, the fish (ICHTHYS), the chi-rho. Apse mosaics place Christ at the centre of an imperial court.
Byzantine
Hagia Sophia (Constantinople, 532–537, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus) is the key monument: a dome of about 31 m carried on pendentives, so a round dome rests on a square room, with forty windows at its base producing a 'floating' light. San Vitale at Ravenna (c. 547) is a double-shell octagon whose mosaics of Justinian and Theodora present the emperor as Christ's vicar. After Iconoclasm (726–843) images return under strict rules: gold ground as uncreated light, frontal figures, hierarchical scale, few narrative props.
Romanesque
Stone barrel vaults replace timber, so walls thicken, windows shrink and tribunes are added to buttress. The pilgrimage church (three aisles, transept, ambulatory with radiating chapels) lets crowds circulate to relics; Santiago de Compostela, begun 1075, is the model. Sculpture concentrates where the pilgrim passes: portal tympana, capitals, corbels, with horror vacui and a didactic programme.
Gothic
The pointed arch, rib vault and flying buttress turn the wall into a frame of stone, permitting vast glazed areas (Chartres after 1194; Sainte-Chapelle, 1240s). Verticality and light become theological statements; stained glass is a medium in its own right, not decoration.
Worked example: the Pórtico de la Gloria, Santiago de Compostela
- Identify - Maestro Mateo, 1168–1188; granite with a marble mullion; polychromy almost entirely lost; narthex of the west portal.
- Describe - three arches; the central tympanum shows Christ in Majesty with the Tetramorph and the twenty-four elders; the mullion carries Saint James; the jambs carry apostles and prophets.
- Reason - it is late Romanesque already moving toward Gothic: volume under drapery, individual faces, and an arrangement the arriving pilgrim reads in sequence.
- Interpret - the programme is a Last Judgement placed exactly where a tired pilgrim is received.
Traps
- Treating Romanesque as crude rather than structurally limited.
- Dating the Pórtico as pure Gothic.
- Confusing an ambulatory with a Gothic choir; the ambulatory is a Romanesque pilgrimage device.
- Equating mosaic and fresco technique.