Culture in the High Middle Ages

Between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance

(My second post on European society and culture from the 400s to the 1700s.)

From the 500s to the 1000s, while Catholic Europe plodded through the Dark Ages, almost all of the best Christian culture was in Greece and the rest of Eastern Orthodox Christendom.  The Byzantine Christians excelled in architecture and made enduring contributions in the visual arts.  By the 600s, medieval Constantinople surpassed ancient Rome in the arts, and the 800s and 900s brought the Byzantine renaissance.               

            The brilliant, skilled, and religious artists of Byzantium excelled in portraying and decorating life.  Many of their paintings were quite good and their illustrations in manuscripts were the finest of all time.  Ornate and exquisite masterpieces poured forth in textiles, pottery, enamel, glass, wood, ivory, bronze, iron, gold, and gems.  There were cups of blue glass decorated with golden foliage, birds, and human figures.           

The Frankish-Catholic Dark Ages from the 500s to the 900s (or 1000s) were a cultural wasteland.  Then, in the 900s and 1000s, Western European culture began to take on some its recognizable modern forms.

            In the 1100s, the Catholic people leapt out of their Dark Ages. Isolation of western and northern Europe ended, and the tectonic plates of Catholic society and culture shifted. 

  In the 1100s and 1200s, there arrived the wonder and glory of Catholic Christian civilization.  Drama, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, fiction, and poetry all enkindled the Christian mind.  New aesthetic and spiritual harmonies filled the soul.  And the Catholic Golden Age was just getting warmed up.

Medieval Literature

      In the Middle Ages, Europeans were entertained by the poems of troubadours, the short plays of traveling actors, the songs of traveling minstrels, the tumbling and juggling of acrobats, and traveling circuses with animals.

            The century of the 1000s brought new Christmas plays with shepherds, an angel, and three kings visiting the baby Jesus in the manger.  In the 1100s, drama entered the church, including Bible mystery plays and post-Biblical miracle plays.  And by 1200, Catholics were reenacting the raising of Lazarus, the passion of Christ, and Peter, John, Mary, and Jesus at the tomb. 

            The passion enactments and miracle plays were enormously popular — attracting crowds up to 20,000 in number — and could last for a week or more.  With sets, costumes, instrumentalists, and singers, these were like Christian dramas with fairs, and they took place in open fields and market squares all over Europe. 

            French literature began in the 1000s, German literature in the 1100s, and English, Spanish, and Italian literature in the 1200s.  Catholics were now inspired by epics like King Arthur and the knights of the Roundtable and El Cid (hero of the reconquest of Spain), written by Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (1043-99).

            In the 1300s and beyond, Catholics’ spiritual imaginations were  inflamed by the poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and his epic Divine Comedy.  Dante captured in poetic verse a romantic and allegorical Thomism, ending — for his section on Heaven — with touches of the mystical vision of Bernard of Cluny.  Soon all of Europe rang with Dante’s verses.

           Despite the book’s bitter vituperations and barbarism, Dante was courageous and his book was filled with the sensitive, the grand, and the sublime.  And The Divine Comedy ends with the poet’s pure vision of entering “that high light which in itself is Truth,” that Divine radiance, “the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.”

Medieval Music

            Beginning in the 300s, monodic hymns drawn from the churches of Greece and the Near East — sometimes with the melody of the Hebrew singer (the cantor) — were translated into Latin. 

            From the 600s to the 1200s, Gregorian chant (or plain chant) was the official music of the Roman Catholic Church.  There was no instrumental accompaniment, and everyone sang the same note, with women and boys singing an octave higher.  In time, in medieval churches with organs, the chants were sung in three octaves.

            From the 700s on, Gregorian chants were embellished with tropes — extra words and melodies, even dialogue — and books were published to teach and preserve people’s favorite tropes.  By the 900s there were the first symphonia; the old monodic strain was called tenor, and a second strain was called melody.

            In the 900s, Odo the Abbott of Cluny (c. 878-942) and the monk Notker Balbulus (c. 840-912) resurrected the Greek device of naming each note in an octave with a letter.  They chose the first seven letters of the alphabet.

            In the mid-1020s, to better teach music to youth, the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (c. 991-c. 1030) named the notes ut (later changed to do), re, mi, fa, sol, and la.  (Later ti was added).  Guido also made a staff of four lines.  (A later teacher added a fifth line.)  Dots between lines of the staff signified the seven notes. 

            Guido and his choir boys now learned music in a few days that had previously taken them weeks.  Singers and other performers could now read music at sight, and were freed from having to memorize entire songs.  Composers could now break free of monodic music and experiment with polyphonic music: two or more voices simultaneously singing or playing different but harmonizing strains.

            Also in the 1000s, the priest and mathematician Franco of Cologne borrowed from Moslem musicians as he developed a system that became mensural notation.  Franco used symbols to show a singer or performer how long to hold each note.

            The 1000s brought harmonies with two independent voices.  Then came the motet with three, four, five, or even six different voices. 

            The foundations of modern musical composition were in place.  Bishops protested the new polyphonic music as too intoxicating, the Council of Lyons condemned it in 1274, and Pope John XXII condemned it in 1324.  But it spread from France to England and Spain, and in time Catholic leaders accepted it.

            The 1100s brought instrumental keys and the 1200s brought two great Franciscan hymns: Stahat Mater by Jacapone da Todi (c. 1230-1306) and Dies Irae by Thomas of Celano (c. 1200-c. 1265).

            Through the Middle Ages, Eastern Orthodox Christians continued to chant a capella while Catholics recited “low mass” or chanted or sang “high mass,” accompanied, increasingly, by a pipe organ.  The two favorite Catholic hymns of the Middle Ages were Te Deum and Veni Creator Spiritus.

Medieval Painting

In the 1100s and 1200s, some Byzantine painters revived the three main techniques of creative perspective: linear and aerial perspective and foreshortening.  In 1259, artists covered the walls of Saint Nicholas Church in Boyana (Bulgaria) with perspectival art. 

            In the West the innovation was led by Giovanni Cimabue (c. 1240-1302).  In Assisi, the drama and power of Cimabue’s wall paintings in the Upper Church of San Francisco include his grieving and lamenting Mary Magdalene.  In the Pisa Cathedral, his mosaic of Saint John displays both elegance and sympathy.

            With their own brilliant new style, Catholic artists added smiles, pure and sweet faces, joy, life, beauty, nobility, warmth, tenderness, passion, and grace to their portraiture.  Giving flesh to spirit, by the 1200s Catholic painters had become peers — equal peers — to the painters of Periclean Athens and Augustan Rome.

            Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) was the first painter to use perspective instinctively.  In 1305 and 1306, Giotto painted at Padua’s Arena Chapel his two finest surviving paintings: The Lamentation and Betrayal of Christ.  Giotto’s figures are wisely and skillfully grouped and are clearly located in real space and surroundings.  With their anxious and tearful faces, both paintings convey deep intensity of feeling.

            Two decades later, Giotto had added movement to his figures, and freedom, facility, and grace.  And so Giotto turned a painting into a window that makes visible a three-dimensional scene.  Viewers could step into a painting’s virtual scene and feel right at home.  Giotto used the new techniques to dramatize the battle between good and evil and scenes from the life of Christ and other Biblical figures. 

Medieval Sculpture

Niccolo Pisano (c. 1220-84), who carved tombs and cathedral pulpits out of white marble, may have been the first modern sculptor.  Like classical sculptors, Pisano tried to render the individual body, emotion, and character of each man and woman accurately – living and breathing and with a real face.

            In 1260, Pisano’s marble-reliefs in the pulpit in the baptistry of Pisa showed real human beings, fresh with life, their faces filled with anxiety and care.  In his immediate-relief sculpture, Pisano sculpted individual souls with real working bodies and real faces.

            Nicolo’s son Giovanni Pisano (c. 1240-c. 1320) designed and built the cathedral facade at Siena, the church pulpit at Sant’Andrea, and cemetery sculptures in Pisa — all with naturalness and grace.

            The three centuries from the 300s to the 500s brought the Syrian Christian renaissance.  While architects led the raising of 100 new churches, Syrian  Christians excelled at a variety of arts: mosaics, textiles finery, relief sculptures, and decorative arts. 

Medieval Architecture          

            In Eastern Christian society, the marvels of Constantinople always included its gilded-domed churches.  The Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, finished in 538, was a stunning achievement. 

In the 1100s, 1200s, and beyond, French Catholics spent 10 to 100 years building each of their magnificent Gothic cathedrals.  Between 1170 and 1270 alone, 500 French churches were built in the new Gothic style. 

            By the 1100s the cathedral of Chartres was famous for its sculpture and glass.  The cathedral of Chartres included 10,000 carved or pictured personages — men, women, children, saints, devils, and angels — with grace and depth.  In the central portal, seated in calm majesty over a happy crowd of sculpted and painted personages, is Jesus Christ, His Divine Hand held out, blessing the entering worshiper. 

            And here in the cathedral of Chartres are 174 stained-glass windows with 3,884 figures (historical and legendary), from kings to cobblers to the Prodigal Son — all suffused in dark reds, soft blues, emerald greens, saffrons, and yellows.  These and the remarkable stained-glass roses are the glory of Chartres.

            Inside Chartres, light bathes the altar in colors.  Chartres is a marvel of ethereal beauty — a mosaic of glass, sculpture, painting, color, and light that stirs us to a supreme experience of our faith.

            Suger (c. 1081-1151), the Benedictine Abbot and Regent of France, oversaw design and construction of the abbey church in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis.  Abbot Suger’s goal was a church that would enable the people of Paris to enter into a more intimate relationship with Christ. 

            Abbot Suger innovated with the spires, walls, windows, interior light, vaults, sculptures, mosaics, and murals of the cathedral.  Dedicated in 1144, the interior of Suger’s Cathedral of Saint Denis was more illuminated and filled with color than any before it, and the light suffusing across the altar seems as if to be Divine Light.

            Beginning in 1163, Bishop Maurice de Sully (d. 1196) oversaw early development of the Notre Dame de Paris, which was completed in 1250.  The Notre Dame de Paris is graced by a sculpture of a quietly majestic Christ with an angel at His right Hand.  This work is a triumph of ease and grace, arguably the greatest of all Gothic sculptures.

            Among the many elegant and joyful sculptures in the Cathedral of Amiens is the renowned Beau Dieu, on the west facade of the cathedral.  Here Christ stands in classic clothes, carrying the Gospel in His left Hand while His right Hand is raised in benediction.  He is a Ruler altogether benevolent and just.

            And so French Catholics of the 1200s and beyond worshiped amid the spires and stained-glass perfection of Chartres; the inspiring nave, uplifting vault, and elegant and joyful sculptures of Amiens; the sublimely complex facade of Reims; and the lines and harmonies of Notre Dame.

            What French priests and master builders pioneered soon spread across the continent.  

            In Spain, the cathedral of Toledo mixed elegant and somber immensity with passionate energy.  The cathedral of Leon, finished in 1303, mixed Moorish elements with Byzantine domes and half-domes and Gothic stained-glass masterpieces – and has a beauty unique in all the world.

            In Orvieto, Italy, Arnolfo di Cambio (c. 1232-c. 1300) and Lorenzo Maitani (c. 1275-1330) designed the cathedral.  Completed in 1330, every element in the Orvieto cathedral is a painstaking masterpiece, and the cathedral as a whole feels like a vast masterpiece painting.

            In 1296, di Cambio began designing and overseeing the building of three of the glories of Florence: the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Church of Santa Croce, and the Palazzo Vecchio.

            Across Europe, the outer walls of the cathedrals were magnificent sculptured facades, embellished with statues and pictures.  Inside their cathedrals and out, in marble, gold, silver, bronze, wood, and stone, Catholics could contemplate the glory of Creation, the tragedy of the Fall, the visions of the prophets, the life of Christ, the acts of apostles, the blessings of angels, and the struggles and triumphs of the saints.  Belief came to life, and the story of our faith unfolded before their eyes.

            And so Catholics gathered each Sunday in cathedrals that were, in and of themselves, masterpieces.  They worshiped surrounded by the genius, spirit, and hard work of their own peers and ancestors — in cathedrals that expressed the terror, myth, mystery, audacious energy, gentle grace, and tender longings of the medieval Christian faith.