Early Medieval Art

Wall painting, in general, proves the most resistant to immediate appreciation of all early medieval media.  And yet, the testimony of wall painting to the destructive power of the passage of time drew me to art history in the first place.  But the context of wall painting evokes as much as its fragments do, and on our side of the ocean we can only go so far in the re-creation of context.

How then to situate the students most effectively in the space of the wall paintings?  And how to stimulate their ability to fill in the gaps in order to envision wall paintings at the moment of their creation?

In practical terms, I use plans with the location of the studied scene highlighted.  I also show views of the entire wall, if I have them, so that students can see where to find the scene in its architectural context.  I also present multiple scenes from one church in the sequence that the worshipper would have encountered them, so that the students can associate movement through the space with a succession of images.  The rare well-written article in English also helps.  And I feel immense gratitude for computer reconstructions, such as we find in the La Pittura medievale a Roma, 312-1431 series.

But I suppose only study trips to Europe may truly solve this problem!

In the course of advising my students on their seminar papers, I have realized that even students with a  serious interest in medieval may lack familiarity with the basic research tools.   So, I offer here the starting points for any research project:

Bibliography of the History of Art (by way of library subscription)

International Medieval Bibliography (by way of library subscription)

Index of Christian Art (by way of library subscription)

Hollis Catalogue

A meaningful art history learning experience should provide an authentic simulation of the art historian’s craft.  A higher-level art history survey should therefore include a substantial writing assignment.  

When I taught ‘Caves to Cathedrals’, I did not incorporate a writing assignment, but devoted most of class time to developing the students’ ability to describe and to compare and then on both the mid-term and final exams assessed these skills.  I simply had too many students to respond meaningfully to a writing assignment.  But I was amazed to see that the oral practice of the skill of description translated to its written mastery.

My early medieval art survey numbers thirty-five students, ten of whom are graduate students, who have different requirements, leaving twenty-five papers to read.  When I planned the writing component of the course, I thought only of optomizing its pedagogical value and not at all of my time. 

Writing Assignment

You can see that I required three papers.  As of yesterday, I have read, responded to, and returned the first two papers.  I have learned several important lessons.  First of all, I will never assign this much writing again.  Although my students’ writing has noticeably improved from the first paper to the second, I have had my fill of reading student papers and have no more comments to give!  Second, I have learned not to expect a student to have learned how to describe a work of art and to compare two works of art in an introductory art history survey (a prerequisite for enrollment in this class).  The first two assignments – the first focusing on description, the second on comparison - would have sufficed.  Third, I have learned that students need a lot of guidance, even more than I provided by the very structure and progression of the writing assignments as well as by time in class devoted to explaining how to describe a work of art.  Fourth, no previous professor may have ever asked the student to avoid the passive voice.  Of course, not all disciplines avoid passive constructions, and a quick glance at any volume of the Art Bulletin or Gesta will turn up examples of the passive voice.  But the ability to eliminate the passive voice constitutes a basic writing skill, and one may discern a direct relationship between absence of the passive voice and the read-ability of a paper. 

After reading the first paper, a simple description, I sacrificed one class for each subsequent paper so that students could exchange papers and offer one another comments for revision.  So far we have had one such workshop, and I have learned that students need guidance even in this.  For the next workshop, I will provide the following instructions:

1. Highlight all forms of the verb to be and suggest re-phrasings.

2. Compare the descriptions of the images to the images themselves to confirm the accuracy of the descriptions.

3. Read the entire text aloud (quietly, of course).  Mark any phrase that does not sound right.  Then think about why it doesn’t sound right.  Write a brief comment explaining this and suggest a re-phrasing.

The historical study of art also develops skills particular to the discipline.  These include: 

• the precise description of the content and form of a work of art (for pedagogical purposes, I label these skills Iconography and Formal Analysis)
• the identification of traditional and innovative elements in a work of art
• the establishment of the historical context of a work of art through the meaningful relating of image to text
• the discernment of a program encompassing the various elements of a single monument.

I have ordered these skills from lower level to higher.  I will elaborate on each in due course.

When I taught the first part of the two-semester art history survey last fall, I decided to privilege the cultivation of the students’ looking and describing skills.  With this decision came, by necessity, a de-emphasis on content.  Although one cannot separate higher-level thinking skills from meaningful content, the massive amount of information presented in any ‘Caves to Cathedrals’ survey text far surpasses the time that even the most devoted of undergraduates would allot to an introductory art history class.  I reasoned that the skills that the study of art history develops would prove of greater value to my students than knowledge of the precise dates of every object and monument in the textbook.  Furthermore, recognizing the wide range of student abilities in my classes, I quickly adjusted my expectations so that they need only know the period of every work of art.  The lecture component of any given class consisted of clarifying the defining features of a given period – generally speaking, time, place, and style.  But I devoted the remainder of class time to active learning.  Mostly, I presented an image from the textbook and asked them what they saw.  I wanted my students to see things for themselves, not have them pointed out to them (active versus passive learning).  At the end of the course, my students knew how to describe a work of art, the importance of which only a non-art historian would doubt.

This spring, in my early medieval art survey, I couldn’t sacrifice content for skills, so I have reverted to the more traditional lecture format to ensure that the students acquire a certain amount of knowledge.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I lack a survey text to rely on to present the most basic of information about the objects and monuments that we study.  To compensate, I provide a comprehensive image guide a pdf document of the slides before each class, in addition to a pdf document of images from the same period that we do not have time to cover in class.  For each and every object or monument, I strive to make available to the students every illuminated folio, painted wall, or carved side.  I then ask the students to prepare for class by looking closely at all of the images while referring to the image guide.  Of course, if an assignment does not involve reading or writing, students need some convincing of its value.  Although I believe that undergraduates should develop independence in their learning, I still do not know how best to enforce it.  And yet, the employment of active learning techniques in my early medieval art survey depends on the students having covered some ground on their own, and, in general, they don’t, so I haven’t.

In subsequent postings, I will offer some ideas that I have had a chance to try out and others that I would have liked to, and I welcome ideas on how to cover larger areas of content without a survey text and still using active learning techniques.

Since the early medieval survey that I teach this semester begins ca. 600 and ends ca. 1050, finding a textbook proved challenging.  Most of the newer early medieval surveys (such as Early Medieval Art (Oxford History of Art) by Larry Nees and The Early Middle Ages: From Late Antiquity to A.D. 1000 (Taschen’s World Architecture) by Xavier Baral I Altet) begin with late Antiquity and/or include early Byzantine material, neither of which I cover in this class.  For both, I considered the number of relevant chapters too few.  An older survey, such as John Beckwith’s Early Medieval Art: Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque (World of Art) doesn’t cover the first third of the class, and I do not consider Romanesque early Medieval, as a matter of principle.  Furthermore, this text shows too much its age and would require constant correction. 

If I should wish for a translation, Piotr Skubiszewski’s L’art du haut Moyen Age covers most of the objects and monuments that I do, if not more and, at moments, even offers profound insights.  But it too reveals its origin too clearly.  The edited volume, De Mahomet à Charlemagne : la Méditerrannée et l’art, most closely matches my pan-Mediterranean approach, but this course, for reasons of curriculum, restricts itself to the West.

Ultimately, I opted for Charles McClendon’s The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600-900 combined with the essays dealing with art and architecture in the first three volumes of the New Cambridge Medieval History series, the first by Ian Wood in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700, the second by Larry Nees in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 2: c. 700-c. 900, and the third by Henry Mayr-Harting in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 3: c. 900-c. 1024.  McClendon stops slightly short of the terminus of the course, but his focus on architecture well complements my own emphasis on art, and he is utterly reliable.  I did not require its purchase, however, because of its cost.  The NCMH essays condense the material quite a bit, but I could rely on them.

I felt keenly the lack of a suitable survey and apparently so did the students, for I heard reports that some even consulted Stokstad’s Art History.  Perhaps some day…

Please permit me to say a bit about my teaching philosophy, as it informs much of the material on this website. 

Text-based disciplines develop close reading skills, but only a student who ventures into an art history class chances upon an opportunity to develop his or her close looking skills.  These close looking skills include: the careful observation of detail; the precise recall of images no longer before the eye; the awareness of the scale of objects and monuments and their relation to the beholder through space; and the recognition of patterns and of differences.  These skills form the foundation for art historical study and should therefore inform the teaching of the traditional art history survey. 

One develops attention to detail simply by slowing down the looking of the students and developing their patience with visual material. Practice in visual recall may be incorporated into a class by naming a previously-studied image and asking the students what they remember about it before showing it for comparison purposes.  A tape measure provides the best tool for the development of the appreciation of scale.  The careful selection of images – for example, showing corners, floor-to-ceiling views, and people standing within a space - and the presentation of an image in a church with the image’s location highlighted on a plan of the church or a detail alongside an image of the whole with its location highlighted cultivate spatial awareness. 

Slide: Image and Location and Spatial Awareness

Slide: Relation of Detail to Whole and Spatial Awareness

Finally, the traditional slide comparison enables the recognition of pattern and difference.  Power Point reduces the scale of two projected images; details therefore become essential.

How should a department that aims for a comprehensive view of the history of art through offering upper-level survey courses divide up the early Middle Ages?  Accordance with the grand art history surveys may prove convenient, but it separates material that students should encounter within a single learning context. 

I offer here a few possibilities.

Option 1: A Pan-Mediterranean Approach, 3 Classes

Art of the Late Antique Mediterranean (4th through 6th Centuries, Constantine through Justinian with the earliest Christian art of the 3rd century included, also earlier Sassanian)

Art of the Post-Antique Mediterranean (6th through 8th Centuries: Early Byzantine, Coptic, Visigothic, Longobard, Merovingian, earlier Anglo-Saxon, later Sassanian, Umayyad)

Art of the Early Medieval Mediterranean (Carolingian, Ottonian, early Middle Byzantine, Abbasid, Asturian, Mozarabic, and Umayyad Spain, later Anglo-Saxon England)

Option 2: The Gardner Model, 3 Classes (does not include Islamic)

Late Antique

Byzantine (beginning with Justinian)

Early Medieval

Option 3: The Stokstad Model, 2 Classes (again, does not include Islamic)

Early Christian and Byzantine

Early Medieval

My preference leans toward option 1.  It encourages meaningful contextualization, for each course would cover a reasonable span of time and the transmission of ideas through visual means would tie the courses more tightly together than the artificial narrative traditionally imposed upon the artistic production of the Early Middle Ages.

The curriculum within which I teach this semester set the parameters of my Early Medieval Art course.  The medieval curriculum here at FSU (amazingly) includes: Byzantine Art; Late Antique/Early Christian Art; Late Medieval Art; and Early Medieval Art.  EMA therefore begins after Ravenna, ends before Romanesque, and sticks rather closely to Western Europe (although I could have probably ventured a bit further eastward- for example to medieval Croatia).  This curriculum accords with the history of art surveys of Gardner, Stokstad, and Adams (but not Honour and Fleming).  I will have more to say about these surveys at a later time.

I define my field of research more broadly and in an ideal world would call it the early medieval Mediterrannean.  As such, early medieval art includes the art of the following periods (some overlapping perhaps inevitable):

• Early Byzantium, from Constantine’s establishment of Constantinople as the imperial capital up to and including Iconoclasm
• The later Roman Empire in the west, from the moment of the earliest Christian art (mid 3rd C.) to the end of the Roman empire in the west (476)
• Coptic Egypt
• The Sassanian Empire
• The Umayyad Dynasty
• The Abbasid Dynasty
• Papal Rome from the time of Sylvester to the beginning of the eleventh century
• Ostrogothic Italy
• Longobard Italy
• Visigothic Spain
• Merovingian France
• Anglo-Saxon England (from Sutton Hoo to Alfred the Great to Aethelwold)
• The Spanish Kingdom of Asturias
• Umayyad Cordoba
• Mozarabic Spain
• Carolingian Europe
• Ottonian Europe

This semester I have been using “My Maps” at Google Maps.  At the beginning of each class, I log onto my account and choose the map that I have created and saved for that particular day.  I prefer the “terrain” option, but “satellite” offers a bit more drama with its bright blue waters.  I would use Google Earth, but the room in which I teach has a computer that works at a snail’s pace.  In my graduate seminar, for their presentations, some of my students have captured their maps with “Alt” + “Prt SC” and then inserted them into their Power Point Presentations, but I prefer being able to move the mouse over the area covered in any given class to give a sense of the intervening distances.