The Middle Ages
For medieval thinkers all beauty was ultimately God’s beauty, and the visible world a sign pointing upwards. The question was how the pleasures of the senses could lead to the spiritual instead of away from it – a question that received its most magnificent answer in the light of the Gothic cathedrals.
The Middle Ages had no word corresponding to our “art”. The Latin ars meant skill, anything that can be done according to rules – building, forging, weaving or calculating. The seven liberal arts, among them geometry and music, were academic subjects, whereas painting, sculpture and building were counted among the mechanical arts, manual labour. There was thus no special theory of the fine arts. But there was a rich theology of beauty, and it shaped both how cathedrals were built and how images were understood. Nor were images and buildings meant to be enjoyed as in a museum. They had tasks: to teach, to honour God and the saints, to display a patron’s piety and power. Their value lay as much in material, purpose and correct execution as in form.
The theologians built on two legacies. One was biblical: the Book of Wisdom says that God has ordered all things in measure, number and weight. The other was Greek, above all the Neoplatonic idea that beauty radiates from a divine source. When the two were combined, creation itself became a work of art, God its artist and beauty a trace of the creator in things. To love visible beauty was therefore not wrong in itself, but it must not become an end. It was to be a ladder – the same image Plato had used in the Symposium, now with God at the top. The world could also be read like a book: nature, like the Bible, had several meanings, and a thing could be both itself and a symbol of something higher.
No one expressed this with greater personal intensity than Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa. As a young teacher of rhetoric he had written a book on the beautiful and the fitting, which has been lost. In his Confessions, written around 397–400, he looks back on how he lost himself in the beauty of the world: “Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new.” For Augustine beauty is unity, number and order. He asks whether things are beautiful because they please, or please because they are beautiful, and answers that they please because they are beautiful. Beauty is in things, not merely in the beholder. In On True Religion he reflects on how we judge a building: we like windows and arches to correspond to one another, and we can do so because we carry within us an inner sense of unity that goes beyond what we actually see. No body is wholly unified, but all beautiful bodies strive towards unity.
Augustine also explained why the ugly and evil can have a place in a good creation: just as shadows are part of a painting and contrasts give force to a speech, even the dark contributes to the beauty of the whole. At the same time he warned against the lust of the eyes, the countless objects, clothes, pictures and ornaments that people make far beyond what is needed. The tension between enjoying beauty and distrusting it runs through the whole of the Middle Ages. Number also acquired a tradition of its own through Boethius, who around 500 wrote a textbook on music in which the music of the world, of human beings and of instruments rests on the same ratios. It was read at the universities for almost a thousand years.
The second great source was a Greek author who around 500 wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian who according to the Acts of the Apostles was converted by Paul. In fact he was a Syrian monk influenced by the late Neoplatonist Proclus, and he is therefore called Pseudo-Dionysius. In the treatise On the Divine Names God is called Beauty itself, the source of all harmony and all light. In The Celestial Hierarchy he describes how light flows down through the ranks of angels to human beings and the material world – and how human beings can ascend by the same path by seeing visible signs as images of the invisible. Pseudo-Dionysius also holds that the divine is so exalted that it is better described by what it is not, the so-called negative theology. That is why even lowly and unexpected images can serve as signs of the holy.
Meanwhile images themselves became a burning issue. Around 600 Pope Gregory the Great wrote that images in churches are for the unlettered what scripture is for those who can read. In the Byzantine Empire the opposite view led to Iconoclasm in the 8th and 9th centuries, when images of Christ and the saints were destroyed. The Council of Nicaea in 787 defended images with the argument that the veneration shown to an image passes on to the one it depicts. The Byzantine icon and mosaic, such as the one with Justinian in Ravenna, are therefore not depictions of a scene but windows onto something eternal: the gold background is light, not sky. In the West images never quite achieved the same sacred status as in the East; they remained first and foremost narratives, instruction and decoration.
The clearest meeting of the theology of light and architecture took place at Saint-Denis, north of Paris. In the 1130s and 1140s Abbot Suger had the abbey church rebuilt, and the new choir, consecrated in 1144, is usually regarded as the beginning of the Gothic. Slender columns, pointed arches and rib vaults made it possible to replace large parts of the wall with stained glass, so that the choir was filled with a “wonderful and uninterrupted light”. Suger himself wrote about the building and justified his precious objects by saying that the dull mind rises to truth through material things. The abbey was dedicated to Saint Denis, who was then believed to be the same man as the author Dionysius – which is why his writings were close at hand. The new way of building spread rapidly, and within a few decades cathedrals had been begun at Laon, Paris and Chartres, among other places, with ever higher vaults and ever larger windows.
How far Suger was really influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius has been debated. In 1946 the art historian Erwin Panofsky made the connection the core of his interpretation of the Gothic, and that view was long widely accepted. Later scholars have pointed out that Suger’s texts contain relatively little theology and a great deal of pride in gold, precious stones and the speed of the building work. Suger’s contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux saw the splendour with different eyes: in a famous treatise he attacked the monasteries’ lavish churches and the fantastic monsters on the capitals, which drew the monks’ attention away from prayer. Both splendour and asceticism had their theology.
Number mysticism also had a practical side. Master builders constructed plans and façades with compass and straight edge on the basis of simple geometric figures, often squares and equilateral triangles, which could be transferred from drawing to building site without advanced calculation. How important this was considered can be seen in a famous dispute during the building of Milan Cathedral around 1400. The French master builder Jean Mignot asserted that art without science is nothing and that the local builders lacked the geometric principles that make a building stable. The Lombard builders replied that science is one thing and art another. The question of whether beauty and stability follow from rules or from experience was thus alive long before the Renaissance theorists took it up.
In the 13th century the universities of Paris and Oxford gained access to Aristotle’s writings, and theologians began to systematise the faith using his concepts. In the Summa theologiae Thomas Aquinas offered some brief formulations that later became classic. The beautiful is that which pleases when seen. Beauty requires wholeness, due proportion and clarity, claritas – a radiance in which the form shines forth. The beautiful and the good are the same in reality, but the good is what is desired and the beautiful what pleases in the very act of contemplation and knowing. Here is an early idea of a contemplation that does not wish to possess what it sees, a theme that Kant would make central five hundred years later. The question of beauty did not stand alone. Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln and teacher at Oxford, saw light as the first form, from which the whole material world had expanded, and theologians debated whether beauty belonged to the properties shared by all being, like the good and the true. What Thomas himself thought on that point is disputed.
The cathedrals united all of this: number mysticism in their proportions, the theology of light in their stained glass, and stories for the unlettered in the sculpture of the portals and the images of the windows. At Chartres, rebuilt after a fire in 1194, the windows have survived to an unusually large extent. But at the same time something new was beginning. Around 1305 Giotto painted the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua with figures who have weight, stand in a space and grieve with their whole bodies. Dante wrote in the Divine Comedy that Giotto now had the fame that Cimabue had once enjoyed. At about the same time handbooks for painters began to be written. Cennino Cennini’s book on the craft of painting, from around 1400, teaches how to grind colours and apply gilding, but also says that painting requires imagination and that nature is the best model. The interest in the visible human being and the visible world pointed ahead to the Renaissance, which would seek beauty in nature and in antiquity as much as in the sacred.