ARTH 4007 Bohemian Sculpture

Now we want to talk about Bohemian sculpture in the early 15th century. We're going to show you two examples. One is one of these beautiful Madonnas, the Chaunet Madonna, and this one is from Bohemia, it's called the Crumo Madonna because that's where it's from, and as you can see it's from the very end of the 14th century, about 1390 to 1400, and it's a little under life-size or maybe a very short person, about four feet three inches, made out of stone. The other is a Pietà or Vesperbilt, and we'll talk about the meaning of those words, an image of Mary holding the dead Christ, dating from the very earliest years of the 15th century, about 1400 to 1410, so both of these circa 1400, and this of course is what we call polychromed or painted stone. We've been talking about the master of the Trebone altarpieces, beautiful Madonna, and the beautiful style or sometimes the soft style, this is the one of a number of images of the Madonna where they are beautiful, dainty, graceful, courtly figures. Essentially you have that high Gothic elegance and in some ways carried even further, particularly as you can see with these very active drapery folds. So here we have our beautiful, dainty Madonna, you know, who could be a princess in a court, and the Christ child as you can see looks very much like a baby, he's wiggling, he's twisting around, so you have that idea of both the elegance and a certain amount of naturalism. Mary has a pose that is sometimes called the hip shot position, in which the Christ child is held up as though he were being held on one hip, or you can just think of it as a beautiful S or reverse S pose, and as you can see one side of Mary, you know, you have to imagine the hip, it's under all that drapery, is extended out, the Christ child is kind of resting on that side, and her head is turned in the direction of the Christ child, and you have this lovely, in this case, sort of a reverse S curve rather than a figure that just sort of stands there straight up. It makes for a much more beautiful shape. Along with this idea of rhythmic grace, you also have drapery folds, in this case they are extremely abundant, and they're very active, some of them are undercut, which means exactly what it says, that they have been cut under, so they're making a darker shadow, and these can be very, very active and enhance that idea of the beauty of the Madonna. One of the images that you see over and over again in German medieval and Renaissance art is known either as the Pietà or the Vesperbild, and this is an image of Mary, the mother, holding her dead son, Jesus, after the crucifixion. Now, he's dead, he's being held in her arms, you are supposed to make an analogy between the mother holding the baby Jesus and here the mother holding her adult son. Now, the Italian name for this subject is Pietà, a word that literally means both pity and piety. In German, they'll usually call it a Vesperbild, which means, and Bild is image, Vesper is Vespers, so it's sort of like an image to look at at Vespers. There are other Vesperbild of other subjects, for example, an image of Christ at the Last Supper with John leaning against his master's breast, so it's a more general term, but it is also applied to the image of Mary holding her dead son. Now, this is a devotional image. The German word is an Andachsbild, Dachs, you're thinking, Andachs, thinking on or contemplating, Bild, image, so an image to contemplate, an image to think on, or we would simply say a devotional image. When you see this image, you should be affected, it should move you emotionally, and it is an example of that affective piety that we've talked about. The devout viewer is expected to pray before the image and probably to weep and remember that it is his sins or her sins that brought about Christ's death, in other words, all of mankind is responsible because all are sinners. Now, this particular image, it shows two figures and it is a devotional image, it is not a narrative scene where you have, say, all of the people who are lamenting the death of Christ and he's laid out just about ready to be put into the tomb. We do have that subject in Christian art, it's called a lamentation or a lamentation over the body of Christ. Now, that's considered to be a narrative and you would have many figures with the different poses, you know, mourning the death of Christ. This is taken out of that setting and you concentrate only on the two figures for devotions. As you can see, in this particular Vesper Bild, Mary is shown as one of these beautiful Madonna's. She is youthful, she is beautiful, she is graceful, she doesn't have a line on her face. This emphasizes her purity, the idea that she is sinless. Not all Pietà or Vesper Bild will show you the youthful, beautiful Virgin. Sometimes Mary will be shown as older and sometimes she'll be, her face will be distorted with grief, particularly some of the things from the earlier 13th century in which they are really emphasizing the suffering of Christ, but here around 1400 we see this beautiful, ideal Virgin. The Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, is shown rigid in death as though rigor mortis has at least in part set in and, as you can see, it gives you a certain amount of movement within the form. In this case, it's a strong diagonal that reaches, you know, across the body of Mary and then Mary is pulled back a little bit and her head is tipped toward Christ to sort of answer and balance that strong diagonal movement. You can also see that the paint shows you the bright red blood, the courses from the wound, and that you can see some of it on his leg and on his hands, and of course there would also be on the feet, but they're turned so we can't really see that. We also want to talk about printmaking in the early 15th century. The earliest prints that we have in the Western world are woodcuts, and these are prints that are being made by taking a block of wood and cutting away everything that will not print, and then the remaining raised surface is inked and printed. We often put these in a larger category of relief prints, meaning that where the raised or relief surface is inked and printed, and there are other types such as, for example, a linoleum print, which of course you would not have in the 15th century, no linoleum, a lino cut they call them now. Here is an actual woodcut block from the 15th century, and as you can see it is a nativity, and you can see that certain parts of it are raised, these will, if you ink these with a dauber or a roller, here probably a dauber, you apply ink and the raised surface will print, and of course it will print in reverse, so you have to kind of imagine this, that if this were printed the baby Jesus would be on the viewer's right rather than the viewer's left, as you see it here. Well, let's look at one of these actual prints. This is known as Les Baux, protot, from the protot collection. Les Baux means the wood, so it's sort of the protot wood or the protot woodcut we would say. It's believed to be French, possibly Burgundian, and it is the earliest known woodcut. It dates from the late 14th century, around 1380 to 1400. It was created on a wood block and it is only a fragment of the image. It is a fragment of the crucifixion, and so you see the centurion Longinus pointing up to Christ saying, you know, truly this must be the Son of God and two soldiers standing behind him, and at the very top left of the print you can see the cross and the arm of Christ extended out. So this would have been part of a larger image, probably printed with three separate blocks. So you might have another block that shows Christ in the center, for example, and another block with Mary and John and perhaps some of the holy women on the other side. Of course those parts don't exist, we just are extrapolating from other images of the crucifixion. Okay, how would you create a 15th century woodcut? Now remember these are not thought of as fine art the way we would think of today, perhaps, a print. These were thought of as more commercial art, the same way as we might a reproductive, a reproduction of, say, a work of art, but these of course today are considered to be a work of art because we now believe that the printmaking, even if it's not as expensive as painting with all of the very expensive pigments, that it is of artistic or aesthetic value and I think you would certainly agree when you look at this beautiful image of St. Dorothy here. It was commercial production and it involved a number of people. Generally it would be the printer who would probably organize everything. We might think of him as the kind of publisher and he would hire an artist and the artist would create the design, probably on a piece of paper, and then that design would be transferred to the block. Either it could be glued down on the block and then the carver would cut right through it or perhaps an artist could even draw directly on the block, but probably more likely the design would then be transferred, probably glued down on the block, and then you have the woodcarver and the woodcarver cuts away everything that is not a black line, cuts right through that original design, that original drawing, and then of course you'd have to, you know, clean off the remains of the drawing and ink the block using a dauber, probably, possibly a roller, spread the ink over the surface as it projects, you try to not get it down in the the grooves, and then the printer would print the block. You've probably seen pictures of early screw presses in which you have a printer, you down, there's a screw that comes up and goes sort of whop on the block below, so what you would do is he would have the block inked and place a piece of paper over it and put it in the printing press and then, you know, manipulate the lever and this would come down and go whop on the top, put pressure on it, and then, you know, he would pull up the print and ink the block again and print, and they get very fast with this. These particular images are what we call a single leaf. You also use woodcut images in books where you could print the book and then put in the image as long as it's type high, as they say, the same height as the type. Single leaf woodcuts were used for a number of purposes. The ones we're looking at here were religious purposes. Not everybody can afford a painting. A painting would be a very expensive, luxurious item, but ordinary people might want to have a picture of their favorite saint. You know, they could say their prayers in front of it, they could, you know, be reminded of the intercession of the saint, and so we often see these religious images such as the one we're looking at right now. As you can see, we have one that is black and white, white paper, black ink, use any shade of ink, and another one which has color in it, and sometimes if you wanted something, it'd be a little bit more expensive, but you wanted to add color, the printer could hire someone to use watercolors and add color, the painter would add color by hand. Now a little bit later they get what they call chiaroscuro woodcuts, where you could put the color with another block, but at this early stage you just basically have, you know, black or brown, some dark hue for the lines, and then if you want color that would be printed, that would be painted by hand. There are other reasons for woodcuts, they're used in all sorts of commercial production, playing cards for one thing, souvenirs, you go on pilgrimage and you could buy a picture of your favorite saint, or maybe a little pilgrims badge, which they can make out of all sorts of things, a paper one obviously wouldn't last very long. When we look at the history of early woodcuts, we sometimes talk about the different phases, and these come out of the writings of Arthur M. Hind, often A. M. Hind, he wrote some of the early books talking about the development of the woodcut and the development of engraving, and for woodcut he said there were four phases of 15th century woodcuts. What we're looking at is what he called phase one, dating from the first quarter of the century, and the characteristics of that are the use of bold lines and very rhythmic curving lines, as you can see, and if you look at the saint's drapery here, you can see these loops that form the folds of her drapery, and some of them go into a kind of U and then taper back like an old-fashioned hairpin, and we often call these hairpinned loops or hairpin bends. There's no shading or hatching. The early shading was done with parallel lines, we'll see that later, but here, you know, as you can see for the drapery, for the figure, we just have these beautiful curving lines that set up a wonderful rhythmic pattern across the surface of the woodcut, and there are no lines to shade or model the figures. So we're looking at St. Dorothy, this is a German woodcut from about 1420, and it shows the saint with the Christ child. There's actually a legend about St. Dorothy that when she went to martyrdom after she got to heaven, she dropped down flowers from the heavenly gardens, you know, sort of to prove she was in heaven. The crown would be her martyr's crown, and here she is in her, in the heavenly gardens as it were, with the Christ child. Looks like they've been gathering flowers together. It just makes a very charming, very beautiful image. The other woodcut that we're showing you here is an Agony in the Garden, or Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and this could be either Bohemian or German, remember our borders are not exactly the same thing, and there's so much influence going back and forth. It dates possibly just a little bit earlier, about 1410, 1420, and as you can see, they have left the background completely solid, so it can be inked and gives you that sense of a night scene, and a dark back, or just simply a dark back room in which the figures are silhouetted against them. You can see in the sleeves of Christ the loops, and some of the things that we've seen in painting before actually, the little tiny trees, the wattle fence, this woven fence, and of course this is Christ before he is arrested and taken to his death, praying in the garden, he prays, you know, let this cup pass from me. In other words, you know, please if it's possible, you know, don't let me go into suffering and death, and then he says, but thy will be done. Some of his closest companions, three of the Apostles, Peter, John, and James went with him, but they fell asleep, so you see them here, it's got a little huddled up triangular form, they've gone to sleep. Here we're looking at the St. Dorothy woodcut in the black and white version without the hand coloring. Now, they do not paint every single woodcut in, say, every St. Dorothy they printed. No color, it would be cheaper. Maybe they could sell more of those, but maybe some people would be willing to pay a little more money to have color added to their print, and so some of these, evidently, were hand colored. Now, in this case, this is the only version of this print that is hand colored that has survived, so it is a unique image. We can't compare it to others and see if they may have used different colors and in different ones. That's the only one. We think that frequently woodcut designs may have been deprived from paintings. Certainly the vocabulary, you know, is similar to pictures that we have seen. So here we have our picture of the agony in the garden, Christ in Gethsemane, and we're comparing it to the Trebone altarpiece, agony in the garden, the same scene, and you can see that Christ is very, very similar. You know, he's bent in a very similar way, perhaps bent over a little bit more in the painting, but, you know, very, very close, and then they've shifted the sides where the three sleeping apostles are on the opposite side. Remember, when you cut your woodcut, it's always going to be reversed, but this wouldn't have been a copy of something, of this painting, because then Christ would be facing the opposite direction too, wouldn't he? But it has similar elements. They've even used things like the little tiny trees, which of course are the tradition of the time, the figures are important, the trees are just there to sort of tell you where the setting is, and they've used the stone, the stony landscape, the hilly landscape, to separate the two parts of the figures. In the Trebone altarpiece there is this rocky separation between Christ and the apostles. In the woodcut, the hill rises up behind the apostles, so when you can see them clearly, they're marked off, and then of course Christ is silhouetted against the dark background.