Thread by @ChristianWriti1

Look carefully and you'll realise there's something funny about these paintings. All the faces are exactly the same. They're all the same person.

This is bcs a particular aspect of Gothic painting is "canonical" faces. They're not drawn from a live model.

👉🧵👇

In the Gothic sacred art tradition, figures were based on proportional templates passed down through workshops or manuals. A saint’s face wasn’t a portrait of a specific person; it was a visual formula designed to show their holiness, not what they looked like.

A Gothic “canonical” face: Oval or elongated head, High forehead, Long, narrow nose, small, closed lips, large, almond-shaped eyes.
These weren’t meant to be realistic, they were *idealised*. The same visual grammar applied across saints, angels, the Christ Child &the Virgin.

Zoom in on the faces, and you can see it: they're all the same face.

Why not use real people? Because Gothic sacred art wasn’t about capturing the moment, it was about revealing the eternal. Realism would anchor the sacred in the everyday. Canonical types lifted the viewer out of the changeable-ness of time and into contemplation.

These paintings are a "prototype," called simply a Madonna and Child (or Sacred Conversation), standard ways to depict Christ, Mary, angels and saints that constitute a sacred language, instantly known to the viewer.
This can't be anyone except Mary, Christ and angels.

The point isn't recognisability or "relatability" but universality. A Gothic Madonna isn’t just some random woman, it’s THE Woman, THE archetype of purity. These forms speak across centuries because they tap into the orderliness of the cosmos.

In earlier painting, like this Cimabue "Maesta" (Majesty, another prototype), it's even more pronounced by the abstraction of the forms. Naturalism isn't necessary for sacred painting bcs we are not trying to "relate" to the figure, but *pray* to the person depicted.

Canonical proportions reflect a natural universe ordered by God toward heaven. You’re not praying before a portrait of a random model who took a job in a local studio. You’re engaging with an image constructed on universal principles, like sacred geometry or liturgical chant.

You can easily see how these proportional "canons" were pioneered by the Byzantines in their iconography. This is the "Hodegetria" icon prototype, brought over to Italy that became the Madonna and Child type.

This was obviously never meant to be a "portrait".

And this became the standard way of depicting sacred persons throughout the middle ages. These are not "primitive" works; far from it. They're canonical, idealised and ordered toward a greater cosmic reality.

Want to know more about how to really see and understand these magnificent pre-Renaissance works? The sacred art of Christianity for 1200 years?

Click to subscribe and join the discussion here:
open.substack.com/pub/hilarywhit…

The canons in sacred painting is part of the larger Christian cosmological worldview in which all sacred art forms, chant, architecture, liturgy, were interconnected through a shared grammar of number and proportion. Just as Gregorian chant was not composed to stir emotion...

but to create a complete immersion in this cosmological worldview of divine orderliness. The fact that the human face and body can be drawn according to precise proportional canons implies that the human person is part of a divinely ordered reality.

But I warn you: if you dive deeply into this, it will change you. Your way of seeing art and meaning, even your grasp of reality itself will shift. And the change is irreversible. You won’t be able to go back to how you saw things before. It'll be like climbing out of the Matrix.

All of this is what this very famous image by Leonardo da Vinci means.

Read about the canons of sacred art, and start climbing out of the modernist Matrix, here:

open.substack.com/pub/hilarywhit…