,
5 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
When people speak of "bad" medieval art, or medieval artists who "can't" draw, generally they're referring to the absence of naturalism (portraying things as they "actually look"). But look at this majestic Vierge Ouvrante, pictured here in Elina Gertsman's book _Worlds Within_+
Medieval artists could be masterful conjurors of form for a wide range of effects that just can't be achieved by naturalism. Gertsman spends the length of a book unspooling the many threads of meaning that these sculptures generate.
psupress.org/books/titles/9… +
psupress.org/books/titles/9… +
Some artists may have chosen to convey the humanity of Christ by rendering both him and his mother as convincingly as possible, attending to the veins and tendons beneath his once living skin. +
While others facilitated an interactive performance that conscripted real humans into the process of bringing Christ into the world (opening the sculpture). These are hardly convincing illusions of reality. Yet, to my and many others' minds, they are as expressively powerful. +
Learning to gauge the impact of art by metrics other than naturalism is an inherently progressive act. It understands that there are many, many ways to communicate successfully and to interact with the world.
