History of painting: 06

(after last publication)

International Gothic: 14th - 15th century AD

The Europe of the Middle Ages, dominated by a powerful church and criss-crossed by pilgrim routes, has enjoyed a culture which largely transcends geographical regions. It is appropriate therefore that the final style of medieval art should also be common to much of the continent.

This style, flourishing between about 1375 and 1425, is known to art historians as International Gothic - or sometimes simply the International Style. It is characterized by figures of a slender and even winsome elegance, painted with great confidence but looking somewhat ill-equipped for the hurly-burly of everyday life. The style can be traced back to Italian artists of the early 14th century, such as Simone Martini.

It reaches its mature form at the end of the century. The Wilton Diptych, painted in about 1395-9 and now in London's National Gallery, is often quoted as an outstanding example. Against gilded backgrounds a kneeling king, Richard II, is presented by three saints to the Virgin and Child and a host of blue-robed angels.

The stillness of the scene, and the beauty of the robes and the angels' wings, makes this a glimpse of an ideal world. Its international quality is attested by the inability of the experts to decide whether it was painted in England, France, Italy or Bohemia. This international style features in a more relaxed and secular form (though still with the same slender decorative figures) in the prayer books or 'books of hours' illustrated in the early 15th century for the duke of Berry, a member of the French royal family. The most famous of them is the Très Riches Heures (Very Rich Hours), illustrated between about 1411 and 1416 by the three Limburg brothers.

The artists, from the border region between modern Germany and Belgium, provide beautiful images of the duke's many castles and of his peasants working in the fields, as well as scenes from the gospel story. In their confident control of space within each picture, and in the natural ease of their human figures, the Limburg brothers have something in common with other artists of their generation who are the founding figures of the Renaissance.

But a certain decorative quality, a prettiness, a lack of emotional conviction, makes the painters of International Gothic a transitional group between medieval and Renaissance. In the decades after the Très Riches Heures, in Flanders to the north and in Italy to the south, images of a new kind are created. These Flemish and Italian artists are very different from each other, but they share a solidity and a solemnity lacking in International Gothic.

to be continued………………