The History of Art Survey

Lecture 27

High and Late Gothic

Gardner  502-

 

High Gothic Art: 1194-1300

Late Gothic Art: 1300-

 

18-

 

18   Plan of Amiens Cathedral, Robert de Luzarches, Thomas  and

       Renaud de Cormont, 1220-88                                                                                Amiens

19   Nave, Amiens Cathedral, 1220-                                                                             Amiens

20   Vaults, Amiens Cathedral, 1220-                                                                           Amiens

21   West facade of Amiens Cathedral, 1220-                                                               Amiens

22   Christ (Beau Dieu), trumeau, West facade, Amiens, 1220-35

23   West facade of Reims Cathedral, c 1225-90                                                           Reims

24   Visitation, jamb statues central doorway west facade, c 1230                               Reims

25   Ste.-Chapelle, 1243-8                                                                                             Paris

26   Interior, Ste.-Chapelle                                                                                            Paris

27 Virgin and Child (Virgin de Paris), Notre-Dame, early 14th c                                  Paris

28   West facade of St.-Maclou                                                                                     Rouen

29   The fortified town of Carcassonne                                                                   Carcassonne

30   House of Jacques Coeur, 1443-51,                                                                         Bourges

31   Notebook page, Villard de Honnecourt

32   God as architect of the world, moralized Bible, 1ı1²,1220-1230,                          (Paris)

33   Blanche of Castile, Louis IX, and two monks, moralized Bible, 1ı3²,

       1226-1234,                                                                                                             (Paris)

34   Abraham and the Three Angels, Psalter of St. Louis, 5², 1253-70,                       (Paris)

35   Master Honoré, David before Saul & David and Goliath,

       1296, 8², Breviary of Philippe le Bel,                                                                    (Paris)

36   Jean Pucelle, David before Saul, Belleville Breviary, 9.5², 1325,                           (Paris)

*     Anastaise (?), Christine de Pisan at Work, The City of Women, 1405                   (Paris)

37   Virgin of Jean dıEvreux, Abbey Saint-Denis, 1339,  2ı 3.5²,                                 (Paris)

38   The Castle of Love and knights jousting, 1330-50,  9.75²,                                    Paris

High Gothic Architecture

 

[Paris 496]

 

Philip II (Philip Augustus) ,r 1180-1223, was a major consolidator of barons under the royalty and expander of the royal house possessions to Normandy and Languedoc.  He gave Paris its great walls, paved streets and Louvre palace.  Paris University became the intellectual center of [western] Europe.  Peter Abelard  and the Schoolmen developed Scholasticism here.  He began with Aristotle as maintained by the Arabs in Spain.  Using Aristotleıs method they moved beyond the exclusive property of truth being biblical revelation.  They went on to prove Christian truths through scholastic argument.  Saint Bernard of Clairveaux was a critic of this effort, as Scholasticism questioned dogma.  In 1140 Bernard got the church to condemn Abelardıs doctrines.  Thomas Aquinas 1225-74 was a later Scholastic.  The foundations of scholastic philosophy are contemporary with Sugerıs Saint-Denis.  The logical thrust of the reasoning system is paralleled in the logic of Gothic rib architecture and even the iconographic programs.

 

 

18   Plan of Amiens Cathedral, Robert de Luzarches, Thomas  and Renaud de Cormont, 1220-88                                              Amiens

 

 

19   Nave, Amiens Cathedral, 1220-                                          Amiens

 

Gardner titles this section ³The Quest for height at Amiens.²  And as a result of quite recent research gives us the name of the three main original designers, Robert de Luzarches, Thomas de Cormont and Renaud de Cormont.  Work was begun in 1220, while Chartres was still underway.  The nave was done by 1236, the radiating chapels by 1247.  The choir took until 1270. 

 

 

20   Vaults, Amiens Cathedral, 1220-                                         Amiens

 

The form is a conscious step based upon and then stepping beyond Chartres.  Return to 18-10, and you can see the differences.  Everything was stretched, taller and slimmer (to appear even taller).  The mature mold was now set: repeated rectangular bays with four part vaults, flying buttresses. no walls, but only a skeleton stone frame filled with open spaces.  Laonıs vaults were 80 feet over the floor, those at Notre-Dame Paris 107,  Chartres 118, Amiens 144.

 

The effect, looking up is ³like a canopy.²  ³The light flooding in from the clerestory, and the vaults seem even more insubstantial.  The effect recalls another great building, one utterly different from Amiens but where light also plays a defining role: Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (12-5).  If Hagia Sophia is the perfect expression of Byzantine spirituality in architecture, Amiens, with its soaring vaults and giant windows admitting divine colored light, is its Gothic counterpart.² 

 

The point isnıt that they are alike in form, but that they are alike in achieving epitomes of their respective traditionsı expression of the divine through the use of light. 

 

 

21   West facade of Amiens Cathedral, 1220-                           Amiens

 

The west facade was finished with the nave.  Thirty years later than Laon, there are the same sort of deep, funneling gabled portal arches.  The biggest difference is in the reduction of wall surface by stress on linear edges and openings: more framework, less wall.  The line of figures in the third story is called the ³kingsı gallery.²  The shorter tower is 14th century, the taller one 15th. 

 

If you look a the arches you can see the continuity of searching for difference.  Youıll remember back to the Romanesqueıs semicircular, now the arches are all pointed.  and if you look to the latest arches, in the tallest tower you will see the curving ogival arch with its pointed tip, of what is called the flamboyant.

 

 

22   Christ (Beau Dieu), trumeau, West facade, Amiens, 1220-35

 

The nearly free standing figure of Christ on the trumeau of the central entrance defines the moment.  It is the same moment as Chartresı west entrances.  The canopy above his head is more or less equivalent the structureıs radiating chapels.  That is the designers are showing off the style of the moment.  The Christ below is one you should recognize.  Check out the gesture in the right hand and the book in the left.  It is the Pantocrator, Christ of the Last Judgment. 

 

Though it seems to our author in Gardner that this is, by contrast, a ³kindly figure who does not strike terror into sinners.  Instead  he blesses those who enter the church and tramples a lion and a dragon symbolizing the evil forces in the world.  This image gives mankind hope in salvation.² 

 

Is it fair to ask what he offers ³womankind²?  This might seem at first to ask a 20th century question, since the term ³mankind² was questioned only then.  But the question of a difference between the salvation offered to each may be a real one.  Men and women were not considered equal then.

 

³The Beau Dieu epitomizes the bearded, benevolent image of Christ that replaced the youthful Early Christian Christ (11-6) and the stern Byzantine Pantocrator (12-24) as the preferred representation of the Savior in later European art.  The figureıs grace and grandeur also sharply contrast with the emotional intensity of the twisting Romanesque prophet carved in relief on the Moissac trumeau (17-23).² (505)

 

You should be able to assess each of these characterizations for yourself, now.  Make each comparison offered you and see how the terms fit.  On one hand you are looking to see if you agree; on the other you are learning the meaning of the authorıs usages. 

 

I can agree that this more naturalistic image is less twisted than the Romanesque Jeremiah, but is it less stern than the Christ in Monrealeıs apse?  The general view of most historians is that this is a much more human persona and so a less threatening image of god.

 

 

23   West facade of Reims Cathedral, c 1225-90                      Reims

 

Reims began only a few years later than Amiens, but it shows us how things kept changing, not at random but in a direction we have already seen established.  The kingsı gallery is now higher, and larger.  There are fewer stories than Amiens, but each is extended more steeply and linearly: taller, more intricate.  There are fewer elements, but each is much more elaborate.  They continue to find ways to turn walls into networks of tracery.  The rose window now sits within an arched window, the lancets are traceries with multiple crockets.  There are figures invading the peaks of the gables over each of the arches of the  entrance facade and the great rose.  There are rose windows replacing the tympanum over the doors.  ³Glass replaces stone² Gardnerıs says.  One does not have to go back to the Romanesque of Saint-Etienne (17-9) to see the difference, it is striking in the few years since Amiens (18-21). 

 

 

24   Visitation, jamb statues central doorway west facade,

       c 1230, Reims

 

The most famous figures at Reims are the jamb images of the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth in the central doorway.  They stand almost free from the wall, each on its own pedestal, and now without canopies to confine them to the architecture.  In this they are step beyond Saint Theodore and his peers on Chartresıs south  transept, or the Beau Dieu at Amiens.  Their faces are distinctly less wooden and more realistic than their predecessors.  Specialists suppose Roman models and see a Greek contrapposto pose beneath Maryıs robe.  What is most interesting here, however, is the way the two are turned slightly toward each other.  These arenıt two isolated figures, but a scene. 

 

The various devices we count here, are nudges of the figure style of symbolism in architectural decoration toward human images to be responded to as personalities.  This is the Visitation, the pregnant Maryıs meeting with the Elizabeth, who is pregnant with the future John the Baptist.  There is a symbolic metaphysical: Christıs first meeting with John the Baptist.  But this theological symbolism is less the issue in the expression here than the much more mundane humanization two people in conversation.  There is a psychological humanization achieved here we havenıt seen in almost a millenium.  Another scene, the Annunciation is right beside.

 

 

25   Sainte-Chapelle, 1243-8                                                       Paris

 

Sainte-Chapelle is the royal chapel, on the Isle Saint Louis in the Seine.  Here the entire nave wall is dissolved in glass, and thus light enough to be supported by strip buttresses rather than flying buttresses.  The church was to be a great reliquary for the crown of thorns and other implements of Christıs Passion that Louis IX, had purchased from his cousin Baldwin II, the Latin emperor of Constantinople in 1239.  It is the type example of the Rayonnant (Radiant) Gothic style, of the second half of the 13th century.  The delicacy and intricacy of the detail is an expression of luxury and display that has been described as the ³court style.² 

 

 

26   Interior, Sainte-Chapelle,                                                    Paris

 

The extraordinary amount of glass at Sainte-Chapelle is most visible from the interior, where the wall just about disappears into a tracery mullions, holding the glass.  The full style: verticality, tracery.  The upper chapel is 49ı tall and only 15ı wide.

 

I donıt know what to say about the difference between the situation within the great cathedrals with their elegant, but still strikingly rational and powerful stone skeletons that raise the parishioner into a heavenly grandeur for prayer, and this jewel box that is less architectural and more a display case.  The power has been lost for a sense of intimacy that is totally different.  The difference may be between the building meant to impress the common parishioner with the grandeur and power of heaven and the royal courtly intuition about the right of kingıs to be such special people that they are being catered to here for their exceptional being, as much as they are here to cater to a greater one.

 

 

27   Virgin and Child (Virgin de Paris), Notre-Dame,

       early 14th c                                                                           Paris

 

Here is the later Gothic style as it has grown even more elegant.  The Virgin is shown as a worldly queen, decked in a jeweled crown.  The Christ child too is shown in royal attire.  Again here we have two figures in a relationship.  And here we find a free standing sculpture.  But, according to our survey (and the others IŒve seen) there is an abstraction here, a withdrawal from the growing trend of naturalism toward an elegant stylization.  The draperies here make handsome patterns, but do not seem to depict a body beneath within.  The S curve visible here is more a matter of elegant form than of naturalistic contrapposto.

 

We have now come almost full circle from the naturalistic Christ of the Later Roman empire, through the abstractions of the Medieval world back toward a naturalistic, Christ in the image of man.  But not quite.  The general development toward naturalism here pauses for a moment of high gothic elegance.  Stylistic development over a wide number of artists and patrons does not take a forgone goal, but probes in all sorts of ways as alternatives are explored and found interesting or not.  Sometimes there is no dominant trend to direction visible.  Sometimes what we see as a dominant trend, looking back, is our selection of related developments in a field that actually had no real coherence.

 

 

28   West facade of Saint-Maclou. 1500-1514                           Rouen

 

The years following 1300 saw the High Gothic of the Isle de France spread throughout France and across Europe.  Louis IXıs France was itself extremely successful economically.  Louis was a paragon of Christian royalty, advertised far and wide as a paragon of ethics an virtue and leader of two abortive Crusades (the 7th and 8th).  In 1297, a quarter century after his death, he was canonized as a Saint by the Catholic church. 

 

Our last example of the Gothic is a very late work in what is called the Flamboyant Gothic, the west facade of Saint-Maclou at Rouen.  As its name suggests, the Flamboyant is a Gothic elaborated in the direction of dramatic tracery licking toward the heavens.  ³Flamelike² tracery our author says.  The Normandy region of northern France is particularly well stocked in this style. 

 

Saint-Maclou is a relatively small structure, only 75ı tall [inside] and 175ı in length.  Its is more a decorative than a structural design.  Only three of its five portals are actual doorways.  The set bulges out in a curve toward the approaching worshipper.  Elegant webs of tracery burst from every element.  One sees through the tracery to the rose window.  Here the flying buttress is visible on the facade, having become a pretext for more pinnacles and decorative enhancement than a stop gap buttress.  ³Bewildering complexity of views...is the hallmark of the Flamboyant style.² (509)

 

 

29   The fortified town of Carcassonne, 12-13th century

 

When we think of the Middle Ages we often see the great baronial castles as the a significant form.  And it was.  It was a brutal age of military contestation among feudal aristocrats at every level.  Castles are the fortified palaces.  Unfortified palaces, that is centers of wealth and luxury without walls and armies to protect them, did not exist.  As towns grew, they were surrounded by defensive ramparts for their protection.  Or they were overrun by local barons.  The double fortification walls of Carcassonne are one of the best preserved, and best restored examples of this necessity on the road toward civilized society.  They were the rule until the development of gun powder artillery mad stone walls obsolete. 

 

They were an effective defense against swords, bows and arrows, and stone catapults.  The bastions the decorate and articulate the walls are actually the battle platforms that allow the defenders to get angles advantage over would-be attackers.  Artillery eliminated the need to scale walls, but removing the walls.  The original walls were Visigothic structures of the 6th century.  The great bastioning took place in the 12th.  Viollet-le-Duc [credited in the caption] restored them along with many other Gothic structures in France in the 19th century.  The decorative battlements and their fringe or crenellations were the defensive walls that the defenders hid behind between volleys directed out. 

 

 

30   House of Jacques Coeur, 1443-1451,                                  Bourges

 

Jacques Coeur (1395-1456) was an extremely successful merchant and banker in Bourge.  The extent of his wealth, that allowed him to build a palatial stone mansion is an indication of the growth of commercial trade in the later Middle Ages that allowed cities to grow and populations to move out of the feudal agricultural manors and out from under feudal baronial control.  Banking is one key here, being a necessary step toward the capitalist world ruled by commerce that eventually did away with the feudal world of martial violence.  Coeur and his network of over 300 agents competed and traded with the trading republics of Italy to the south.  He owned fleets of ships that traded, by permissions purchased from the Pope, with the Arab merchants of Egypt and the Middle East.  He was a financier and advisor [read business partner] of Charles VII of France and Pope Nicholas V.  The continuing power of aristocratic privilege over commercial productivity is made clear by his end through false [?] testimony at the Kingıs court and the sharing up of his wealth among the titled aristocracy. 

 

The mansion is heavily walled on its exterior perimeter and built around an open, internal courtyard.  [Lack of a title meant he was not allowed to build a more fortified structure, which would allow him to protect himself against the aristocracy, who had a monopoly of state power.  Service quarters occupied the ground floors and living quarters for the household were above.  The layout is irregularly planned around the functions of the rooms, without the formal symmetry that marks more ceremonial structures. 

 

The entrance facade features an finely arched tracery window in stained glass over an elaborate balcony niche with decorative details of the sort workmen were trained to design and make in church architecture.  Equestrian statues of Coeur fit into the balcony niche and a comparable one on the interior.  There were smaller ³window² niches to either side which contained images of a male and a female servant watching the street below.  The two entrance doors are for pedestrian and cart traffic.  The pinnacle next to the central entrance tower encloses a staircase, but its main point is to offer a handsome decoration in the established stone architectural style. 

 

 

 

 

 

Gothic Book Illumination &

 

31   Notebook page, Villard de Honnecourt, 1220-35

 

Paris was the intellectual capital of Gothic Europe.  Dante refers to it in his Divine Comedy as  famed for the art of illumination.  Weıve just been reading of how it was the location of the origin of the Gothic style that spread across most of Europe.  Its great scriptoria were commercial ventures and the forerunners of modern [print] publishing. 

 

Villard de Honnecourt sketchbooks are filled with imagery of the time.  He was a master mason and recorded both things he saw and things he invented.  The page we have shows thinning about geometric forms as armatures for designing imagery.  In his text, Villard speaks of geometry being ³strong help in drawing figures.²  What we can see is a mind looking for rational approaches to design.  There were mystical issues embeded in this thinking too, however.  The triangle referred to the trinity and the circle to eternity for the Medieval Christian. 

 

 

32   God as architect of the world, moralized Bible, 1ı1²,

       1220-1230,                                                                            (Paris)

 

Moralize bibles were hand written, of course, and heavily illustrated.  Each page paired an Old Testament episode with a New Testament one explaining their significance.  This is a frontispiece rather than an illustration of one of these parallels.  We see god here shaping [measuring?] the universe with a compass.  Within his circle there is [a green ocean  and clouds, a dark sky and then] the red globe of the sun and golden globe of the moon; the matter of the earth is still shapeless.  God here is portrayed as an architect.  [Iıd say architectural designer.] 

 

We may want to ask ourselves whether or not this concretion of god is a trivialization through humanization.  Certainly people of that day did wonder.

 

 

33   Blanche of Castile, Louis IX, and two monks, moralized Bible, 1ı3², 1226-1234,                                                                   (Paris)

 

The finest books belonged to the most powerful people, the highest aristocracy.  Saint Louis was an avid collector.  This is the dedication page from a Moralized Bible painted for the Queen mother and King Louis IX. Above we see the two in architectural frames much like those for sculpture on the cathedrals.  Below in a similar frame are the monks, one writing and painting the text in a manuscript while the older one dictates it.  If we look at the page before him, the younger monk has divided the page into two columns and set four rondels, the format for moralized bible comparisons.  Again in this format too we can see formulas we have already seen in the glass windows of the cathedrals (e.g., 18-14).

 

Though we saw these forms first in the architecture, there is no reason to think that the formulas werenıt developed as significantly in manuscript and decorative arts forms at the same time. 

 

The actual process of manuscript illumination was a compounded one, involving a number of skills, from the manufacture of parchment from sheep skin to the manufacture of pens and inks, bindings for pages into books and so on.  This manufacturing process involved a goo number of people in a well financed workshop.

 

 

34   Abraham and the Three Angels, Psalter of St. Louis, 5², 1253-70,                                                                                               (Paris)

 

If the golden background of some illuminations, like the previous one, were not possible in stained glass, the light found there was a luminous.  The same workshops could design both.  The artists associated with the Psalter of Saint Louis are supposed to have worked in both media, and specifically to have worked on the windows for his Sainte-Chapelle.  ³the pained architectural setting in Saint Louisıs Psalter reflects the pierced screenlike lightness and transparency of royal buildings such as Sainte-Chapelle.  The painted figures also express the same aristocratic elegance as the Rayonnant ³court style² of architecture royal Paris favored.  The intense colors, especially the blues, emulate glass.  The orders resemble glass partitioned by lead.  And the gables, pierced by rose windows with bar tracery , are standard Rayonnant architectural features.² (516)

 

As painters designed both, this shouldnıt be a surprise. 

 

Abraham with the three angels suggests the pre-figuring of the trinity.  Weıve seen it already in Byzantine imagery (12-34).   There are two episodes here, separated by the tree.  First Abraham greets the angels, then along with his wife, he entertains them.  We can compare this imagery with that in the windows.  The ³elegant  proportions, facial expressions, theatrical gestures, and swaying poses are characteristic of the Parisian court style admired throughout Europe.² (516)

 

Sainte-Chapelle details

 

 

35   Master Honoré, David before Saul & David and Goliath,

       1296, 8², Breviary of Philippe le Bel,                                 (Paris)

 

What, you may wonder is the point of listing the names of artists first in each label, where they can be identified?  Why mention them at all, when we know next to nothing about them than their identification with these designs?  In the modern world of Bourgeois cultureıs flowering the individual has become the center of cultural analysis, and indeed the center of culture.  This was not so in the period we are studying, but we are focused upon it in our culture, so we look for it in all cultures.

 

Master Honoré had his own workshop.  He is known to have illuminated a breviary for Philippe le Bel (Philip the Fair) in 1296.  We see two Old Testament scenes involving David.  Above he is anointed by Samuel; below, as Saul looks on, David prepares to hurl his slingshot at Goliath, who is already wounded.  In fact we get three scenes in the continuous narrative here: David preparing, Goliath being struck, and then David cutting off the defeated giantıs head, at the far right. 

 

It is clear that identifying personas is more important here than creating a dramatic scene. 

 

The style is essentially linear drawing with coloring added.  The colors are modulated darker toward the edges and lighter toward raised centers of masses.  So the figures are growing more massive and plastic in the Gothic illuminations than they were in the Romanesque examples like Eadwine the Scribe (17-29).  As in the sculpture we are moving away from the diagrammatic toward the optical.  Though we still have a good long ways to go to get to the Renaissance.  There is no spatial rendering here to go with the growing plasticity of the figures.  Indeed, the painter is still enjoying the diagrammatic visual pun of pushing the feet of his figures and a sward and a spear, across the frame. All he major figures are named in appended labels.  To make sure no space appears, even by accident, the background is filled with a brocade pattern of diamonds in contrasting blue and gold. 

 

 

36  Jean Pucelle, David before Saul, Belleville Breviary, 9.5², 1325, (Paris)

 

David and Saul are again the subject of this page out of Jean Pucelleıs Belleville Breviary.  You find them in the upper left, beginning, corner of the page.  Pucelle was the most famous illuminator of his time, and he did place his figures into coherent space, though they were too small to have much presence.  The main thing that comes from his pages is the richness of the decorative spread across the page, weaving in an out of the text.  It is believed that Pucelle had been to Italy and there saw the work of the equally famous Duccio of Siena, who worked on a much larger scale.  There is also here a close empirical observation of the natural world in the flowers and insects here. 

 

In this case the artist was important enough to have his name, along with some of his assistants, recorded at the end of the text, along with their pay for the project.  The painters of these illuminations, like the masons and sculptors who worked on the great churches, were members of workshops and guilds. 

 

The fact that this is not a lone artist, but a workshop headed by a master is worth noting.  It is the major fact of nearly all the art we have seen.  The ideal of the lone artist is a development of individualism in the Romantic era, of the 18th to 19th century.  Earlier there was no virtue seen in avoiding assistants. 

 

 

*    Mistress of the City of Women (?), Christine de Pisan at Work,  The City of Women, 1405, (Paris)

 

Christine de Pisan is one of the intellectual and artistic gems to come out of this first, Gothic, flowering of Parisian culture.  The author of some 30 texts, she was the first internationally acclaimed feminist author.  Born in Italy, she spent most of her active life in Paris.  It was she who first enunciated the position that the situation of women in society was cultural not biological.  This is still a prominent aspect of the feminist discourse.

 

The City of Women (Le Cité des Dames)was written in 1405.  Though de Pisan is the author, and the illuminator is not definitely known, she was known to direct the illumination of her books herself.  The book mentions two established female illuminators as particularly fine.  Anastaise is one of these, and we may be tempted to suppose the work was by her.  

 

But the reality of the historical record does not, and that is of interest.  In most works on the period mentioning Christine de Pisan her attention to the illuminations in her texts is mentioned, and then the work is attributed to the unknown painter who is identified by the practical convention of associating their actual anonymity with the subject that is known.  Ofter more works by a similar hand are recognized and a personality is developed.  Here, as this is a major work, we get the ³Master of the City of Women.² I donıt know if any other works are attributed to this same master, while we wait in hopes of finding more about him. 

 

Him?  Here is where verbal convention and the fact of recording history verbally as well as visually can catch us in a significant trap.  Why should we suppose it was a man?  Here is the one prestigeous art form of the Medieval period in which women were represented and here is the one author most interested in the work of women, in the work in which she even mentions a pair of highly reputed female artists.  So, why donıt our historians call the anonymous painter the Mistress of the City of Women?  Well, there is no such term in use.  It sounds awkward.  It is unfamiliar, so it is awkward.  So, of course is the very idea of a major artist of the Middle ages, being a woman in the first place. 

 

It is in this way that the conventions of history-writing regularly capture our thinking invisibly in patterns we should be suspicious of, and may already know to be suspect.  It is the innate and necessarily conservative aspect of history-writing and so of all written and oral history.  It is the ideological level of available logic on which the actual discussionıs logic is based.  This is a level of thinking I have eneavored to make visible in this course.  And so in order to keep it in your minds, I will re-attribute the work to the still anonyous, newly recognized Mistress of the City of Women

 

 

In the scene illustrated here she ³describes how she was oppressed by the massive literature on womenıs nature, which found all women Œabominable,ı and Œthe vessel,...of all evil and all vices.ı  In a vision, three allegorical figures, Reason, Righteousness, and Justice, appear to inspire Christine de Pisan to challenge these misogynistic dogmas.²  (Slatkin, p 67) 

 

What we see first is the advance of the technique of manuscript illumination in the century following Jean Pucelle.  We are now at the end of the Gothic at the point of the transition into Renaissance naturalism.  This is still drawing filled in with color, but there is now space as well as form.  Each of the four figures here has a clearly readable relation to the others in space and psychology.   The allegorical figures pose with her symbols ‹Reason, for instance, with a mirror, and Honesty with a sword, Justice with ? [Iıd like to say a small wishing well, but that would seem more of my joke on the picture than useful to you.  Have you enjoyed these lectures notes?  I wouldnıt mind getting email on your most important criticism.] Christine de Pisan sits writing at a desk among her books. 

 

Included in de Pisanıs text is the following section on Anastaise.  ³...with regard to painting at the present time I know a women called Anastaise, who is so skillful and experienced in painting the borders of manuscripts and the backgrounds of miniatures that no one can cite a craftsman in the city of Pairs, the center of the best illuminators on earth, who in these endeavors surpasses her in any way....And this I know by my experience, for she has produced some things form me which are held to be outstanding among the ornamental borders of the great masters.² (Slatkin, p 67, from Milliard Miese 1967.)

 

Bourgot, the daughter of Jean Le Noir,  was another renown woman illuminator.  In the town of Bruges the painters guild unusually preserved its records, and more unusually admitted women as practicing members.  In 1454 12% of the m were women and by the 1480s there were 25 %.   This more or less sums up the issue.  As in most professions of high social or economic value, women were normally excluded.  When offered the opportunity of participation, some excelled.  Bourgot typical of a good percentage of the earliest known women artists, in that he education came from being born into a family of artists.  It was her father Jean Le Noir who taught her and later worked with her.