What Are the Periods of the Middle Ages Art History

This postal service is part of a series called A Beginner's Guide to Art History.

Welcome back to our series on art history! From the lands of Asia, we at present venture onward to experience the earth of art from the Middle Ages. Let's encounter how history significantly affected the art of this time.

An Insular art piece of the Virgin Mary from the Middle Ages.

Art in the Age of Darkness

If you were born during the Middle Ages then you would have been witness to a major flow of transition in history equally a whole. After the destruction of the Black Death, Europe saw its most dramatic decrease in stability, with at to the lowest degree a tertiary of the population killed off by this awful pandemic.

Understandably, art suffered every bit a event. And though threats from outside invasions were no longer every bit imminent, the Islamic influences from before years of conquests became a recurring theme in many works of art. Religion is presumed to be a huge subject area as well, as survivors clung to the hopes and stories of their favorite icons. Simply there was also the emergence of definitively different styles like Baroque and Gothic fine art, which opened the doors to great artistic influences for centuries to come up.

Art during this period is not necessarily bars to ane particular manner or time, with historians often breaking down the era into several phases.

A shoulder squeeze from the Migration Period of the Middle Ages.

So today we'll cover just a few of the media that were most prevalent and survived this remarkable era of death and rebirth.

Sculptures and Carvings

With the fall of the Roman Empire, sculptures with traditionally stylized features became replaced with more than realistic aesthetics. This was due to the work of the Ottonians and Carolingians, who emphasized realism over the stoic expressions left behind past the Byzantine Empire.

Ivory sculpture featuring a courtly scene. Image by Jastrow.

This likewise began an important flow of cultural revival. Beautiful ivory carvings emerged along with bronze castings with three-dimensional details influenced past classical realism that surpassed their predecessors.

With this massively expansive era, many styles of sculpture came and went, including architectural sculpture found from the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Here, figures adorned the faces of famous churches, and the Virgin Mary became a prominent subject of this time.

Life-sized alabaster tombs were a sign of the wealthy, while minor portable sculptures of ivory were used as devotional objects.

Pictured here are Gothic sculptures seen on the Chartres Cathedral.

Illuminated Manuscripts

An illuminated manuscript is a document with decorative text and ornamental objects. And most of the surviving illuminated manuscripts of today came from the Center Ages.

A costly and super complex process, it all started with writing the text onto sheets of parchment newspaper. This was followed up by a long phase of planning, in which the blank spaces of the layout were used primarily for ornamentation. Finally, beautiful figures were painted onto the pages, with gold being a favorite colour in many earlier manuscripts.

Pictured hither is the Tyniec Sacramentary, an illuminated manuscript written in gilded.

A unique style that came from this menstruation was the historiated alphabetic character. A large, decorated letter of the alphabet used at the beginning of a passage, this letter was first seen in Insular art and became pretty prevalent during the Romanesque menstruum.

Yous can even see the influence of these illustrious manuscripts today, with decorative initials often adorning the pages of antiquarian-inspired books filled with old tales of myths and legends.

Pictured here is a historiated letter "P" from the Malmesbury Bible.

Stained Glass

Another beautiful medium that was pop during the Middle Ages was the art of stained glass. Stained glass was created past mixing sand and forest ash together and melting it into a liquid in order to form drinking glass. While the drinking glass was even so molten, powdered metals were added to create the beautiful colors that would later adorn great cathedrals.

Stained glass from Troyes Cathedral in France. Paradigm by Vassil.

Each window image was created past arranging different pieces of glass together to create the desired design. The artist so added final details by hand earlier assembling the completed fine art and mounting it into a window.

Over again, religion was an important theme in many stained glass designs because they were meant to decorate the windows of churches with love icons. The colors of the glass as well changed during this fourth dimension according to the stain and which ingredients were used for the drinking glass mixture. But no matter the mixture, artists guaranteed stunning results of illustrated scenes total of colour and wonder.

Stained glass panel from the Chartres Cathedral. Image by Vassil.

Icon Paintings

With organized religion still a prevalent theme, vibrant paintings featuring famous icons were as well a recurring art form during the Middle Ages.

2 panels from the Wilton Diptych, a painting created on Baltic oak.

But information technology wasn't until the emergence of Gothic art that nosotros see artists start to dorsum away from the typical religious themes. And while the field of study matter changed, so did the fine art manner. Paintings now focused on mythology, animals, and other themes autonomously from the norm.

Realism also became an important feature of painting practices during this time. No longer were at that place just monks in solitude creating art, but also truly skilled artists with many years of practice and persistence under their belts.

The painting most well known from this fourth dimension is "Last Supper" by Giotto di Bondone. A painting depicting a scene of Jesus surrounded by his apostles, this artwork features one of the most depicted religious scenes in fine art history.

Painting of the Concluding Supper past Giotto di Bondone.

Conclusion

Though the Middle Ages were considered a dark period in history, this era largely contributed to many different art styles today because of its expansive time frame and allure. Its wide range of civilisation and influence is a true testament to the development of art, and I promise you continue to learn more than about these amazing timelines on your own.

For more wondrous tales of art history from the Middle Ages, dive into the links below for farther reading. And join me next month when we discuss the glorious art of the Renaissance period.

• Art of the Middle Ages
  
• Medieval Art
• Fine art and Nature in the Middle Ages
  
• Medieval Art 2nd Edition
  

The following sources were too included in this commodity:

• Wikipedia: Medieval Art
  
• Britannica: Western Sculpture - The Middle Ages
• Met Museum: Stained Glass in Medieval Europe
• The Finer Times: Paintings in the Middle Ages
  

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Source: https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/art-history-middle-ages--cms-28042

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