museums in his villas, inside and out, and these served as places of retreat and philosophical contemplation. Emperors, too, populated their villas with grottoes, fountains and reflecting pools that were surrounded by sculpture. Knowledge of these villas from ruins and from verbal descriptions was vital in shaping the gardens of Europe in the Renaissance and later. The Romans developed a vigorous sculptural tradition surrounding the rituals of death and mourning, and their funerary portraits and sarcophagus reliefs provide a rich legacy of artistic history.
During the last centuries of its existence, the Roman Empire slowly went into decline militarily, economically, culturally and morally. The amphitheatres and their bloody games gained in popularity, while traditional athletics (running, javelin throwing, discus throwing) fell into decline. Dramatic theatre in the traditional sense all but disappeared, and poetry and prose lost much in the way of refinement. For its part, Roman sculpture of the 2nd to the 5th centuries CE showed a gradual decline, and figural ideals and proportions ultimately handed down from the Greeks gave way to blunt, mundane and stocky types that conveyed stature and power. Constantine the Great (died 337 CE) was the first Roman emperor to accept Christianity, which had hitherto, with varying degrees of intensity, been persecuted in the empire. The early Christians generally shared the artistic materials and style of the secular Romans, while introducing religious imagery.
The destruction of the civilisation of the Roman Empire at the hands of the tribal Visigoths, Ostragoths, Vandals and others in the 5th and 6th centuries CE brought an end to long cultural traditions. Some of the migratory peoples brought with them a kind of art based on small-scale, intertwining and animal motifs, with only a rather stylised human presence. The Vikings, no less than the others, practiced a style alien to ancient Mediterranean traditions. For its part, the Roman tradition remained dormant for over two centuries before being revived by Charlemagne (Charles the Great; died 814 CE), who deliberately restored ancient Roman styles of script, architecture, sculpture and manuscript illumination, all in what seems to us as provincial variation at best, and hardly taking a new direction. The Ottonian style of a century or so later was less linked to Roman models, but perhaps equally vigorous and forcible in attempting new narrative force and figural presence.
Although Europe was weakened by invasions from Vikings, Magyars and others towards the end of the first millennium after Christ, a great stabilisation of European society took place around the year 1000, and civilisation began to flourish. The feudal system was well established, and Christianity had become mature in its institutions and was leading the way in education and in shaping the codification of both civil and canon law. Society was secure enough that trade could take place on land and sea, and the faithful could take long pilgrimages to distant sites. Places where holy relics were located – blood from the body of Christ, pieces of the True Cross, the mantle of the Virgin, bones of a saint – became pilgrimage destinations, and the internationalisation of culture grew as pilgrims travelled the continent. The holy destinations for these religious tourists called for a new manner of sculptural presentation, and there was a re-adaptation of the ancient Roman system of using abundant sculptural decoration on exteriors, as occurred early in the Romanesque period at the Cathedral at Modena. Builders turned also to a utilisation of Roman architectural ideas, including the construction of thick masses of wall and the use of rounded arches and barrel vaults, and thus the later word ‘Romanesque’ is used to indicate this use of ancient Roman ideas in a new context. For their part, certain sculptors made very close copies of Roman works, or even (with architectural sculpture) re-used Roman ‘spoils’, that is, items salvaged from the rubble and prized for their beauty. At the church of Santi Apostoli, the Florentines used one ancient capital found in local Roman ruins and made faithful copies to create a nave in the antique taste. This was a rebirth of the arts, if not a Renaissance, but the movement was international and there was a recognisable similarly of style, despite local variations, from Spain to England.
The Gothic period in the arts continued under many of the same social and cultural conditions as the Romanesque. The Church increased its strength, economies continued to grow, and the aristocratic feudal class continued to exert dominance. A number of artistic forms did change, however. Now rejecting antiquity as a model, the builders of this new age came up with their own solutions, an ars nova that differed from the heavier, stable Romanesque style. The development of the pointed arch, ribbed vaulting, flying buttresses and great masses of fenestration in ecclesiastical architecture was in response to the desire for light, to create a jewel-studded Heavenly Jerusalem in building interiors. Abbot Suger (died 1151) of Saint-Denis (outside the walls of medieval Paris) led the way intellectually with his architectural patronage, and over time the new style swept Europe. Another ecclesiastical institution that gained in stature during the Gothic period was the monastery. Fairly powerful in earlier times, monasteries made even greater gains in moral and economic influence. The growth of monasteries, built with orderly planning and hierarchical and sensible arrangement of buildings, was one of the striking developments of the period, although this is often overlooked because the material remains of these great establishments have survived in rather poor or fragmentary states. Throughout this period, the monarchies of Europe continued to strengthen, and the fabulous wealth achieved by the French kings and their relations, such as Jean, Duc de Berry, found an outlet in ambitious artistic commissions.
The Church continued to have a dominant role in education, and it oversaw the development of the universities. There was a growing voice for nominalism, in which the primacy of the senses and the priority of material existence played a leading role, and this philosophy was ideologically linked to a growing naturalism in the visual arts. The softening of the features of carved figures and the rendering of ease of posture show a new sharpness of vision and a willingness to consider the real as well as the ideal aspects of the visual world. The Church’s assertive role included moral leadership during the Crusades, and the raising of armies to occupy the Holy Land. Despite the Crusades, and in part because of them, the medieval period saw the introduction of ideas in philosophy and science from Islamic thinkers, enriching Western thought. The revival of formal types located in the Holy Land, especially as found in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, left a lasting mark on medieval and Renaissance architectural iconography.
The later Middle Ages played out against a backdrop of great drama: the Black Death, the plague that destroyed much of the population of Europe, occurred between 1348 and 1351 and, in many places, threw society into upheaval. The ruling feudal class survived, but the labouring class gained some social strength, and the growth of cities and the influence of the bourgeoisie increased greatly. This power of the merchant classes was especially strong in Italy, where the city-states flourished, and feudal and agricultural power waned, and Italian cities saw the rise of a new secular and urban class of leader. This was also accompanied by a secularisation of society, which took place alongside the growth of vernacular Italian literature (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio) and the influence of explorers and travellers such as Marco Polo. This was the proto-Renaissance, which would explode in the 15th century into a powerful surge of secular and classical revival ideas.
The world of Renaissance Europe was dominated by the spirit of humanism. Humanists, that is, scholars interested in the moral and literary values found in ancient Greek and Roman literature, turned their attention to the rediscovery of ancient texts, useful not only for the study of good grammar and writing, but newly valued for the content itself, throwing light on the past experiences and thoughts of an elevated, lost civilisation. Renaissance critics regarded the Gothic style as a corruption, and gave us the word Gothic itself, which is historically inaccurate but reflected the belief that those who developed the pointed arch and the ‘barbarous’ accretion of ornaments on the exteriors of the great northern European cathedrals were of the same low level as those who had earlier destroyed the Roman Empire.
Following the lead of the humanists themselves, others – businessmen, lawyers, political rulers and eventually church leaders and clerics – rediscovered the marvels of antiquity. For certain fields of endeavour, such as medical science and painting, there were scant remains from ancient societies, but sculpture was one field where the remains were plentiful, from triumphal arches to sculpture fragments, from sarcophagi to small bronzes. Those 15th-century sculptors who wanted to turn to antiquity
