8. Western Art in the Melting Pot

(E.H.Gombrich/The Story of Art)

-Europe, sixth to eleventh century

-ローマ帝国の衰退に続く「暗黒時代」。

-修道院等を中心に文化再興が試みられるが、蛮族の侵入・度重なる戦禍により空に帰する。

-勢力を拡大する「蛮族」が好んだ、絡み合うドラゴンといった魔除け的な装飾。

-イングランド・アイルランドではこの装飾をキリスト教の挿絵写本に取り入れる試み。複雑に組み合わせられた美しいパターン。

-知識により描いたエジプト人、見たものを描いたギリシア人。そしてこの中世の時代にはキリスト教の教えを伝えるべく、「感じた」ものが表現された。

We call these ages dark, partly to convey that the people who lived during these centuries of migrations, wars and upheavals were themselves plunged in darkness [...], but also to imply that we ourselves know rather little about these confused and confusing centuries[...]. (119)

One can well imagine that these threatening heads of monsters were something more than just innocent decorations. In fact, we know that there were laws among the Norwegian Vikings which required the captain of a ship to remove these figures before entering his home port, ‘so as not to frighten the spirits of the land’. (120)

The Egyptians had largely drawn what they knew to exist, the Greeks what they saw; in the Middle Ages the artist also learned to express in his picture what he felt.
     One cannot do justice to any medieval work of art without keeping this purpose in mind. For these artists were not out to create a convincing likeness of nature or to make beautiful things — they wanted to convey to their brothers in the faith the content and the message of the sacred story. (124)