A Preface to Morals > Chapter VI. Lost Provinces > Art (c) The Artist Formerly
In 787 the Second Council of Nicaea laid down the rule which for nearly five hundred years was binding upon the artists of Christendom: The substance of religious scenes is not left to the initiative of the artists: it derives from the principles laid down by the Catholic Church and religious tradition .... His art alone belongs to the painter, its organization and arrangement belong to the clergy.
This was a reasonable rule, since the Church and not the individual was held to be the guardian of those sacred truths upon which depended the salvation of souls and the safety of society. The notion had occurred to nobody that the artist was divinely inspired and knew more than the doctors of the church. Therefore, the artist was given careful specifications as to what he was to represent.
Thus when the Church of St. Urban of Troyes decided to order a set of tapestries illustrating the story of St. Valerian and of his wife, St. Cecilia, a learned priest was deputed to draw up the contract for the artist. In it he wrote among other specifications that: "there shall be portrayed a place and a tabernacle in the manner of a beautiful room, in which there shall be St. Cecilia, humbly on her knees with her hands joined, praying to God. And beside her shall be Valerian expressing great admiration and watching an angel which, being above their heads, should be holding two crowns made of lilies and of roses, which he will be placing the one on the head of St. Cecilia and the other on the head of Valerian, her husband .... "
The rest, one might suppose, was left to the artist's imagination. But it was not. Having been given his subject matter and his theme, he was bound further by strict conventions as to how sacred subjects were to be depicted. Jesus on the Cross had to be shown with his mother on the right and St. John on the left. The centurion pierced his left side. His nimbus contained a cross, as the mark of divinity, whereas the saints had the nimbus without a cross. Only God, the angels, Jesus Christ, and the Apostles could be represented with bare feet; it was heretical to depict the Virgin or the Saints with bare feet. The purpose of these conventions was to help the spectator identify the figures in the picture. Thus St. Peter was given a short beard and a tonsure; St. Paul was bald and had a long beard. It is possible that these conventions, which were immensely intricate, were actually codified in manuals which were passed on from master to apprentice in the workshops.
As a general rule the ecclesiastics who drew up specifications did not invent the themes. Thus the learned priest who drafted the contract for the tapestry of St. Cecilia drew his material from the encyclopedia of Vincent de Beauvais. This was a compendium of universal knowledge covering the whole of history from Creation to the Last Judgment. It was a source book to which any man could turn in order to find the truth he happened to need. It contained all of human knowledge and the answer to all human problems. By the Thirteenth Century there were a number of these encyclopedias, of which the greatest was the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. From these books churchmen took the themes which they employed their artists to embellish. The artist himself had no concern as to what he would paint, nor even as to how he would paint it. That was given, and his energies could be employed without the travail of intellectual invention, upon the task of expressing a clear conception in well-established forms.
It must not be supposed, of course, that either doctrines, lore, or symbolism were uniformly standardized and exactly enforced. In an age of faith, contradictions and discrepancies are not evident; they are merely variations on the same theme. Thus, while it may be true that enthusiastic mediaevalists like M. Mâle have exaggerated the order and symmetry of the mediaeval tradition, they are right, surely, on the main point, which is that the organic character of the popular religion provided a consensus of feeling about human destiny which, in conjunction with the resources of the popular lore, sustained and organized the imagination of mediaeval artists. Because religious faith was simple and genuine, it could absorb and master almost anything. Thus the clergy ruled the artists with a relatively light hand, and they were not disturbed if, in illuminating the pages of a Book of Hours, the artist adorned the margins with a picture of Bacchus or the love of Pyramus and Thisbe.
It was only when the clergy had been made self-conscious by the controversies which raged around the Reformation that they began in any strict and literally-minded modern sense to enforce the rule laid down at Nicaea in 787. At the Council of Trent in 1563 the great liberty of the artist within the Christian tradition came to an end:
The Holy Council forbids the placing in a church of any image which calls to mind an erroneous dogma which might mislead the simple-minded. It desires that all impurity be avoided, that provocative qualities be not given to images. In order to insure respect for its decisions, the Holy Council forbids anyone to place or to have placed anywhere, and even in churches which are not open to the public, any unusual image unless the bishop has approved it.
In theory this decree at Trent is not far removed from the decree at Nicaea nearly one thousand years earlier. But in fact it is a whole world removed from it. For the dogmas at Nicaea rested upon naive faith and the dogmas at Trent rested upon definition. The outcome showed the difference, for within a generation Catholic scholars made a critical survey of the lore which mediaeval art had employed, and on grounds of taste, doctrine, and the like, condemned the greater part of it. After that, as M. Mâle says, there might still be artists who were Christians but there was no longer a Christian art.