https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0M9iI4neBh0
So the first thing to understand when we’re looking at this question is to understand how ancient art worked. You know, not just in the middle ages, but I would say art in many of the traditional cultures, that, you know, art was integrative. And in some ways that is the meaning of art itself. The word art means to gather together things, and the way that the ancients understood art was in this way. That’s why they could talk about the art of rhetoric or the art of painting or the art of poetry, you know, or we could even say the art of making cheese or making wine. That is, art was in some ways gathering multiple elements together towards one purpose, one vision, and so that is what it means to be, that is what it meant to be an artist. Someone who had the skill and the capacity to take a bunch of stuff, a bunch of materials, and gather them together towards a common meaning. Of course, you know, but materials in terms of physical materials, but also in terms of ideas, in terms of words, all of that together. And so the way to understand the ancient art is that it was integrative, not just in its constituents, that is not just in the things that made up the object of art, but the way in which art functioned in the world. That is, art was participating in society, you know, if you think of sacred art, then it was used in service of God, in service of church functions, you know, a reliquary was there to hold relics, paintings were there to both to decorate important places, but then also to remind us of what is important in the images of the sacred, but then also, you know, if you think of how castles or the houses of nobles were decorated, was there to, of course, decorate, but also to celebrate the things that were important to people, the hunt, you know, the jousting, if someone, you know, commissioned a poet to come and give an elegy to the king, to a wedding or something, music was used for dancing, music was used for celebrating God, and so there was a sense in which there was this integrative aspect. And so this integrative aspect, you know, comes, you know, as in this basic idea in the Middle Ages of the great chain of being, that is the way in which God manifests himself in the world, and how things participate in that, you know, and you can see art becomes a means of embodiment, of skill, of craft, and there is a desire to find unity in the multiplicity, and this hierarchy is both in the means and the expression, that is, in the very style of the images, there was this desire, but then also, you know, in the use of materials and towards the direction, that the direction towards the sacred, and so there wasn’t only sacred art, but in some ways sacred art informed the profane, that is, church architecture, church music, church art became the model, the thing to look to, to know where to get the influences for everything else, and so of course a church building would be the most beautiful and the most ornate, and you know, the most complete building in a city, but it would inform the forms and the structures of the rest of the building. The same goes for art. If you look at Byzantine art, for example, you’ll notice that if you made a, you know, a book that illustrated the life of Alexander the Great, you would use the same tropes that you would use in icons and in sacred art, because in some ways sacred art was the highest and it informed the lowest as well. This was true both in the East and in the West, and it was true really up to, you know, I would say up to the 13th, 14th century. If we look at, for example, in Florence, the Baptistry in Florence, you will find, you know, late versions of this type of art where the the the Baptistry is there to baptize people, and then in the Baptistry you will find a type of imagery which is looking to, let’s say, integrate the the way the image is made into a deep theology, and it wasn’t as concerned with certain questions which would come later in the art. It was concerned with really showing the meaning and also having us understand the participation. And so the way that it’s often phrased by historians, you know, maybe a little less today, but at least for a very long time, the way it was framed by art historians was that there was a shift at the end of this period into now wanting to show the natural world, you know, the ancients didn’t show the natural world. They showed this type of iconology, this type of the way, you know, focus on theological meaning and not so focused on representing reality the way that it looks, and that then in the late 14th century, I would say, you know, then 15th century especially, is when you start to see this kind of stuff. Of course this is Van Eyck and Raphael, and so Van Eyck is an early example used by art historians to show the shift that happened where now there’s a desire to represent the textures of reality, represent the folds in a more realistic way, and that this is a major shift in in art making. And then you have examples like Raphael, you know, Leonardo da Vinci as people who are now focused on the material world and trying to represent things in a material world in a different way. Now it’s very important to pause even here and to question some of the assumptions that we have about the Renaissance. And so what’s interesting about the Renaissance is that in the Renaissance there’s a little microcosm, you could call it, which is that although it is true that if you look at the beginning of the Renaissance there seems to be a desire to show visual, the way in which we experience visual reality, to kind of emphasize that, emphasize the momentary, emphasize the capturing the moment, you know, because in the ancient images they tended to represent figures from the front, faces that you could see, you know, that’s how you encounter a person. So if I’m going to show a person then I show them face first, I show them, you know, in a way that I can see their face, their expression, that’s clear. And so that of course in the everyday life, you know, if you’re walking down the street then that’s not the experience you have, you know, although you know, you could argue that this way of representing is more real because it takes, you know, it takes into account the fact that this is a representation of a person and what’s the best way to represent a person, then this is the way that it is. But of course when you see a Raphael then all of a sudden you see people, you know, from behind, people that you don’t see their faces, people that you can see the the heads here, you know, all of that is going on and then you can see the bottom of people’s feet, this kind of stuff that you would never see in a in a traditional and ancient image. And there’s this kind of atmospheric desire to show the sunset and to show, you know, these kind of natural details. Of course in Van Eyck you see that especially. And so the way that it’s often framed is that, okay, so this is a major shift and then from then on there is kind of this desire to to show natural reality and a desire to to show the visual world. But I would say that it’s not completely true and like I said there is a interesting microcosm that happens in the Renaissance is that it starts this way, then it ends with this. And so this is what we call mannerism. And so mannerism is a part of the Renaissance that people don’t like to talk so much about because they don’t quite know how to fit it into their narrative. And so immediately after the artists start to try to represent, let’s say, what you could call visual or physical reality, they immediately start to deform it. They immediately start to stretch it out and to create, let’s say, expressive deformations in the art. So this is Parmigiano who shows excessive proportions here in the body of the Virgin, extremely long neck, everything is ridiculous in terms of natural proportions. I’m not trying to mock it because of that. And then the body of the baby is completely stretched out. These are not natural proportions. And then you look at someone like Archimboldo, which goes even further, and paints figures with flowers and with different vegetables and different types of details. And so you could say, interestingly enough, that these artists here, they are, these are contemporary artists. That is, that their concerns are very much the concerns of a contemporary artist today. Archimboldo, the things that he’s dealing with, the questions that he’s dealing with, are questions that are completely akin to what you would see in a modern installation or in much of modern art. And so there’s a little microcosm in the Renaissance of the transformation that is going to happen. And the transformation is a movement, you could say, away from the representation of the sacred, a representation of the visual. But the way to understand the visual, to understand why it leads to mannerism, is that you have to understand that in, even in Van Eyck, is a desire to show the little hairs on the dog and, you know, the little folds in this clothing. And so because there’s a desire to show idiosyncrasy, a desire to show, you know, the little details rather than the patterns of the world, although it’s not, of course, it’s still all very patterned, then this will lead to what? It will lead to idiosyncrasy. And so there are many types of idiosyncrasies, and this kind of idiosyncrasy, the kind of idiosyncrasy that shows exception and shows strangeness and shows a kind of, you know, especially in Archimboldo, you know, a kind of fantastical impossibility is, of course, the end of what we could call idiosyncrasy, you know, and so the idea that the movement from this to this, if that surprises you, then you’re missing out on what is going on. And you can understand now, for example, why something like the Scientific Revolution or why the Enlightenment leads to postmodernism and leads to idiosyncrasy, because the desire to show the world in its details, that’s irrationally in its details and to kind of explore the textures of reality and looking down at the earth and trying to explore phenomena will ultimately lead to something like idiosyncrasy, because you’re not looking above, you’re not looking at the patterns, you’re not trying to embody the patterns, you’re rather trying to disconnect yourself a little bit. It’s not yet completely clear that that’s going on. Disconnect yourself from the patterns and look, let’s say, down below. And so down below is, of course, detail and all of this stuff. And then also, you know, it’s a moment that are not captured for the reason of their meeting. And so showing someone the back of someone’s head, you know, looking at the transfiguration is to show like an idiosyncratic moment in what happened, you know, because, OK, maybe someone had their head, you know, you could not see their face. But, you know, what is the purpose of showing that except to just show an idiosyncrasy of the moment? And you also always need to compare it to the way in which the traditional image would tend to show things in a manner that was more, that tended to be more ordered and tended to show the pattern of reality. And this movement, this transformation, you know, it’s there even in the great artists, it’s there in their lives. And so if you look at someone like Michelangelo, you know, the Pieta has this very powerful image, you know, in terms of emotion, in terms of realism, in terms of showing, you know, the Virgin’s fingers kind of, you know, on the skin of Christ, you know, these little details like the finger of Christ that is caught in her clothing, like these little, beautiful little details have nonetheless something to do with this kind of movement towards idiosyncrasy. And this movement towards idiosyncrasy appears in the Pieta already as something like a beginning of that. You see it in the way in which her clothing, the Virgin’s clothing is represented. So if you look at an ancient image, you know, here’s an image of the Virgin here, there was a way in which, although it wasn’t completely ordered, the clothing was showed with a certain restraint. And so there was, there were patterns of fold and everything. And so it’s not like it was just completely straight, but there was a certain restraint to avoid, you know, to show something that is completely chaotic, especially in her veil, you know, especially in the veil on her head. That would have been the case. But of course, here you see, you know, her clothing completely frumped and completely mixed. And this is of course to show her emotion in this, in this crucial moment, which, like I said, is very effective. But when you get to the end of the life of Michelangelo, he is really taking this mannerism to the extreme. So if you look at the Florentine Pieta, which is here, you can see, you know, how twisted and how strange the proportions are. Look at the proportions of this woman compared to the man behind Christ who is, who is holding him. You know, look at how his body is twisted, how his arm is completely twisted, how his leg is folded in ways that are no longer even have the subtlety of what is, of what is in this image, but really push the deformation of the body to, to, to extremes.