EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

When art was not art….

Here’s a thought for the day from an excellent introductory text, Herbert Kessler’s Seeing Medieval Art (2004). “The production of art”, he writes of medieval images, “was understood as a spiritual act, inspired by the Holy Spirit and implicated in the process of restoring carnal beings to the invisible God.”¹

That means, however odd it sounds, that medieval art was intended to help viewers unite with God and thus become God. It was an everyday idea in the Middle Ages when Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ was a besteller. Art then (even though the term did not exist) was not a picture book of religous stories for the illiterate, as is so often claimed, but a spiritual guide book. True art was intended to help those capable of such thought steer themselves towards a divine outlook so they could face death with equanimity. To do that one had to become like Christ in order to become at one with God and, thus, become God. Artists, sometimes monks themselves, were thought to have divinely-bestowed wisdom, skills that allowed them to teach others. The purpose of art, then, was not unlike the story of a saint’s life which was used as a guide book on how to live. Yet while saintly stories concerned conduct in both body and mind, medieval art addressed the spirit alone.

Thus when Renaissance artists began to paint naturalistically, the tradition within which they were working had one main goal, to help viewers become (like) God. We aim to demonstrate here how, contrary to appearances, the purpose of art in the Renaissance remained the same even if the craft was now called 'art'. The best Renaissance artists did not follow the dictates of their patrons or orthodox theology. Nor were they illustrators depicting bible stories; nor copyists replicating nature. That, incidentally, is why so few religious images in the Renaissance match the relevant stories in the texts and why visual discrepancies abound. Renaissance artists maintained the same principles as their predecessors: to help lead their viewers who could understand what they painted and sculpted, primarily other artists, towards spiritual fulfillment. 

1. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Broadview Press) 2004, p. 64