Brought to Life Brings Color Back to Gothic Churches

 

 

BROUGHT TO LIFE: PAINTED WOOD SCULPTURE FROM EUROPE, 1300-1700 

Smith College Museum of Art 

Northampton MA 

Through August 6, 2023  

 

Montreal--more typical than you think!

 

Sometimes visitors to cathedrals such as Notre Dame de Montréal, the Sistine Chapel, the basilica at Notre Dame University in Indiana, or Amiens Cathedral in France are alarmed by what they see. Such Gothic splendors appear gaudy, even garish, riots of sky blues, pastels, and gilding. 

 

This is because they have either visited weathered medieval churches or have seen bare stone and woodwork in museums. Assumptions of spartan interiors dance in their heads, as if somehow naked pillars directed the gazes of the faithful toward heaven and reminded them that they were to eschew the pleasures of the earthly realm. In such imagining, only stained glass windows or perhaps a fresco or painting illuminated the insides of hulking churches. 

 

If that's what you think, you're the victim of time and the changes brought by sunlight, candle smoke, dampness, mold, and ephemeral unvarnished paint. At one time, a 14th century cathedral looked a lot like Notre Dame de Montréal—except their exteriors were painted as brightly as those in Italian cities such as Orvieto.  And if you want to push things back even further, Greek and Roman statues were gaily painted as well.

 

 

 

An exhibit at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) give us a glimpse of what medieval cathedrals might have looked like inside via woodworks that retain traces of pigment.  Brought to Life is a gallery full of wooden sculptures from the 14th through the dawn of the 18th centuries. Though these pieces have also been dimmed by time, there is enough of their original hue for us to imagine the explosion of color a medieval cathedral would have been. If you're wondering, though they are too big to go on tour or be installed and the museum, even massive Gothic columns and arches would have appeared in Technicolor. (Okay, not Technicolor, which is a film stock, but you get the picture.)  

 

 

 

In other words, Gothic cathedrals were quite the opposite of a spartan holiness scenario. For most Europeans, cities and villages would have been drab, muddy, and dark before gas lighting, street paving, window panes, and more substantial dwellings took over. In most places, little of that even began to happen before the 19th century. Churches and cathedrals were brightly adorned because they invoked thoughts of heaven, not because color stymied such reflections.  

 

 

 

By extension, there's another historical lesson embedded in the SCMA exhibit. Many North Americans are so present-minded that their view of the past is like the black and white or sepia archival photos from the pre-color film era. We all know Puritans dressed mostly in black, right? Granted their worldview was often gloomy, but many of them liked a splash of color. After all, it was easier to make fabric dyes from flowers and wild plants than blacks from tannin-tinted roots and bark. (Black dyes also degraded fabric much faster.)

 

 

 

To circle back, color was associated with the glories of Creation. It was the case that a lot of medieval public art other than paintings was left unsigned. The skilled artisans who carved figures from wood or stone and those that slathered on the paint were supposed to be conduits to God's glory, one imagined in full living color. 

 

 

 

A visit to the SCMA reveals both the ways medieval Europeans were different from us–faith was seldom openly questioned and religious symbols were ubiquitous–yet also similar. Like us, they enjoyed color and light. They liked it so much that some of their efforts strike us as a bit garish!

 

Rob Weir