Interview

A Conversation about Mount Holyoke's Medieval Collection

While the galleries are closed for renovation and expansion, the museum's medieval and early Renaissance objects are on loan to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. In the following interview, Marianne Doezema discusses the installation with director of the McMullen Museum, Nancy Netzer, and instructor at Boston College, Ross Bresler.

MD: It's fascinating to see these familiar objects, installed in a very different way than they have been at Mount Holyoke. I see you've arranged them in a three groups in order to demonstrate influences that played a role in the stylistic development of early Italian Renaissance art. I understand you developed the installation, Ross. Let me ask you how the story line begins.

RB: Mount Holyoke's collection provides an excellent opportunity to study the effects on early Renaissance artists of the renewed interest in the heritage of ancient Rome as well as the courtly northern Gothic tradition and the eastern Byzantine style. In the first gallery, several of your museum's Romanesque capitals demonstrate the earliest revival of interest in monumental sculpture in Europe.

MD: The photographic reproduction of an ancient Corinthian capital on the first object label is a wonderful way to illustrate how the sculptor was borrowing from the architectural orders of the classical world. The encircling palmettes decorating the Romanesque capital are clearly abstractions based on the acanthus leaves of the ancient prototype.

RB: Many of these capitals demonstrate the same kind of borrowing. The example you've referred to was created in France, while others were produced in Italy and Spain. They all share a similar abstract style, which demonstrates the international nature of Europe and European art as early as the 11th century.

MD: How do you account for this relative stylistic homogeneity?

RB: All of these countries had once been part of the Roman Empire, and so numerous architectural remains were available to be seen.

NN: And parts of Roman buildings were often reused. Some of the capitals we see here would have been side by side with Roman ones that had been retrieved from ancient sites.

RB: Also, there was considerable travel during the Romanesque age, due in large part to the rise in importance of pilgrimage to sacred sites around the Mediterranean. And the crusades brought large groups of "soldiers" from all over Europe on a mission to retake the Holy Land and southern Spain for Christianity.

MD: You want visitors to this installation to see beyond commonly used categorizations of the Romanesque, such as French and Italian, but yet these objects do reflect regional styles.

NN: Very true, but those regional styles are much more local than much art-historical literature acknowledges. The boundaries between regions were not necessarily nationalistic but rather had to do with political and/or commercial relationships between regions that might have been separated by a day's travel on horseback.

MD: The identification of Mount Holyoke's Gothic Madonna and Child, which was acquired in 1995, depended on knowledge of regional style. Much of the history of this sculpture is unknown, but on stylistic grounds we could conclude that it was produced in the region surrounding Paris known as the Ile-de-France. I see that this sculpture is a centerpiece of the second gallery where you examine the spread of the Gothic style across Europe.

RB: This Madonna and Child represents all the major characteristics of the high Gothic style, including the S-curve defined by her pose and the elegant folds of her voluminous drapery. The sculpture was produced in the region where the Gothic style emerged, in the Ile-de-France. With its ornate use of rich decorative motifs, the stylistic vocabulary of Gothic art was associated with the French court and was adopted as the dominant language of power by many European courts.

MM: So the Gothic style, with its regal associations, could have been used as the language of choice even after the Renaissance had emerged in some regions.

RB: Exactly. This fragment of a tomb slab dates from the 14th century. It comes from a region of southern Italy that was ruled by the French House of Anjou, where an elegant and aristocratic French style developed and persisted into the mid-15th century. On this slab, Gothic writing, a trefoil pointed arch, and an overall decorative aesthetic reflect influences of the courtly North.

MD: In the final section, your installation deals with the influence of the Byzantine style imported from the Greek Empire centered in Constantinople.

RB: Mount Holyoke's Byzantine icons demonstrate the principle characteristics of the style, such as abstraction and spirituality. In this first panel painting, Mary the Queen of Heaven is positioned frontally, her face broken up into flat segments, articulated with pronounced lines. The drapery conveys no sense of volume. Originally, the luminous gold ground enhanced the glorious sense of the unearthly realm in which she is presented.

MD: Then this Italo-Byzantine painting shows how Italian artists adopted the style.

RB: Yes, again, the segments of the bodies are broken up into compartments, with only subtle hints of shading. The drapery is articulated by gold striations, very similar to the manner of Byzantine images. But the elaborate border of the Virgin's mantle and the calligraphic lines are Gothic features. As in many of the objects on display in this section, the Byzantine and the Gothic are combined.

MD: At the same time that many of these artists are working in a style rooted in the Gothic, another tradition emerges. These two Florentine fresco fragments of the 14th century exemplify a new conception of the human form that is primarily associated with Giotto.

RB: Yes, the Head of a Saint, for example, shows a new interest in naturalism, monumentality, and volumetric rendering.

MD: If you were to select one object from Mount Holyoke's collection that represents the melding of all these influences, which would it be?

RB: I would have to turn to a painting that is small in scale but extremely important, your Angel pinnacle from Duccio's great Maestà. The naturalistic proportions, the volumetric drapery, and the modeled face again reveal a familiarity with Giotto's work. The decorative foliate patterns of the angel's tunic convey the Gothic influence, while the severe frontality of the figure, the elaborate gold striations that define the feathers of the wings, and the worked gold background point to Byzantine sources. This is only one of four angel pinnacles to survive from the Maestà, an elaborate, multi-paneled altarpiece installed in the Cathedral of Siena in 1311 but sawed into pieces in the 18th century. Your museum is very fortunate to own a panel from this magnificent work.

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