By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The 19th century fascination with the medieval past suffuses every genre of the literary, performing, visual, and decorative arts—even when the individual artwork has little, if anything, to do with the Middle Ages. The medieval legacy and claims on the medieval past were foundational to the concept of modernity, and the arts of the 19th century propagated a powerful medieval imaginary across genres and media.
Artistic Medievalism
The mania for medievalism was not confined to elite political and intellectual discourses. Instead, these fascinations were shared by the general public, in Europe and beyond, at every socioeconomic level.
If we’re looking for the main taproot of artistic medievalism, the best place to start digging is Romanticism—a hugely influential movement pioneered at the very end of the 18th century and articulated, most fundamentally, by the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel, both of them poets as well as critics. Their German term, romantisch, ‘Romanesque’, was chosen as a counterpoise to the worship of Classical antiquity that had begun to take hold in 14 century Italy. This movement was later dubbed the Renaissance by intellectuals of the soi-disant Enlightenment, who saw themselves as its heirs and continuers.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Medieval Legacy. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Enlightenment Attitudes
The Classicizing turn of the so-called Renaissance had rejected the Gothic barbarism of the Dark Ages in order to recover the symmetry, proportions, techniques, and ideals of Greco-Roman literary and artistic forms, as well as the political models of Periclean Athens and the early Roman Republic. With this commitment to Classical imitation came an embrace of modern technologies and the vaunting of modern scientific methods: rational inquiry, the rejection of superstition, and even the questioning of traditional religion; all were hallmarks of Enlightenment attitudes.
In response to this trend, as Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1800, “I seek and find the Romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived.” That is, Schlegel rejected the developments of the past two centuries in favoring a return to the “older moderns” and their medieval forbears, the original Romantics.
The French Revolution
This turning back of the clock was not only aesthetically important but also politically motivated. For the Schlegels and many of their contemporaries and followers, the ultimate failure of the French Revolution had exposed, in various ways, the limitations of Enlightenment doctrines, particularly the rejection of the older ideals that had animated the medieval world—animated, quite literally, since the proponents of Romanticism regarded Classical influences (aesthetic, political, or ethical) as soulless and derivative. In short, the Enlightenment had deprived both individual people and entire nations of the capacity for self-realization.
In France itself, the Revolution’s overthrow of the Ancient Regime had been accompanied by the savage destruction and confiscation of medieval Church property, and the permanent weakening of religious institutions. In place of the Enlightenment’s cold, universal absolutes—of morality, political ideology, and science—the Romantics glorified the search for authenticity and true passion, for ‘vernacularity’ in its broadest sense.
Indeed, this Romantic connection between the human person and the human community helps to explain why medievalism would be so appealing both to the architects of nationalist projects and to the individual artist or consumer. There were medievalisms of the Right, as well as of the Left.
Nationalist Movements
In many European countries, as a result, Romanticism was closely tied to nationalist movements; this was especially so in such lands as Germany and Poland, neither of which was a nation-state. (Germany would become so in 1871, whereas the medieval Polish kingdom had been partitioned twice, in 1772 and 1793, and no longer existed.) This meant that the quest for (collective) self-realization was also a quest for an elusive basis on which to ground that national identity.
In Poland, the poet Adam Mickiewicz, active in the first half of the 19th century, was literally ‘the prophet’ or ‘bard’ who energized a nationalist movement among dispossessed and diasporic Poles through his glorification of Polish history and folklore. A similar role was played in Germany by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among other poets, and by the Brothers Grimm, whose pioneering collection of fairy tales, first published in 1812, was later the basis for Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology), published in 1835.
These story-collecting efforts, while they might seem to serve divergent purposes, were part of the same mission—the recovery of an authentic medieval worldview, which proponents hypothesized to be encapsulated in the oral traditions of the peasantry. For just as (in Wordsworth’s words) “the child is father of the man”, the Romantic view held that childhood was the time of life in which we are our truest selves; hence the cults of childhood and pastoral simplicity are so characteristic of this era.
Common Questions about Artistic Medievalism and Romanticism
Rational inquiry, the rejection of superstition, and even the questioning of traditional religion; all were hallmarks of Enlightenment attitudes.
In France, the Revolution’s overthrow of the Ancient Regime had been accompanied by the savage destruction and confiscation of medieval Church property, and the permanent weakening of religious institutions.
Adam Mickiewicz was a poet in Poland. He was active in the first half of the 19th century, and was literally ‘the prophet’ or ‘bard’ who energized a nationalist movement among dispossessed and diasporic Poles through his glorification of Polish history and folklore.
