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The Drogo Sacramentary Ascenscion Illumination

Pre-Romanesque art and architecture is the period in Western European art from either the emergence of the Merovingian kingdom in about 500 or from the Carolingian Renaissance in the late 8th century, to the beginning of the 11th century Romanesque period.

The term is generally used in English only for architecture and monumental sculpture, but here all the arts of the period are briefly described.

The primary theme during this period is the introduction and absorption of classical Mediterranean and Christian forms with Germanic ones creating innovative new forms, leading to the rise of Romanesque art in the 11th century.

In the outline of Medieval art it was preceded by what is commonly called the Migration Period art of the "barbarian" peoples: Hiberno-Saxon in the British Isles and predominantly Merovingian on the Continent.

The Carolingian Renaissance late eighth and ninth centuries, with the peak of the activities occurring during the reigns of the Carolingian rulers Charlemagne and Louis the Pious.

-- confined almost entirely to the clergy, and due to the period lacking the wide ranging social movements of the later Italian Renaissance.[1] Instead of being a rebirth of new cultural movements, the period was typified more as an attempt to recreate the previous culture of the Roman Empire.

Carolingian art spans the roughly 100-year period from about 800-900. Although brief, it was an influential period - northern Europe embraced classical Mediterranean Roman art forms for the first time, setting the stage for the rise of Romanesque art and eventually Gothic art in the West. Illuminated manuscripts, metalwork, small-scale sculpture, mosaics and frescos survive from the period.

The influence of Byzantine art in western Europe, particularly Italy was seen in ecclesiastical architecture, through the development of the Romanesque style in the 10th century and 11th centuries. This influence was transmitted through the Frankish and Salic emperors, primarily Charlemagne, who had close relations with Byzantium. The contribution of the migrated Byzantine scholars in Renaissance is also very important.

Faded Fresco "Christ Healing the Possessed", 1080, Lambach Abbey Church, Upper Austria

The National Art Museum of Catalonia (Catalan: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya), abbreviated as MNAC, is a museum of Catalan visual art located in Barcelona, Catalonia.

Romanesque art refers to the art of Western Europe from approximately 1000 AD to the rise of the Gothic style in the 13th century, or later, depending on region.

The preceding period is increasingly known as the Pre-Romanesque.

The term was invented by 19th century art historians, especially for Romanesque architecture, which retained many basic features of Roman architectural style

Romanesque art was also greatly influenced by Byzantine art, especially in painting, and by the anti-classical energy of the decoration of the Insular art of the British Isles, and from these elements forged a highly innovative and coherent style.

art of the period was characterised by a very vigorous style in both sculpture and painting. The latter continued to follow essentially Byzantine iconographic models for the commonest subjects in churches, which remained Christ in Majesty, the Last Judgement and scenes from the Life of Christ.

In illuminated manuscripts, where the most lavishly decorated manuscripts of the period were mostly bibles or psalters, more originality is seen, as new scenes needed to be depicted.

Colours, now remaining bright only in stained glass and well-preserved manuscripts, tended to be very striking, and mostly primary.

Compositions usually had little depth, and needed to be flexible to squeeze themselves into the shapes of historiated initials, column capitals, and church typanums; the tension between a tightly enclosing frame, from which the composition sometimes escapes, is a recurrent theme in Romanesque art.

Figures still often varied in size in relation to their importance, and landscape backgrounds, if attempted at all, were closer to abstract decorations than realism - as in the trees in the "Morgan Leaf".

Portraiture hardly existed.

The period saw Europe grow steadily more prosperous, and art of the highest quality was no longer confined, as it largely was in the Carolingian and Ottonian periods, to the royal court and a small circle of monasteries.

Monasteries remained extremely important, especially those of the expansionist new orders of the period, the Cistercian, Cluniac, and Carthusian, which spread across Europe,

but city churches, those on pilgrimage routes, and many churches in small towns and villages were elaborately decorated to a very high standard - indeed it is often these that have survived, when cathedrals and city churches have been rebuilt, and no Romanesque royal palace has really survived.

The lay artist was becoming a valued figure - goldsmith and enamellist, Nicholas of Verdun seems to have been known across the continent. Most masons and goldsmiths were now lay, and lay painters like Master Hugo seem to have been in the majority, at least of those doing the best work, by the end of the period.

The iconography of their church work was no doubt arrived at in consultation with clerical advisors.

Painting was either in illuminated manuscripts, or on walls, mostly.

Belles Heures
de Duc du Berry
Folio94- Diocres
Expounding the
Scriptures
1408-09
Artist: Limbourg Brothers (Paul, Hermann and Jean)

W empire fell to Heruli 476

Isaurian dynasty in Byzantium 717 - 802

1022 first 14 for-reformation protestants were burned in france

Gothic first appearing during the latter part of the Renaissance as a stylistic insult.

The word "Gothic" for art was initially used as a synonym for "Barbaric", and was therefore used as a negative term of opprobrium: this type of Medieval art was considered as unrefined and barbaric, too remote from the aesthetic proportions and shapes of Classical art and its resurgence during the Renaissance.[1] The "Gothic" qualifier for this art seems to have been invented by the Italian Giorgio Vasari,[2] who used it anachronistically and pejoratively as early as 1530, calling Gothic art a "monstrous and barbarous" "disorder".[3] "Gothic art" was strongly criticized by French authors such as Boileau, La Bruyère, Rousseau, before becoming a recognized form of art, and the wording becoming fixed.[4] Molière would famously comment on Gothic:

The besotted taste of Gothic monuments,
These odious monsters of ignorant centuries,
Which the torrents of barbary spewed forth.
-Molière.[5]

In its beginning, Gothic Art was initially called "French work" (Opus Francigenum), thus attesting the priority of France in the creation of this style.[6]

The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry

Christian art was often typological in nature (see Medieval allegory), showing the stories of the New Testament and the Old Testament side by side. Saints' lives were often depicted. Images of the Virgin Mary changed from the Byzantine iconic form to a more human and affectionate mother, cuddling her infant, swaying from her hip, and showing the refined manners of a well-born aristocratic courtly lady.

Secular art came in to its own during this period with the rise of cities, foundation of universities, increase in trade, the establishment of a money-based economy and the creation of a bourgeois class who could afford to patronize the arts and commission works resulting in a proliferation of paintings and illuminated manuscripts. Increased literacy and a growing body of secular vernacular literature encouraged the representation of secular themes in art. With the growth of cities, trade guilds were formed and artists were often required to be members of a painters' guild-as a result, because of better record keeping, more artists are known to us by name in this period than any previous, some artists were even so bold as to sign their names.

Hanseatic League was founded in the 12th century, with the foundation of the city of Lübeck in 1158-1159

Loyola b 1491

Limbourg

In the realm of painting, the change to the new style became visible around a century after the first of these cathedrals rose. In contrast to the Romanesque and Byzantine styles, the most noticeable feature of the art of the Gothic period is its increased naturalism. This quality, which first appeared in the work of Italian artists in the late 13th century, became the dominant painting style throughout Europe until the end of the 15th century.