> A question came up at a seminar this morning which no one could answer.
> We were discussing the way in which gothic cathedrals and sculptures were
> painted and realising that we might not have liked their appearance very
> much! The question: when was the practice of painting sulptures and
> facades abandoned, and why?
A difficult question to answer because of all the scraping that went
on in the 18th and 19th centuries. Painters such as Jan van Eyck and
Robert Campin are documented as having polychromed statuary in the
second quarter of the 15th century, but even at this time, practices
must have been changing. In Italy, I have never heard any mention of
Donatello's sculptures being polychromed, for example, and until
recently, I always assumed that was probably quite straightforwardly
related to emulation of classical sculpture, which at the time was
thought to have been unpainted (we now know it was as brightly
painted as medieval sculpture was). But what is puzzling is that, at
the same time that van Eyck and Campin were colouring up real
statues, they were also painting, on the backs of their panels,
fictive sculpture in "grisaille", i.e. unpainted sculpture. In
wood sculpture, unpainted retables were one of the innovations of
Tilman Riemenschneider at the very end of the 15th century.
Certainly, the full-blown revival of Antiquity provoked an aesthetic
preference for pure, white marble (and bronze), and that in turn led
to lots of scraping off of pigments from medieval buildings and their
sculptures by "restorers", so much of the evidence has been erased.
It has only been recently, in fact, that technical examinations of
medieval architectural sculpture have even looked for traces of
pigment (recent examples are the west facade of Wells Cathedral and
the Royal Portals of Chartres Cathedral), so the question will
probably not be fully answerable for some time.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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