The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich 2
11. Courtiers and Burgers………………………………………………………………………………………2
12. The Conquest of Reality……………………………………………………………………………………2
13. Tradition and Innovation I…………………………………………………………………………………..3
14. Tradition and Innovation II…………………………………………………………………………………4
15. Harmony Attained…………………………………………………………………………………………...5
16. Light and Colour……………………………………………………………………………………………..7
17. The New Learning Spreads………………………………………………………………………………..8
18. A Crisis of Art………………………………………………………………………………………………..9
20. The Mirror of Nature……………………………………………………………………………………….11
21. Power and Glory I………………………………………………………………………………………….12
22. Power and Glory II…………………………………………………………………………………………13
23. The Age of Reason………………………………………………………………………………………..13
The Classical Language of Architecture, John Summerson 15
The Essentials of Classicism………………………………………………………………………………….15
The Grammar of Antiquity……………………………………………………………………………………..15
Sixteenth-Century Linguistics…………………………………………………………………………………17
The Rhetoric of the Baroque………………………………………………………………………………….17
A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, Spiro Kostof 19
The Popes as Planners: Rome, 1450-1650…………………………………………………………………19
Making the City Whole…………………………………………………………………………………………19
The Reorganization of Old Quarters…………………………………………………………………………19
Campidoglio…………………………………………………………………………………………………….20
“A Pasture for the Bodily Senses”.........................................................................................................21
The Master Plan of Sixtus V…………………………………………………………………………………..21
The Workshop of St. Peter’s………………………………………………………………………………….22
Understanding Architecture, Roth-Roth Clark 24
Architecture in the Age of Enlightenment, 1720-1790……………………………………………………..24
The Emergence of Art and Architectural History……………………………………………………………25
A Rational Architecture: Saint-Geneviève, Paris……………………………………………………………25
“Speaking Architecture”........................................................................................................................26
Designing the City……………………………………………………………………………………………...26
The English Garden: “Consult the Genius of the Place”.......................................................................27
Eclecticism and the Architecture of Revolutions……………………………………………………………27
The Industrial Revolution……………………………………………………………………………………...28
Cast Iron………………………………………………………………………………………………………...28
An Architecture of Rationality…………………………………………………………………………………28
(number) = page in the story of art
green = people
yellow = works of art
underlined = concepts
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,The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich
11. Courtiers and Burghers
The fourteenth century
(207) Cathedrals were no longer the main focus of art. Small towns wanted pride ->
cathedrals -> the towns had grown into teeming centers of trade whose burghers felt
increasingly independent of the power of the church and the feudal lords -> moving to cities
to express their wealth.
● Architecture: Early English (Gothik) -> Decorated Style, because they liked to show
their skill in decoration and complicated tracery. (208) Growing cities -> many secular
buildings had to be designed (town halls, guild halls, colleges, palaces, bridges, and
city gates), like the Doges’ Palace in Venice.
● Sculpture: are not of stone, but smaller works of metal and ivory, (210) like Virgin and
Child (for private prayer); avoiding the impression of rigidity (a real mother) -> curves.
Goths loved this -> gradually more details.
● (211) Art: the clear symbolic way of telling a story with easily readable gestures and
no distracting details (the graceful narrative), and, on the margin page, the slice of
real-life (the faithful observation).
Influence of Italian art, (212) in particularly the art of Giotto in Florence. Duccio breathed new
life into the old Byzantine forms instead of discarding them altogether. Painters arranged the
symbols of the sacred stories to form a satisfying pattern by ignoring the real shape and
proportion of things, and by forgetting about space altogether. (213) Achievements of Giotto,
the details. (214) Portraits had not existed during the Middle Ages, but Simone Martini made
a portrait of his friend’s, poet Petrarch, lover. Painters painted likeness from nature, and that
the art of portraiture developed. (215) Pope centers in Avignon, not in Rome, Germany
centers in Prague. Artists and ideas traveled from one center to another, and no one thought
of rejecting an achievement because it was ‘foreign’ -> the ‘International style’, like Wilton
Diptych. (218) Observation and the delight in delicate and beautiful things is being portraited.
A picture that looks nearly like a scene from real life, but not quite (Paul and Jean de
Limbourg). The interest had gradually shifted, from the best way of telling a sacred story as
clearly and impressively as possible, to the methods of representing a piece of nature in the
most faithful way. (220) The artists’ job became difficult, they began sketching -> (221)
studying a live animal. The public began judging -> artists wanted to study the human body
as the Greeks had done -> end medieval art, begin Renaissance.
12. The Conquest of Reality
The early fifteenth century
(223) The idea of revival/ rebirth of ‘the grandeur that was Rome’. The period between the
classical age and the Renaissance was merely a sad interlude, ‘the time between’, the
Italians blamed the Goths for the downfall of the Roman Empire (Gothic = Barbaric).
● Some seven hundred years separated the Goths from the rise of the art that we now
call Gothic.
● The revival of art, after the shock and turmoil of the Dark Ages, came gradually.
● The Gothic period itself saw this revival getting into its full stride.
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, (224) The Italians of the fourteenth century: “All art, science, and scholarship that had
flourished in the classical period, had been destroyed by the northern barbarians, so we
need to revive the past and thus bring about a new era”. Filippo Brunelleschi (initiator of
Renaissance architecture, perspective) embraced the Gothic tradition -> needed to design
new churches -> discarded the traditional style and adopted a Roman programme to create
new models of harmony and beauty. (226) Cappella Pazzi contains classical elements like
columns, pilasters, arches, framing, ‘order’. (229) Brunelleschi gave artists the mathematical
means of solving the illusion of depth. Masaccio painted the Holy Trinity with the Virgin, St.
John, and donors with a new perspective. (230) Donatello broke with the past with his
sculptures because he visualized freshly and convincingly; details by studying the human
body (using models). (233) Like Masaccio’s figures, Donatello’s are harsh, angular, violent ->
alive. The new art of perspective further increases the illusion of reality (thinking how things
were). (235) The artists around Brunelleschi longed so passionately for a revival of art that
they turned to nature, to science, and to the remains of antiquity to realize their new aims.
The final conquest of reality in the North by Jan van Eyck, he, like sculptor Claus Sluter, was
connected with the court of the Dukes of Burgundy. (236) The Ghent altarpiece contains
differences and similarities from Masaccio’s fresco in Florence. Van Eyck didn’t idealize the
human figure like the ancients, he used models. (239) The Van Eycks did not break as
radically with the traditions of the International Style as Masaccio had done. Gothic paintings
had details, but didn’t have the real appearance of the figures and landscapes -> drawing
and perspective not convincing. The southern artists began with the framework of
perspective lines, and they built up the human body through their knowledge of anatomy and
of the laws of foreshortening. (240) But Van Eyck achieved the illusion of nature by patiently
adding detail upon detail (= difference between northern and southern/Italian art).
● Representation of the beauty of things = northern artist.
● Bold outlines, clear perspective, mastery of the beautiful human body = Italian.
The method of painting in the Middle Ages: making pigments by grounding elements and
eggs (dried quickly) = tempera. Van Eyck used oil instead of eggs -> oil painting (The
betrothal of the Arnolfini). (243) The artist became the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense
of the term. (244) Konrad Witz painted The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (with people like
themselves), (245) perhaps the first exact representation, the first ‘portrait’ of a real view ever
attempted.
13. Tradition and Innovation I
The later fifteenth century in Italy
Art could not only be used to tell the sacred story movingly but might serve to mirror a
fragment of the real world (revolution) -> experimenting. Middle Ages: Latin -> (growing
cities) native tongue and against foreign. Artists were organized into guilds: (248) watching
over the rights and privileges of members, ensuring a safe market, and having standards.
They helped to make the city prosperous and beautiful, but foreign artists couldn’t get settled
or employed. ‘School of painting’ = learning from the masters if you have talent and could
imitate them. (249) There was to find a compromise between the traditional commissions and
the revolutionary methods. Leon Battista Alberti: “How to apply the programme to the
ordinary dwelling-house in a city street?” -> (250) modern look by reverting to Roman forms
and Gothic traditions (smoothing out the ‘barbaric’ pointed arch and using the elements of
the classical order in a traditional context). (251) The mixture between new and old, between
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