I get it. I really do. The renaissance is sexy. The Baroque is sexy, if you like Caravaggio. Modern art is clearly sexy. Medieval art, however, has taken vows of chastity and is hiding in the corner. Probably self-flagellating.
This seems to be the message of how people see the medieval world. Shame I love it, then. Shame also that I work with medieval art on a daily basis. Silly me.
Matters are made worse by the fact that I don’t just like medieval art. I tend to be into decorative art and design, rather than painting or architecture. Most people can be persuaded to get excited about a building. Far fewer get excited about embroidery. Still, them’s the breaks. I can accept this.
No, what really winds me up (sometimes) is the way in which museums can unconsciously reinforce this message. Two trips I made recently to Milan and Berlin summed up what medieval art too often is, but might be.
Milan’s a wonderful, messy, bustling city. And sitting like a spider at the heart of it is the massive Castello Sforzesco, an enormous castle that’s utilised by the city as a series of museum spaces for many of its art treasures. The obvious one being Michelangelo’s final work, the Rondanini Pietà. The ground floor sculpture galleries – which include some pretty impressive medieval works, by the way – are impressive, and must have been done about fifteen years ago. A couple of floors up, the visitor then walks through a new gallery on the history of Milan. Then there follow a whole series of (to my eye) dull paintings galleries. The route continues into another part of the building, at every stage giving the world-weary visitor the chance to jump off the ride, give up and leave, having seen what presumably, they most wanted to see.
But the persevering visitor can continue up onto the battlements. This is wonderfully Italian – little signage, no particular nods to the gods of Health and Safety, and a route up to what promises to be a complete waste of time and energy. However, emerging breathless into the upper reaches of the castle, I was met by a whole other suite of galleries. These took me through ceramics, musical instruments, and finally, into the gallery housing the metalwork and medieval ivory carvings. The galleries had become pokier and pokier, and I don’t imagine that these spaces have been given a facelift in fifty years. Not that I’m complaining – I understand how hard it can be to get funding, and besides, museums have to prioritise. But I spent forty minutes to an hour wandering in this unprepossessing gallery, looking at some truly gorgeous works of art. And during that time, I was the only visitor who’d managed to penetrate the museum’s defences that far. The subliminal message is what interests me – only an obsessive will find this stuff interesting. The rest of you – give up. It’s not worth it!
And this is what I would call ‘Normal Setting’ for medieval art in museums. But in Berlin, I had the wonderful experience of visiting the Bode Museum, which specialises in medieval and renaissance sculpture, but also currently houses a wonderful display on medieval metalwork in the basement. The Bode is beautiful. More than anything, it just shows how strong medieval art can be when it’s shown to the public with the same confidence that you’d have if you were displaying a piece by Leonardo da Vinci or Donatello. The art itself is fine. It’s the signals that are sent out by the way it’s presented that is so often the problem. I especially enjoyed coming unexpectedly across these two tomb figures in the basement.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not complaining about curators. They know the value of what they’re looking after. And I’m not complaining about ‘ignorant’ museum visitors either. After all, people respond, naturally, to the way in which works of art are presented to them. If the display says it’s important, then they’ll pay more interest. What I’m whinging about is two-fold. On the one hand, there’s only a limited amount of money to spend on museums, and so often it’s spent on the most well-known things, making them even more well-known and more likely to have money spent on them. This is a cycle of ever-decreasing returns. On the other hand, it seems to be human nature to see works of art in a way that is more circumscribed than we might like to believe by the way in which it’s presented to us. This explains why lost works by great masters can be ‘rediscovered’ and suddenly be thought to be masterpieces, while works that people thought were amazing a hundred years ago can now more often than not be ignored by the modern visitor. So – does art have any kind of inherent value, or is it all about spin?
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