CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 9 The writer’s voice Individuality and style From ‘Mediaeval Design’ by John Harvey, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, 1958 It is sometimes alleged that artistic individuality and personal ‘style’ did not exist before the Renaissance, that term being used in the specific sense of the revival of interest in the forms of Roman art in 15th-century Italy. It is very hard to find any supporting facts for this view, and it is unusual to find even the most elementary precautions taken in such comparisons as are instituted. We must confine comparison and contrast to works which are truly comparable, for in the first place it must be constantly borne in mind that artistic personality in the fullest sense, is the exception at all periods and in all arts, while the majority of artists are relatively undistinguished. Think of the minor dramatists of Elizabethan England, the lesser contrapuntal composers of Bach’s Germany or the background of common form of the later 18th century against which the personal styles of Haydn and Mozart stand out, the general run of paintings of the Dutch School, the architecture of Wren’s contemporaries. We cannot expect to find many artists of highly developed individuality in any one art at the same time, nor to find, for example, that a 13th-century parish church or a manor house of 1450 has the same degree of personality that exists in St Paul’s Cathedral or Blenheim Palace. But the converse also holds true: it would be rare indeed to find two medieval villages with house fronts resembling one another in quite so stereotyped a fashion as do many Georgian streets, while every one of the important builds of different dates at cathedrals, palaces and castles is marked by its own character, demonstrating the personal style of its designer, known or unknown. Returning for a moment to the Renaissance, the revival of classical forms did, it is true, lead to the discarding of an existing set of traditional conditions, but only to impose another set of at least equal, if not greater rigidity. In the architectural field this new straitjacket consisted of a series of arithmetical rules of proportion given by Vitruvius and interpreted in the light of surviving Roman buildings and fragments. Now it is a somewhat remarkable fact that the text of Vitruvius’s books on architecture had never been lost in the West, and did not have to be rediscovered at the Renaissance. Copies of it existed in a number of the more important monastic libraries and fresh copies were being made up to the 14th century, while there is a considerable body of evidence showing that its structural precepts had to a large extent, passed into the common body of European technical tradition. Occasionally Vitruvius is even cited by name. But until the 15th-century Italian revival of interest in the antique, Vitruvius was not used as a manual of design, aesthetically considered. I want to suggest that the reason for this disuse was not ignorance or neglect, as has generally been assumed, but the supersession of the Vitruvian principles of proportion by another and more highly developed set of principles. It was pointed out more than 50 years ago by the French archaeologist and art historian, Camille Enlart, that there is a fundamental difference between architectural proportions in the classical world and those of medieval times, in that the latter had a constant reference to human scale. If one Greek or Roman temple was built to twice the length of another, every one of its parts was multiplied in the same ratio. But in the works of the gothic period the designers’ appreciation of natural fitness had taken a further step, possibly as a result of making the observation that a large tree has leaves of the same size as those of a small tree of the same kind. Whatever the source may have been, the gothic architects were in fact in possession of a most elaborate geometrical system which for long remained a carefully guarded secret.
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