Stony Chronicle

Smash hit of the Continent's current exhibition season is the Louvre's "Gothic Europe." Sponsored by the 18-nation Council of Europe, and spreading through 15 galleries of the museum's Pavilion de Flore, the show has brought together 548 choice and rare medieval works--stained glass from France and England, illuminated manuscripts from Czechoslovakia, statuary from Scandinavia, metalwork from Germany, and frescoes from Italy. The result is a panorama of Europe from the 12th to the 14th centuries, its greatest age of artistic unity (see color pages).

For many scholars, the exhibition has been a revelation of how Europe's international style swept to the outermost bounds of the Continent. For archaeologists, it is a first chance to see the recently unearthed statue columns and capitals from the destroyed cloister at Chalons-sur-Marne, perhaps the decade's outstanding medieval dig. For the average museumgoer, the show makes alive and vibrant an age that has often seemed remote and otherworldly.

As the Louvre's exhibition makes abundantly clear, if the Middle Ages had salvation as its ultimate aim, it was also a society with its feet firmly on the ground. Until recently, as Jean Taralon, one of the exhibit's organizers, points out, "Gothic art has been the restricted domain of the art historian who looked at everything from a purely esthetic viewpoint." Now a growing group of art historians, led by former Journalist Henry Kraus (TIME, Nov. 17), is discovering that Gothic art is a stony chronicle that records with amazing and poetic fidelity the changing ways of Gothic life.

The appearance in the cathedrals of drolly graven country bumpkins illustrating the "Months of Labor," for instance, was more than an illustration of the monastic injunction Laborare est orare (To work is to pray). It also signaled a change in attitude toward the dignity of labor, and, following the bloody peasant revolts of the 13th century, amounted to recognizing serfs as vital members of society.

Students were even then a turbulent lot. In Paris, the clergy complained that they "were abandoning theology for all kinds of will-o'-the-wisps," while their masters "were always holding meetings to treat of the affairs of the community, to plot and conspire, to deliberate, to legislate and draw up rules." In 13th-century Bologna, this ferment erupted in a gigantic student strike. The plaque on a cathedral tomb showing deftly delineated students at a lecture, argues Medievalist Kraus, may have been part of a subtle campaign by the church to make students feel recognized and give them a sense of participation.

Cathedral Bedlam. The beguiling, gracefully idealized figure of Isabelle, daughter of France's Saint Louis, from Poissy's Dominican priory, illustrates how Gothic art attained new heights of expressiveness by combining divine and human traits in a single figure. The stylized, strangely affecting ladies lamenting the loss of a knight in Castile testify that even in an age of faith, death caused heart-rending grief.

Perhaps the most human scenes--and clearest insights into everyday life--appear in the vignettes of glass and stone that identified the donors of essentially religious works. Here for an instant a touch of medieval individualism was allowed to peek out, whether it was the pride of profession of a barrel maker of York, a craftsman stoutly representing his guild, or a mighty lord humbly kneeling in full armor at prayer. "These were great advertisements," points out Kraus. "In those days, the cathedrals were populated day and night. The professional confreries gathered there in constant meetings. Thousands more came to see the relics. It was generally bedlam, and a donor's window was seen by all eyes, from those of the highest prince to the lowliest peasant."

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