A Sweet Wind Out of the Dark

THE year 1200 marks a high point in the millennium between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance. Around that time, a sweet wind of humanism swept across the dark face of Europe, bringing with it a new interest in Latin classics and Greek philosophy, a delight in racy troubadour songs and epic verse, and a keener awareness of the dignity of man. The Magna Carta was signed, and the great Gothic cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame and Reims were begun.

For all these exceptional accomplishments, however, art historians have traditionally looked upon the period as primarily a transition between Romanesque severity and Gothic naturalism. It is that, to be sure. But Thomas Moving, director of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum and a medieval scholar, has long been convinced that Style 1200, as he calls it, is so distinctive that it merits consideration on its own.

Last week the Met opened "The Year 1200" with 350 medieval treasures culled from the great collections of the U.S. and Europe. At the center of the show is a small triumph of Hoving's own research as a young scholar --an exquisitely carved ivory cross that he himself had traced to the Bury St. Edmunds monastery in England and dated as late 12th century. For the first time, the cross was reunited with the carved body of the crucified Christ that it is thought to have originally supported. By a fortuitous twist of fate, Medievalist Florens Deuchler, who organized the exhibition, noticed the Christ figure in an Oslo museum last summer, remembered the Metropolitan's cross, and realized from their similar scale, design and delicate coloring that the two were probably at one time part of the same work. The Romanesque Christ was inhumanly serene; the later Gothic Christ was often all too humanly agonized. This 1200 Christ has both serenity and humanity, and thus sets the theme for the show.

"Around 1200," Moving points out, "for practically the first time since ancient Greek and Roman times, draperies curl and caress the bodies underneath, and limbs are proudly and successfully shown as organic entities. Faces become truly alive, eyes shine with an inner light, gestures seem to develop an entirely new expressive poetry of their own." That humanizing influence can be traced in a masterly bronze Moses from the Mosan area of northern France and Belgium, in numerous conceptions of the Virgin Mary as a regal but very real woman, and in a series of strikingly carved stone heads recalling Hellenistic ideals of manhood.

Flair for Romance. The most beautiful room of the exhibition is one shaped like the chancel of a church, its walls glowing with stained glass from Reims, Rouen, Lausanne, Strasbourg and Canterbury. In the center is an exquisite effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine, lent by the Abbey of Fontevrault in western France. Eleanor was no saint. In fact, she divorced her first husband, Louis VII of France, conspired against her second, Henry II of England, and delighted in questionable dalliances. But the medieval world loved her flair for romance. She did as much as anyone to usher in the age of courtly love, and minstrels sang her praises in German, Provencal, French and English. Her sculptor saw her as neither saint nor sinner. Rather, he created a slim, elegant woman who is totally at peace--a Book of Hours in her hand, a pillow curving ever so gently beneath the weight of her head. Like most other artists and artisans of the Middle Ages, he remains anonymous.

One name does survive from this age of anonymity: Nicholas of Verdun, a master metalworker in a Mosan workshop. Nothing would be known about Nicholas either except that he had the audacity to sign his works, and what in a lesser medieval man might have been criticized as unseemly vanity was overlooked because he was such an unparalleled artist. His masterwork, the golden, gem-studded Shrine of the Virgin from Belgium's Tournai Cathedral, perfectly defines Style 1200. Nicholas masterfully combined abstract background motifs with a portrayal of the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt that is at once human, simple and spiritual.

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