page_title: Medieval art
section_title: Subsequent reputation
hierarchical_section_title: Medieval art / Subsequent reputation
caption_attribution_description: English: Siege of the Castle of Love, mirror back. Français&#160;: Siège du château de l'Amour, valve de miroir.
context_page_description: The medieval art of the Western world covers a vast scope of time and place, over 1000 years of art in Europe, and at times the Middle East and North Africa. It includes major art movements and periods, national and regional art, genres, revivals, the artists' crafts, and the artists themselves.
  Art historians attempt to classify medieval art into major periods and styles, often with some difficulty. A generally accepted scheme includes the later phases of Early Christian art, Migration Period art, Byzantine art, Insular art, Pre-Romanesque, Romanesque art, and Gothic art, as well as many other periods within these central styles. In addition each region, mostly during the period in the process of becoming nations or cultures, had its own distinct artistic style, such as Anglo-Saxon art or Viking art.
  Medieval art was produced in many media, and works survive in large numbers in sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, metalwork and mosaics, all of which have had a higher survival rate than other media such as fresco wall-paintings, work in precious metals or textiles, including tapestry.
context_section_description: Medieval art had little sense of its own art history, and this disinterest was continued in later periods.  The Renaissance generally dismissed it as a "barbarous" product of the "Dark Ages", and the term "Gothic" was invented as a deliberately pejorative one, first used by the painter Raphael in a letter of 1519 to characterise all that had come between the demise of Classical art and its supposed 'rebirth' in the Renaissance. The term was subsequently adopted and popularised in the mid 16th century by the Florentine artist and historian, Giorgio Vasari, who used it to denigrate northern European architecture generally. Illuminated manuscripts continued to be collected by antiquarians, or sit unregarded in monastic or royal libraries, but paintings were mostly of interest if they had historical associations with royalty or others.  The long period of mistreatment of the Westminster Retable by Westminster Abbey is an example; until the 19th century it was only regarded as a useful piece of timber.  But their large portrait of Richard II of England was well looked after, like another portrait of Richard, the Wilton Diptych (illustrated above).  As in the Middle Ages themselves, other objects have often survived mainly because they were considered to be relics.
  There was no equivalent for pictorial art of the "Gothic survival" found in architecture, once the style had finally died off in Germany, England and Scandinavia, and the Gothic Revival long focused on Gothic Architecture rather than art.  The understanding of the succession of styles was still very weak, as suggested by the title of Thomas Rickman's pioneering book on English architecture: An Attempt to discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation (1817).  This began to change with a vengeance by the mid-19th century, as appreciation of medieval sculpture and its painting, known as Italian or Flemish "Primitives", became fashionable under the influence of writers including John Ruskin, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and Pugin, as well as the romantic medievalism of literary works like Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) and Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831).  Early collectors of the "Primitives", then still relatively cheap, included Prince Albert.
  
  Among artists the German Nazarene movement from 1809 and English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from 1848 both rejected the values of at least the later Renaissance, but in practice, and despite sometimes depicting medieval scenes, their work draws its influences mostly from the Early Renaissance rather than the Gothic or earlier periods - the early graphic work of John Millais being something of an exception.  William Morris, also a discriminating collector of medieval art, absorbed medieval style more thoroughly into his work, as did William Burges.
  By the later 19th century many book-illustrators and producers of decorative art of various kinds had learned to use medieval styles successfully from the new museums like the Victoria & Albert Museum set up for this purpose.  At the same time the new academic field of art history, dominated by Germany and France, concentrated heavily on medieval art and was soon very productive in cataloguing and dating the surviving works, and analysing the development of medieval styles and iconography; though the Late Antique and pre-Carolingian period remained a less explored "no-man's land" until the 20th century.
  Franz Theodor Kugler was the first to name and describe Carolingian art in 1837; like many art historians of the period he sought to find and promote the national spirit of his own nation in art history, a search begun by Johann Gottfried Herder in the 18th century.  Kugler's pupil, the great Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt, though he could not be called a specialist in medieval art, was an important figure in developing the understanding of it.  Medieval art was now heavily collected, both by museums and private collectors like George Salting, the Rothschild family and John Pierpont Morgan.
  After the decline of the Gothic Reviv
caption: The Assault on the Castle of Love, attacked by knights and defended by ladies, was a popular subject for Gothic ivory mirror-cases. Paris, 14th century.
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