In the late 12th century two broad developments took place in wall painting and manuscript illumination throughout the West. On the one hand, forms became smoother and more fluent, and a less abstract and less aggressively patterned interpretation was put on nature. On the other hand, the perennial interest that Western artists had shown in contemporary Byzantine art grew more intense, and this sometimes led to the opposite extremes of turbulent and mannered design. Both of these tendencies probably aimed at representing human actions and interactions with greater conviction and increased psychological power.

In England a new soft style is apparent in the later hands responsible for illuminating the great Winchester Bible in the 1170s. There, all traces of the elaborately patterned damp-fold drapery of mid-century painting have vanished, to be replaced by material that falls in tiny ripples and soft irregular undulations to reveal firm limbs beneath. A later, simplified, mannered, and frenzied version of this style is found in the illustrations of a bestiary from the Midlands of the early 1200s. But the rounded, billowing drapery of the enthroned Christ in the contemporary Westminster Psalter seems to have left the 12th century far behind. This is pure Early Gothic painting.

A similar evolution can be traced in northern France, in books such as the Capucin’s Bible from Champagne and in the Souvigny Bible from central France, in which Byzantine influence is strong. A variation, which originated in the Meuse Valley, was the so-called Muldenfaltenstil, named after the small, troughlike folds into which drapery breaks (e.g., the Psalter of Queen Ingeborg, northern France, c. 1200). In Germany this style is found in manuscripts made on the middle Rhine and at Regensburg.

The other major factor in European art about 1200 was a widespread interest in Byzantium. Byzantine mosaicists in the late 12th century undertook vast commissions in Venice and Sicily, and these provided Western artists with the opportunity of studying monumental Byzantine art of the finest quality at first hand. Imported Byzantine illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, enamels, and ivory carvings were also available as models. The purest and most striking instances of Byzantinizing painting are found in Italy. In Venice local craftsmen, trained by Byzantine masters, designed and laid mosaics that are almost indistinguishable from genuine Byzantine work; and in the cathedral at Aquileia the standing prophets and saints painted on the vaults of the crypt look as if they had walked straight out of an Eastern atelier. In Rome and its environs, too, the development of painting in the first half of the 13th century was determined largely by the extensive new programs of mosaics in Norman Sicily, at Palermo, Cefalù, and Monreale.

This swirling, contrived Byzantine art of the middle to late 12th century gave rise to many experiments in northern Europe. It strongly affected artists at Salzburg (e.g., the drawing of Christ in Majesty in Vienna, Österreichisches Nationalbibliothek, MS. 953) and on the upper Rhine (e.g., the Gospel Lectionary from Speyer of 1196, in Karlsruhe), and it underlies the many figures in the great Tree of Jesse on the ceiling of the Church of St. Michael at Hildesheim, figures conceived in elaborate three-dimensional attitudes, with angular broken drapery. Finally, the Zackenstil—the new, elegant, early Gothic, jagged style of early 13th-century Germany, most magnificently exemplified in the Saxon Gospels in Goslar—was directly inspired by contemporary Byzantine painting.

In the early Middle Ages, wall painters had largely been laymen, whereas the illumination of manuscripts had been practiced almost exclusively in monastic scriptoria. In the late 12th century the production of books began to be taken up by lay scribes and painters working in their own shops. At the same time, illuminated books of private devotion and both religious and secular illustrated texts became increasingly popular. This process continued in the 13th century, when growing literacy and learning among laymen and the rise of the universities created a demand for illuminated and illustrated texts of all kinds.

Gothic

Gothic is the term generally used to denote the style of architecture, sculpture, and painting that developed from the Romanesque during the 12th century and became predominant in Europe by the middle of the 13th century. The many variations within the style are usually distinguished by the use of chronological or geographical terms (for example, early, high, Italian, International, and late Gothic).