Ancient and medieval symbols

Your goal in this lesson: to see how ancient and medieval art used images to protect, to pray and to show power, and to read those symbols on their own terms.

Art that works

Historical For most of history, art was not made to hang on a wall and be admired. It was made to do something: guard a door, stand in prayer, feed the dead, teach a story or make a holy person present. When you look at old art, ask “what was this for?” before you ask “is it beautiful?”

Guardians of the gate

Historical In the ninth century BCE, the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II lined his palace at Nimrud, in today’s Iraq, with carved stone reliefs. At the gateways stood lamassu: huge guardian figures with the body of a bull or lion, wings and a human head wearing a divine horned crown. The Met has one from his reign, 883 to 859 BCE. They were protective spirits, set at thresholds where danger could enter. Look closely at the side view and you may count five legs: the sculptor wanted the figure to look complete from the front and from the side.

Earlier, in the Sumerian city-states, people placed small stone figures with clasped hands and huge eyes in temples, to stand in prayer for them forever. Read more on the Ancient Near Eastern art page.

Egypt: the ideal and eternal

Historical Egyptian art kept a remarkably stable style for nearly three thousand years, on purpose. In wall paintings, a figure shows each part from its clearest angle: head in profile, eye from the front, shoulders from the front, legs in profile. Artists laid out figures on grids, as the Egyptologist Gay Robins has shown. Much of what survives comes from tombs, where images worked for the dead and were not meant for living eyes. See the Ancient Egyptian art page.

Hekate on a Greek vase

Historical Greek painted pottery is our best evidence for Greek painting, since almost all wall paintings are lost. On a red-figure bell-krater made in Athens around 440 BCE, now at the Met, the painter we call the Persephone Painter shows Persephone rising from the underworld. Hermes stands by, Demeter waits, and Hekate holds two torches to light the way. It is one of the clearest ancient images of Hekate as a guide between worlds. If you are taking the Hekate course, this vase is worth ten slow minutes. See Ancient Greek art.

One more surprise: Greek and Roman statues were painted. The white marble we imagine is what was left after the colors wore away.

Icons and the war over images

Historical An icon (from the Greek eikon, image) is a sacred image used in prayer. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Byzantine world fought over whether such images could be venerated. Iconoclasm, “image-breaking”, was imperial policy in two phases, roughly 726 or 730 to 787 and 815 to 843. Its opponents argued that honor shown to an image passes to the person it shows. Gold backgrounds in icons and mosaics were not a lack of skill. They place the holy figure outside ordinary space, in heavenly light. See Byzantine art.

Gothic light

Historical The Gothic style began at the abbey church of Saint-Denis near Paris, whose new choir was consecrated in 1144. Pointed arches, rib vaults and flying buttresses let walls grow thin and high, opened by vast windows of colored glass. The cathedral became a frame for light. Late medieval homes had their own small wonders: the book of hours, a personal prayer book, and luxury tapestries such as the Unicorn Tapestries, woven around 1495 to 1505. See Romanesque and Gothic.

Modern You will read online that gargoyles were made to ward off evil. They were rainspouts. A protective meaning is possible, but medieval texts say little about it, so treat it as a modern guess.

Try this

Today’s exercise: choose one object from this lesson, such as the lamassu or the Persephone krater. Write who would have seen it when it was new, in what light, from how far away and for how long. Then write how you see it now.

Quick recap

• Ancient and medieval art was usually made to do something.
• Lamassu guarded Assyrian gateways; Sumerian figures prayed in temples.
• Hekate lights Persephone’s way on a Greek vase of about 440 BCE.
• Byzantine Iconoclasm was a fight over sacred images; Gothic churches framed colored light.

Keep going

Next: Renaissance: magic, perspective and melancholy. Need a refresher? Go back to The language of images or see the whole course. For more, browse all art movements.

Sources

• E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1950).
• Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Gay Robins, Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Human-headed winged lion (lamassu), accession 32.143.2; Terracotta bell-krater attributed to the Persephone Painter, accession 28.57.23; The Unicorn Rests in a Garden, accession 37.80.6.

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

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