The Medieval to Early Modern Cultural Paradigm Shift
Summary: The Western cultural paradigm shift from medieval to early modern is illustrated by the evolving portrayals of the meme of David's killing Goliath from 1430 to 1604 with a modern post script.
The Medieval to Early Modern Cultural Paradigm Shift:
Absolutism to Relativism (1453-1604)
by Dr. John Freed
Chapman University College
And new philosophy [Copernicus / Galileo] calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
John Donne
from An Anatomy of the World, The First Anniversary (1611)
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.
W. B. Yeats
from “The Second Coming” 1920
Son of Man,
You know only a heap of broken images.
T. S. Eliot
from “The Wasteland” 1922
A confluence of relatable events began occurring in 1453 that would quickly result in the literal “re-orientation” of the European world from East to West. It would turn out to be as radical a transformation as if magnetic compasses suddenly started pointing South. In many senses we in the twenty-first century are still dealing with the consequences of this massive cultural paradigm shift. William Butler Yeats’ 1920 poem, “The Second Coming” reads as if it were a continuation of the lines from John Donne’s 1611 “Anatomy of the World.”
This period marked the end in Europe of almost a thousand years of relative peace and equally evolving prosperity. This was a world of almost completely self-sufficient agrarian villages, manors and monasteries, universal employment that included inter-generational job security, a shared cultural understanding, religion and international language – Rome dominated Catholicism and Latin.
After 1453, Europe turned almost overnight into wide-spread urban infestations of displaced, poor people and desperate national competitions confused by a Babel of languages.
The effect on the highly developed civilizations (Aztec, Inca, etc.) that were being freshly encountered by European voyages westward across the Atlantic would result in an even greater transmogrification -- the greatest holocaust in human history. A conservative pre-Columbian (1492) population estimate of the native populations in the Americas is over a 100 million.
Within a hundred years, through the dual rampages of disease and attack, that number becomes closer to 10 million declining rapidly to near extermination. Christianity is forced upon the survivors at the point of a sword and each of the native inhabitants of the Spanish colonies is “taxed” to supply a certain amount of gold per year to their new “sovereign,” the King of Spain on penalty of torture, enslavement or death. Early proclamations in New England are even less humane awarding bounties to white settlers who manage to rid the territory permanently of “wolves and savages.”
Below is what was left of the magnificent, mountain top city of the Incan Empire totally abandoned just forty years after the landing of the first Spanish Conquistadores in the New World. No contemporary European city could have rivaled its construction.
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Peruvian Inca Empire City of Machu Picchu
[Click on the following link http://www.sacredsites.com/americas/peru/machu_picchu.html
for more background on Machu Picchu.]
Gaining their “just desserts,” Western Europe becomes infected with an unquenchable “desire for riches” – [the root of all evil?] which would eventually revolutionize all of the traditional economic, religious and political values giving birth to our often painfully anxious and self-indulgent, but immensely more materially prosperous, world.
Western Europe, and by extension the rest of the modern world, also gained much from the encounter with the Americas that was of high value to its emerging civilization. This is beautifully documented in one of your reading assignments for this week: Jack Weatherford’s Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World.
The Medieval to Early Modern Transformation Captured in Three Images:
There are three images that encapsulate this massive cultural paradigm shift from the “medieval” to the “early modern” period in Western culture that occurred over such a short period of time.
The first is a work that represents the flowering of high medieval artistic skill and expression. Its iconography should also be familiar to you in the class by now. This bronze sculpture by Donatello was executed in the early 1400’s – Henry V would have been king of England and Chaucer was his father’s court poet.
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Donatello’s David (early 1400’s)
I took this slide of the piece while I was in Florence. It’s surface is like young skin, and its life-like qualities are a match for Degas’ famous Little Ballet Dancer:
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Degas’ Little Ballet Dancer (1890’s)
As modern looking and aesthetically pleasing as the Donatello David is, its ancient and medieval representational value can be read very unambiguously. This is the totally vulnerable [naked] shepherd boy, David, caught exactly at his moment of triumph. He has just used Goliath’s oversized sword to cut Goliath’s head off. David’s foot rests on it like a stool. He is also still wearing Saul’s own helmet specifically referenced in the story.
He is boy – sized; the sculpture itself in only a little over 4 ½ feet tall and upon closer inspection David is clearly pre-pubescent as well. He represents that miraculous manifestation of God’s working in the world against all odds that is the point of the original.
The Donatello David achieves the medieval ideal of conveying its subject directly with an interpretation of its meaning that is independent of the viewer. In this sense the piece has a great deal of “objectivity” to it.
My second David is probably the most famous example of a high renaissance ideal – it assaults the viewer’s expectations and challenges his ability to interpret it.
Here the artist is more important than his subject – even this subject:
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Michelangelo’s David (early 1500’s)
This fifteen foot tall single piece of marble is clearly a monumental “object” but its iconography is exactly the reverse of what it is supposed to be. This David is the giant, and from the evidence of his massive physique, arms and hands and line-of-sight manliness is the opposite of the outmatched shepherd boy.
He is less David, the instrument of God, than Michelangelo, the creator himself, triumphantly displaying his unfettered imagination and talent.
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Michelangelo’s piece physically resides less than a quarter mile from Donatello’s in Florence and was sculpted less than 75 years afterwards; but in terms of the world that it represents, it is a universe away. Some major fissure took place between the two creations, and this is the subject for this week’s unit.
That this break with the past was essential for our becoming ego-centric “moderns” is well captured by my third David:
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Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (1604)
We seem to be in more familiar iconographic territory here. Adolescent boy kills man-sized adversary. The sword, however, looks more David-sized than Giant-sized, and we seem to be at a peculiarly uncomfortable graphic moment in the decapitation. The Goliath head, which is the focus of the composition, is looking toward us with disbelief. He doesn’t know that he’s dead yet. The blood is still gushing from the fresh wound.
Hanging above us on the wall, the painting intends our participation in the event which is a requirement for the artist’s perspective. Biographically we know other essential information about the context for this work. We even know the actual identities of the models. The severed Goliath head is none other than a self-portrait of Caravaggio himself. Caravaggio casts his own lover in the David role. We also know that Caravaggio painted this while on the run intending this painting as a gift to one of his judges to gain a pardon for a murder that apparently Caravaggio actually committed. Unfortunately we do not know how effective the appeal was because Caravaggio died on his way to delivering it.
Goliath /Caravaggio as victim is such a perversion of the original meaning of the David story that we can see how totally “subjective,” spectacularly modern and morally relativistic this new world has become. Goliath’s / Caravaggio’s “lost in space” scream is the one John Donne and William Shakespeare heard very loudly.
Hamlet first states this philosophical conversion to nearly total “subjectivity” almost exactly when Caravaggio was painting this picture, “There is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Post Script:
Below is the David and Goliath meme taken to the 180 degree contemporary turn-about. This painting by the artist Rana Mariem Ghassan recasts the parts one more time with David now being played by a rock throwing Palestinian street protester and Goliath played by Israeli soldiers. Also note that Ghassan prefers Michelangelo’s depiction of a giant-sized David to Donatello’s boy-sized one.
David and Goliath by Rana Mariem Ghassan (2000)
For your iconographic skill development the colors of the rocks that the David figure is holding are the colors of the Palestinian flag:
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Last edited by John Freed on Apr 22, 2008 11:01 pm GMT-5.