The term “Renaissance”, or rebirth, was coined by historians in the mid 19th century to describe the period in Western European history that was characterized by a resurgence of ideas, philosophies, and culture from the classical period. A golden age of cultural, intellectual and ideological movements occurred between roughly the early 14th to the late 16th century in Europe that drew on many elements of classical Greek and Roman history. From the decadence of the Middle Ages and the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church increasingly exerted a dominant influence on European life and became the defacto broker of power in Europe. So it was that within this cultural setting, the dominant ideas of the Renaissance emerged from the collection of city-states in Italy and proliferated throughout Europe via the well connected commercial routes of the time.
Florence, in particular, was emerging as a powerful city-state through its commercial strength as a textile producer and banking center. Its burgeoning economy and growing mercantile class made it a focal point for the cultural transformations that would be associated with the Renaissance. The fall of the Byzantine Empire also fueled change in Western Europe as exiled Greek scholars established themselves in the west, bringing with them copies of classical philosophical texts, literature, and salvaged art works and opening to the Europeans a door to the riches of the classical Greek and Roman periods that had been lost through the centuries of internal tribal warfare and barbaric invasions.
Money from the new middle classes went towards commissioning artists and architects to create masterpieces in quantity and scale unmatched till then. Artists such as Giotto, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Lotto, da Vinci, Michelangelo, to name a few, elevated art to a new level and form of cultural expression. The Renaissance began to flourish in the kingdoms to the north of Florence as well, with new ideas and momentum of change spreading along trade routes. Venetian Italy and the regions of the Netherlands also were transformed by new ideas, aesthetics, and commerce.
During the middle ages the fabrics used most for clothing were wool and linen. The tradition of spinning wool for fiber had existed for more than 5000 years and by the medieval period in Europe wool was established as the standard fabric for all classes. The gradations of thread quality determined the cost of certain types of wool fabric but everyone, from peasant to landowner to royalty, wore wool as a staple of their wardrobe. The peasant classes would afford the coarser wool for their simple tunics, cowls and headwear while the landed classes would have fine garments made of wool woven as fine as silk, dyed in rich hues, and often enhanced with embroidery. Silk as a popular material for costume was not easily available to western Europe until the period of the Crusades when the materials and methods of oriental fashion were brought back by the crusading armies. Linen, too, was used for undergarments but was not as valued as wool because linen threads could not be spun to the same levels of distinction as wool and linen fabrics were not as good as wool in absorbing color dyes.
In medieval Europe the wool trade was particularly a phenomenon of England’s dealing, mercantile class and became its leading industry, at its peak accounting for close to 90% of the revenues. The significance of wool to the development of England’s economy is even manifest in church structures that were built to grandiose scale with money from the wool trade—known as wool churches. England dominated the commercial routes of the material, closely managing exportation and essentially monopolizing distribution.
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Flanders and Italy also became centers of textile manufacture in their own right. Flanders was known for its skilled craftsmen adept at spinning raw wool into yarn and weaving it into rich cloths. The trade in wool also meant specialization of craft and production, and different Flemish towns gained reputations for the | |||||||||
manufacture of particular products. The commerce generated by the textile industry between Flanders and Italy also eventually led to exchange in artistic and cultural ideas toward the end of the Gothic period and what was to become the movements of International Gothic art and the Renaissance.
*image—Brueghel—Village Wedding Feast, 1567
*image 2– calendar page for November of Les Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry 1410-1416
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Changes in clothing styles in the middle ages were not very dramatic until the mid-13th century when the tunic styles that had dominated both men’s and women’s wardrobes began to diversify and manifest unique designs. A dramatic shift in artwork during this same medieval period, when fashion essentially began its history, reflects the changes of those times. What Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance art historian, classified as Gothic Art offers us images caught in time of a movement and energy that encapsulated the end of the middle ages.
Gothic art evokes the great cathedrals of France and Germany to the modern viewer, but Gothic sculpture, and particularly the forms explicit in the Gothic aesthetic, tell a lot about the time period’s aspirations and visions of itself. If Gothic architecture was reflective of people’s Christian ideals, with spires reaching for the heavens and stained glass windows channeling God’s light through the chambers of the church, then Gothic sculpture was charged with the restlessness and flamboyance of the period. Whereas the Romanesque aesthetic in sculpture that preceded it was marked by rigidity and stoic beauty, Gothic sculpture broke free literally and figuratively.
