here is the Chartres Cathedral this is in France and this is another church that arose during the Middle Ages here is the blueprint for the Chartres Cathedral and this is a blueprint that starts during the Middle Ages and the Christian churches and goes all the way through to the Renaissance and you'll still see it today so the blueprint is twofold there's two reasoning behind this blueprint number one it's the shape of the cross with the the Christians use as their symbol the the symbol is actually quite fascinating I don't know I'm sure you've seen the Christian fish and the Christian cross the cross has changed over time but these were symbols that during the Roman Empire when Christians weren't allowed to practice their religion without being crucified they used to mark their homes with different variations of these symbols and it was a way for Christians to know where Christians lived and the road without Romans the Romans knowing their symbols so anyway the cross is where the Christians believe Jesus was crucified on a cross so they use that for their symbols another reason for this blueprint is because of communal worship the altar would go up here and then this is the ASP of the church that became longer and longer so you could fit more people in there right all the pews would face towards the altar and you could get more people in here over to the side they were usually side altars for different saints and different people in the Christian Bible so at the front of the Chartres Cathedral is actually quite fascinating in a history of architecture from this time period there are two major art movements that are happening during the Middle Ages they're not in sequential order here Romanesque comes first obviously a descendents from Roman art and culture and Romanesque is what this side of the Sartre Cathedral is built in and what happened is they started building the church in the Romanesque style they got halfway done and Romanesque was not an in vogue style at the millennium or the new style that was sweeping through the Middle Ages was the Gothic style so they had basically three choices right they could have just ignored the new style and built the whole church in the Romanesque style or they could have tore down what they'd already done and rebuilt the whole church in the Gothic style but instead they decided to just kind of carry on and build this side in the Gothic style and it's interesting when you talk about gothic art and architecture a lot of people describe it as being kind of gaudy and just a bunch of stuff thrown in there well this is why the reason being is you have two sides of the same church that are built in two different architectural styles and so that's why it looks kind of weird but it's kind of cool to be able to see the differences between both of them gothic is much more decorative it's much more slender and elongated and so you can see the difference between the two styles during the Middle Ages here is some of the sculpture in the Chartres Cathedral and so this is the Romanesque side and this is the Gothic side and even though the Gothic side starts to look a little bit more naturalistic look at the difference between this sculpture and the Roman and Greek sculpture that we talked about earlier like the Leo kun group or warrior a what is missing in this one that we saw in like the three goddesses from the Hellenistic period yes means remember we were talking about how knees were so important during the Classical period because they had pride in the human body right they had pride in the the nude human form and even when they would close the human body the body would show through the fabric the fabric would drape around the human body these are these magical fabrics that just sort of hide everything in the human body it's almost like an invisible cloth and one very important thing we need to understand during the Middle Ages is let's say you're going through a museum you're going through locknut and you go through the Classical period you see all these sculptures and then you come here to the middle age and say oh it might they must've been ignorant they must have not own how to sculpt to figure naturalistically well that's not true because they would have seen the sculpture from the middle or from the Classical period but they chose to sculpt figures stylized they chose to hide the human body they chose to hide emotion and it has everything to do with the sacrilegious nature of the icon if they were sculpting these more naturalistically they thought it would anger God and they thought God was angry because of things like the plague and these barbarians attacking from the north and so one way I like to think about it is the Middle Ages if you've ever read the Christian Bible the Middle Ages is more like the Old Testament right when God was a wrathful God and God was angry it seemed that humans and then when we get to the Renaissance the Renaissance is more like the New Testament right after Jesus and everyone's happy in love and that kind of thing so that's kind of where we're at as far as the religion and culture and so here like I said a little bit more naturalistic but notice no one has an expression on their face they all of these blank expressions again the clothes just sort of magically cover the whole body almost as if they're poles then these two artists come to the scene and these are very important artists because they're artists of the Middle Ages that start to ask questions that leads us into the Renaissance they start to ask questions that the Renaissance artists will definitely answer their names are do CHEO and Giotto so no those two artists do CHEO and Giotto and the great Renaissance artist Giorgio Vasari in his book the lives of the most excellent painters sculptors and architects he starts with these two artists so Vasari wrote all about renaissance artists he talked about visual elements but the very first two artists he starts with our middle age artists not like they're in their 40s with artists of the Middle Ages and they're due CHEO and Giotto anyone want to guess where these two artists do CHEO and Giotto come from yes of course these are Italian artists and one important thing to understand when we get to the Renaissance is the Renaissance does spread throughout Europe but it starts in Italy and why does it start in Italy because that was the center of the Roman Empire and so Renaissance is a rebirth from ideas of the Roman Empire and so they start looking at the world around them and they start seeing these sculptures from the classical burns and hey maybe these guys were onto something okay and so we got a rebirth of the Classical period but anyway at the end of the Middle Ages do tio comes along and he starts to paint more naturalistic settings instead of just an icon of figures what he does is he starts to paint figures in an environment where the scene would have actually happened so the Christians believe that Jesus not only was the Son of God a religious figure but he walked here on earth he was a human that was here on earth so this is Christ entering Jerusalem and he tries to create a more naturalistic scene and I say try because linear perspective is not discovered yet so I like to call these old middle-age paintings the dollhouse paintings because it looks like all these figures the homes are like these little tile houses you know I mean the the proportions aren't correct yet but he starts to create a more natural scene this is a really important painting by Giotto and this is Giotto painting the what's called the lamentation this is from the Christian faith they believe that Jesus died on the cross he was then buried and three days later he goes up to heaven and so this is the moment when he's taken off the cross and he's being held here by his mother the Virgin Mary and so this is the dead body of Jesus surrounded by these people now what's so important about this painting is these two figures right here because what Giotto has done is tried to create a more natural setting where people would have surrounded Jesus before this and a lot of icon pieces we would see figures almost like figures in a videogame or like a movie poster or something they're all in their own separate space and they all kind of face us but instead what Giotto does is he has these figures that have their back to us which if these are religious figures that were at the place in the moment when Jesus died they would have been very important and they can't turn our backs to us that's very disrespectful try this next time you're in an argument with someone especially a loved one try turning your back to them see how that works out right it's a very disrespectful gesture and so people would have got upset at this painting how could you do that how could you have people during this extremely holy event in the Christian faith with their back to us so one thing that Giotto does is these two people don't get hey loads notice everyone else has halos except for the people we can't see these people that are covered and these people that are covered this woman here she doesn't get a halo but she's Mary Magdalene and if you know anything about the Christian Bible Mary Magdalene does not get a halo and then one of the things I love about this painting is Giotto is trying to experiment with how do we paint representationally in the medium other than sculpture sculpture they had already figured that out pretty well but painting on a two-dimensional plane is much more difficult so he starts doing things like depicting faces in the rule of thirds he starts doing these profile views and then I loved the angel see how the Angels kind of flip and go around he's trying for shortened views of the figure right he's experimenting and kind of showing off a little bit the angels are all flipping around because they're all excited because Jesus is gonna come up to heaven and Jesus is coming home to heaven so they're flipping around but what it's Giotto is giving us these different sort of foreshortened angles all right and then this is one by Giotto of Christ entering Jerusalem and you can see how more nett more naturalistic were becoming he now starts to give everyone halos even when we can't see them and you have these people that kind of swirl around each other but because we have no linear perspective yet look at the buildings in the background it looks like if they went in and started looking out these windows you'd be looking through these little peep holes right and so linear perspective will come during the Renaissance so one of the very important things about the Middle Ages things are dormant for a while this is the middle between the Classical period and the Renaissance the reason things are dormant is people thought God was angry and they thought God was angry because of the plague and barbarians and then do chio and Giotto these are artists that are going to lead us into the Renaissance and so next time we'll talk about the Renaissance