Huizinga and the Waning of the Middle Ages.

“On one such walk along the Damsterdiep or nearby, on a Sunday, I think, the notion came to me that the late Middle Ages were not the herald of something that was to come, but the fading away of something that has already passed. This thought, if one can speak of it as a thought, revolved above all around the art of the Van Eycks and their contemporaries, which considerably occupied my mind at that time. It was just in those years that it was usual to follow in the footsteps of Courajod and to agree with Fierens- Gevaert and Karl Volz in interpreting old Netherlandish art as the dawn of a Northern Renaissance. My perception was directly opposed to this.” 1907.

Johan Huizinga was no art historian, but an historian from the Netherlands.  Unlike museum professional like Friedländer, Huizinga concentrated on the cultural history of the late middle-ages and the northern renaissance. This can be defined as an attempt to capture the “spirit” of the times by writing about its people, customs and art. Huizinga wanted to evoke the sights, sounds and even smells of the period he was writing about. Thus in addition to the paintings of the Van Eycks, Fouquet, Rogier van der Weyden and others, Huizinga examined fairs, religious festivals, sounds (noticeably church bells), jousts, executions- and he spectacularly succeeded in exposing a broad, cultural panorama for his readers to view. Huizinga’s concept of the “waning” or “autumn” of the Middle-Ages was completely original, and flew in the face of contemporary art history scholarship. Unlike the art historians mentioned in the extract who viewed Van Eyck and Memling’s paintings as expressions of a new dawn, Huizinga saw them as signs of decadence. Though acknowledging that this art was truly beautiful and a wonderful achievement, Huizinga was under no illusions as to the nature of the late-middle ages when cruelty and violence coexisted with celebrations of life and love, such explosions of carnival being needed to cope with “violent tenor of the times.” Huizinga spent a lot of time scrutinising the aristocratic class composed of rulers like Philip the Good as well as newly arrived members of the financial middle class like Nicholas Rolin, famous shown praying in Van Eyck’s masterpiece in the Louvre.   It is in the spirit of Huizinga’s cultural history that art history is used on this course to show how paintings, sculpture, books and other media help to reveal the motivations and machinations of the people of the period-from the most highly born aristocrat depicted by Rogier van der Weyden to the humblest peasant in the works of Brueghel.