ABSTRACT
It is something of a paradox that an age often regarded as one of economiccontraction, social upheaval, intellectual disorientation, and – at least in NorthernEurope – terminal cultural decline, should provide us with so many examples of innovation. Between 1250 and 1500, western Europe witnessed the birth and coming of age of diplomatic, military, financial, navigational, technological, devotional, artistic, and educational practices that were to mold and shape the early modern world. We cannot, I would contend, understand the Renaissance world without some awareness and appreciation of what preceded it. Knowledge of the later Middle Ages – an allegedly epidemic-wracked, war-torn, and strife-ridden epoch – is vital to our understanding of Renaissance culture because it offers us striking visual evidence of a novel kind. For the first time since the end of the Roman Empire, images that look as if they represent the features of living individuals appear in western art. As ever, sculpture had led the way towards verisimilitude during the thirteenth century – in the West Choir of Naumburg cathedral (c. 1240-50) and in the works of the brothers Pisano (1258-1319). But it is only in the early fourteenth century that recognizable, identifiable portraits begin to emerge, first of all in devotional art, namely in wall paintings, altarpieces, and Books of Hours. Much of this artistic patronage stemmed from the very highest echelons of society, although it was not entirely confined to them. Much of it was associated with the courts of rulers. The princely households of the later Middle Ages formed, at the very least, the seedbed from which the courts of the Renaissance were to grow. Courts, great and small, were populated by highstatus patrons, clerical and secular, drawn from the ranks of both hereditary and more recent nobility, and from the growing legal and financial bureaucracies of the age. As power centers, filling the space around the person of the prince, the courts of Europe acted as forums of many kinds, above all as a means whereby images of rulers and their immediate entourages were presented. In the iconography of power, the court played a fundamental role. It is the purpose of this chapter to trace some of these developments into the Renaissance and to consider the legacy of later medieval civilization and its princely courts to the world of humanism, individualism, princely power, and the “new” monarchies of the sixteenth century.
