INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC STYLE

At the dawn of the fifteenth century, the international Gothic style opened the last chapter in thc history of medieval sculpture—a chapter too often underrated by criticism and overshadowed by the great creators of northern pasnting and of the Italian Renaissance. It might be said in defence of this final flowering that Claus Sluter and Nicholas of Leyden are as great as Jan van Eyck, that Miehel Colombe is the equal of Jean Fouquet or Hans Leinberger of Altdorfer, and lastly that Vasari, who despises the barbarous manner of the “Goths,” nevertheless extols the beauty of the St Roch by Veit Stoss. But above all these works undertook to arouse the attention of the indifferent. Thus, to take two examples of the purest emanations of the international Gothic style, the contemplation of a “Beautiful Madonna” from Bohemia delights us quite as much as that of an illumination by the Limbourg brothers.
This vast movement, which flourished around 1400 for several decades, is called international, in the phrase of Louis Courajod, in order to express its dissemination on a European scale, from northern Italy and Spain to Germany and the Netherlands, and from England and France to Bohemia and Hungary. The exceptional unity of artistic language forged at that time was the fruit of constant exchanges between different European courts, particularly those of Prague, Paris, Avignon, Milan, London and Dijon.Works, ideas and styles travelled just as much as did people, artists and patrons, so that the place of origin of some works is still doubtful.
The crowning achievement of fourteenth-century court art, international Gothic enjoyed the favour of princes and their entourage, fulfilhng the aspirations of that ostentatious clientele which sought refuge in its own chivalrous dreams by providing it with an unreal vision of the world, an extreme elegance of forms and a remarkable fluidity of lines. Yet, undulating silhouettes, draperies with melodious rhythms, soft and dreamy expressions or delicate gestures are nonetheless accompanied by descriptive details: touches of the familiar and picturesque. Rehgsnus art was thereby humanized as secular subjects were developed alongside it. Preciousness of language and artificiality oflinear rhythms, moreover, posed no obstacle to the increasing taste for a faithful rendering of facial lineaments or studies of movement and plastic density reflected in the amphfication of volumes set out in a three-dimensional space. Those tendencies, already present at the end of the fourteenth century, had a great future in store for them. Through them, international Gothic also paved the way for the subsequent renewal of style in the fifteenth century.