The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [464]
So all-embracing was this `Christian myth' that it could give a sense of significance to every aspect of individual and collective life. And not the least reflection of its power was the way, for hundreds of years, the chief visual self-expression of European civilisation, alongside its churches and cathedrals, was centred on a particular set of images, endlessly painted, sculpted and depicted in stained-glass, the purpose of which was constantly to focus people's minds on this other dimension to their lives. These stylised icons of the crucified Christ and the Mother and Child made no attempt to relate to the imperfect, everyday, material world. They were windows onto that eternal plane of perfection which was regarded as the only true reality.
One of the earliest signs of how all this was to change began to appear at the very time Dante was writing his Divine Comedy. In the paintings of a fellow Florentine who was his almost exact contemporary, we see Western art at last bursting out of that two-dimensional iconographic frame which had constrained it for so long as, with a mighty leap of the imagination, Giotto brought the central events of the Christian story out into the visible, material world: a world of sky and hills, trees and buildings, peopled by real three-dimensional human beings showing real human emotions. Just when the power of that all-unifying worldpicture was reaching its zenith in Dante's vision, we see the beginnings of another great shift in consciousness which was eventually to reshape the human world more fundamentally than anything which had come before.
The disintegration of the mediaeval world-image was to be a centuries-long process. But an early reflection of it was the way in which, in the two centuries following Giotto, artists took the subject matter of their paintings ever further out into the earthly world. Their pictures remained centred on Christian imagery. But as artists such as Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, Ucello and Jan van Eyck developed an ever greater `realism' in the way they portrayed the physical world, a profound shift was taking place in where that `reality' was perceived to lie. Their art was still subordinated to a vision of heavenly perfection. Through images of Christ's suffering on the cross which represented humanity's struggle to escape the imperfections of the ego, it was still imbued with the transcendent values of the Self. But the spiritual dimension was now coming to be expressed through an ever more life-like recreation of the world of physical appearances. And, as they steadily widened the range of their subject matter in painting landscapes, secular portraits and even scenes from classical mythology, it was no longer necessary that their sources of inspiration should be explicitly Christian at all.
Equally significant was the way this shift in consciousness was reflected in architecture. Nothing had more majestically expressed the transcendent world-view of the Christian Middle Ages than its great cathedrals, with their dark, mysterious interiors leading up towards the central focus of the high altar, their luminous stained-glass windows, their spires and towers soaring heavenwards. Their purpose, reinforced by music, incense and the profusion of holy images, was to lead worshippers into the presence of an unearthly spiritual mystery. But quite suddenly, around the end of the fifteenth century, the Gothic style which had expressed this all but vanished from view. Taking conscious inspiration from the pre-Christian civilisation of Greece and Rome, the dominant buildings of the new age, like St Peter's, Rome, sought, like the temples of the ancient world, to express perfection in