Medieval painting has a reputation for stiff saints on gold, made by craftsmen nobody remembers. Yet the pictures on this list were events in their own time. A city shut its shops on the day a painting was finished, and a piece stolen from an altarpiece nearly a century ago has never been found.
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Gothic painting is the last great chapter of medieval art in Europe, from about 1200 to the middle of the 1400s. Nobody at the time called it Gothic. Renaissance critics coined the name later, and they meant it as an insult.
A painting on an altar was meant to open onto heaven. So saints stand against burnished gold leaf, and the figures stay flat, because heavy shading would have broken the gold behind them.
Over two and a half centuries, painters began to let the world in beside that gold: a blue sky, a farm under snow, hills running to the horizon. Each picture here marks a step in that change, or carries a story about the people who made it, paid for it or fought over it.
12. Enguerrand Quarton, The Avignon Pietà (about 1455)
The Virgin's hands never touch her son. In The Avignon Pietà, painted in Provence around 1455, she holds his dead body across her knees, yet her hands stay joined in prayer while he lies stiff across her lap, bent into one long curve that runs almost the full width of a panel about seven feet wide.
Around that curve, the mourners press in close. John the Evangelist leans from the left to lift the crown of thorns from Christ's head. Mary Magdalene kneels at the right with her jar of ointment, and a donor in white kneels apart at the lower left, smaller than everyone else.
Behind them, gold covers nearly the whole background. Only along the low horizon does it give way to bare land and to the domes and minaret of a distant city, Jerusalem as a Provençal painter pictured it.
For centuries, the man who painted this scene had no name. The panel hung in a church at Villeneuve, across the Rhône from Avignon, and when it entered the Louvre in 1905, no artist came with it.
Today it carries the name of Enguerrand Quarton, also spelled Charonton, a painter active in Provence. The attribution rests on its likeness to his Coronation of the Virgin, a commission tied to him by a surviving contract. That makes the Pietà one of the few French paintings of the Middle Ages that can be given to a named painter.
At a Glance
Artist: Enguerrand Quarton (also spelled Charonton)
Painted: About 1455
Medium: Oil on panel
Size: 163 × 218.5 cm (64 × 86 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris
11. Andrei Rublev, The Trinity (about 1425)
A single cup stands at the center of Andrei Rublev's Trinity, and everything in the icon leans toward it. Three winged figures sit around a small table, their heads tilted toward one another, and all their gestures meet at that cup. Six centuries after it was painted, the panel is caught between a Church that wanted it back in a place of worship and restorers who warned that its paint might not survive there.