Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: German
15th-century, 16th-century
New York, NY: The Met Cloisters
86%
Mirror or Light Reflector. 15th-16th century. Brass, glass, and paint on oak
The sculptural handsomeness of this object combines with your recognition that it's a masterstroke of functional design to produce its aesthetic power. (This is to say that to aesthetically appraise any object as design is to commingle your visual experience of that object with your conceptual understanding of the purpose for which it was intended, as well as the way its physical form fulfils, expresses, and transcends this intention.) The awning above the brass plate would have helped to shape the glow cast by the candle reflecting off the metal, but also it encloses the otherwise open rectangular form of the mass of the object. (The floral band above it all is pure flourish). The sconce, one imagines, sticks out just far enough from the object's front to reflect the maximum amount of light, but also it coaxes the otherwise flat arrangement out into space without overextending it or detracting from the play of curves and right-angles that makes it seem simultaneously bounded and infinite. (TFS, 2025)
Urbana, IL: Spurlock Museum
47%
The Harrowing of Hell. 15th century. Wood and paint
Better-preserved pigmentation might have been to this object's benefit (at least in terms of my experience of it as a work of art). Even if it were in ship-shape, though, I struggle to imagine it being much more than a cut-rate instance of medieval wood sculpture. The best works in this idiom are less stout than this one is, their figures a bit freer in their movements and not as determined by the total mass of the object. This carving's density is to its aesthetic detriment. Like, the spot where Christ grabs the sinner's wrist to yank him up from Hell ought to have been a point of differentiation from the object's prevailing order of thick forms and elisions, a real agon set apart structurally from the rest of the action. But there's not enough distinctness given to this critical moment: it blends back into the crowding of the triple-stacked figures as if Christ is being pulled into Hell, not pulling prehistory's sinners out. (TFS, 2025)