It's a common misconception that the Middle Ages were a time of regression, both intellectual and artistic. Anyone who actually knows something about the Middle Ages knows that's ridiculous, but unfortunately those people are a definite minority. And one piece of evidence often used to show the cultural "backwardness" of the Middle Ages is the difference between the polished, realistic art of the Classical era and the cruder-looking, heavily stylized work of the Gothic era.
What most people don't seem to get is that the Gothic style was a conscious artistic choice. It wasn't that Medieval sculptors lost the ability to carve realistic statues; they just didn't choose to. That wasn't what they were trying to do. And it's simply crazy to think that the builders of Chartres Cathedral built it because they couldn't build the Parthenon.
Let me give a more recent analogy. The late 19th Century was the apex of the hyper-realistic, "Academic" style in painting and sculpture in Europe and America. Artists were turning out works that rivaled the new technology of photography in detail and realism.
Twenty years later, we see the abstract and stylized art of the early Modernist period. Sculpture and architecture went from the Classical pastiche of the Beaux-Arts era to the almost Gothic-looking forms of Art Deco.
Does this mean that the 1920s was a "regression" from the cultural heights of the 1890s? Doubtless some people at the time thought so, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any art historians of the past hundred years who would agree.
This is more than just a know-it-all saying gotcha. If you want to understand a work of art, it's always important to understand what the artist was trying to accomplish with it. Then you can decide if it's a success on its own terms.
Gothic art and architecture wasn't a failure to execute Classical forms, it was a new style. The people who built Gothic cathedrals and sculpted the images of that time were the cool guys, working in a hip new style that the old guard couldn't understand. All art begins as the cool new style, then becomes what everyone recognizes as art, and finally becomes the stodgy old school that the next cohort of hipsters are reacting against.
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