Discuss the medieval use of devotional realism in art and music

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Devotional realism followed the general trend in medieval arts to depict ordinary details of life, in an effort to make the ordinary more dramatic. For example, in Claus Sluter's Well of Moses, facial features of the prophets are individualized so as to render each one with a distinctive personality. In the illuminated manuscripts of the Book of Hours, scenes from sacred history are filled with realistic and homely details drawn from everyday life. Even miraculous events are made more believable as they are presented in lifelike settings and given new dramatic fervor. The brothers Limbourg produced a series of Books of Hours, illustrated with an attention to natural details: dovecote and beehives covered with new- fallen snow, sheep that huddle together in a thatched pen, smoke curling from a chimney, and even the genitalia of two of the laborers who warm themselves by the fire.
The new music of the time, ars nova, paralleled the richly detailed Realism apparent in fourteenth-century literature and the visual arts. The music featured a distinctive rhythmic complexity, achieved in part by isorhythm: the close repetition of identical rhythmic patterns in different portions of a composition. Isorhythm, an expression of the growing interest in the manipulation of pitches and rhythms, gave unprecedented unity to musical compositions. The composer Guillaume de Machaut wrote music that paid attention to expressive detail and his efforts at coherence of design is clear evidence that composers had begun to rank musical effect as equal to liturgical function. He also introduced new warmth and lyricism, as well as vivid poetic imagery—features that parallel the humanizing currents in fourteenth-century art and literature.