We’ve heard a lot about the Dark Ages referring to the European medieval period. We’ve heard about this era with the idea of lack of hygiene, dirtiness, diseases, illiteracy, and especially, artistically, a total regression. This period is interpreted as if everything learned from the classical Greco-Roman era had been thrown away. In short, as if a dark veil covered that whole era. But this, my friends, is not true.

This is actually an idea created in romanticism, which has persisted until today. With the reappropriation of classical beauty standards and the taste for ancient times, the idea began to spread that the medieval period did nothing but eliminate it. When in reality, if it hadn’t been for the medieval monks and scribes who took care to transcribe the great classics among many other documents, today we wouldn’t preserve anything.

We start from a persecuted Christianity punishable by the Roman Empire, which used very cryptic symbology to not be recognized except by the new Christians. Up to a Christianity that took power and had to consolidate a new religious, cultural, and political order. The medieval era only aimed to distance itself from everything it considered paganism: everything classical. The images of mythological characters, their sensuality… But unlike what we think, they retained many things albeit with other reinterpretations and creating a totally new art in line with the new mentality.

The medieval period had the classical period too close to appreciate it. That’s why with temporal distancing, we find the recovery of the classical in the Renaissance. For the medieval people, the classical era was their most present past from which they needed to dissociate themselves. It was a society practically all illiterate, so art needed to be moralizing. Sensuality and its representation were sin. Ugliness and beauty constituted good and evil.

And for this reason, we have so many artistic gems showing “evil” in the Middle Ages. Examples that we can see, for instance, in the magnificent medieval bestiaries. Images and representations that, although we may not share their moralizing message, leave us amazed with this visual spectacle.

Neither was the Middle Ages the dirtiest period (I remind you that the wigs used at court in the 18th century had larvae…), nor the one of cultural or artistic regression.

Let’s reclaim medieval art and value it as we can with any other artistic period. Although we will do it from its darkest side…