Master of Belmonte, Saint Michael

This painting was made for an altarpiece in northern Spain, between about 1460 and 1490 in an area known as Aragon. The central subject is the archangel Michael, who casts Satan down out of Heaven. He’s wearing a cloak beneath which is armor. The demon’s reaching up to try and hold a spear that’s now impaling his jaw. Most of the audiences looking at these objects were illiterate. Storytelling was really central to culture in the Middle Ages. Medieval art is very much about a multi-media experience. You would have been looking at a painting like this, maybe smelling incense, you would have been hearing the music of the Divine Office or other sorts of ritual ceremonies. Think of that broader environment. Many of the accoutrements of this painting—the setting, the costume—would’ve been drawn from the real experience of audiences. They might’ve seen similar fabrics and textiles throughout the church interior. And a painter like this is actually emulating the work of goldsmiths and metalworkers and armorers. You can see a kind of low relief to create that sense that you are looking at something that is believable. And this work which really fundamentally is about the triumph of good over evil, and yet the picture of evil as it’s incarnated is so engrossing, so wonderfully imaginative, and the closer you look the more figures you discover. All these various arms and limbs are actually creatures that are biting onto themselves in order to build this. It’s very likely that this artist is looking at the natural world as well as the imagined world that’s been created by his peers. This is an art form that existed within ritual, throughout the Middle Ages. The artists who were responsible for producing images worked within traditions, but at the same time, they were tremendously inventive. It’s about beauty of surface and of the attention to the senses. But it’s also about the power of imagination: to make the world that they’re representing believable as part of the world we live in. It projects this sense of grace and force together.