BALTIMORE, Maryland, June 25, 2013- {work in progress} First, and to be perfectly clear, I am not claiming that I have discovered anything. How can you discover anything that is already on view in a major art museum? What I am suggesting is that a small and beautiful painting in the Walter's Art Gallery in Baltimore is probably a lot more important than it is given credit for.
No scholar suggests that the Italian Renaissance started in the 1100's. Many lay folk say years such as those make up the so-called Dark Ages. Scholars such as Peter Brown at Oxford and Harvard have pretty-much debunked those theories by finding the high degree of scholarship and intellectual discovery that was taking place during those years, even in the west. Those years, politically, were pointing to the East, to Bynzantium and even further east into Iran and Iraq. In the West the Roman Empire was gone and only the Church was seen as a basis for intellectual and theologic advancement. In the 1200's a Renaissance of sorts did take place in northern Europe centered around the Hanseatic League. The more familiar Italian flowering of the arts was still 100-200 years away. But a painting in the Walters suggests that maybe the foundation of that artistic Renaissance was already in place in the 1100's.
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