Steiner's reading of European painting as two currents: a Southern art of form and composition, and a Northern art of line and inward soul.
In Rudolf Steiner's lectures on the history of art, the Northern and Southern streams in art name two opposite ways the European soul learned to paint. The South, ripening in the Italian Renaissance, reached for composition, colour and the typical heavenly form. The North, rising through Mid-Europe, pressed the single human soul outward into line, gesture and the inward gaze of the face.
In Steiner's Own Words
Continuing our studies on the great works of Art, we will show some further slides today, supplementing those that were shown last week. Today I propose in the main to supplement what I endeavoured to explain last week, of the connections and contrasts between the Mid-European, or Northern, and the Southern Art. I tried to show how the specifically artistic quality is always influenced by the character of the South or of the North, while, on the other hand, there were continual interpenetrations of the Southern and Mid-European impulses, layer upon layer, as it were, so that it is by no means easy now to see how these things really worked together. Spiritual scientific investigations will in course of time have to bring more and more light into these matters.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave these lectures with a lantern-slide projector at the first Goetheanum in Dornach during the winter of 1916, and the contrast he drew still organises how the School of Spiritual Science there teaches the history of painting. His claim is precise rather than poetic. In the South, the artist begins with the whole and arranges figures in space, so perspective is born there: Brunelleschi works it out in Florence, and Raphael lifts the human countenance up toward the angelic and the typical. In the North, the artist begins with one soul and works from within outward, so oil-painting is born there instead, in the Ghent workshop of the brothers Van Eyck around 1432, where colour flooded with light could carry the inward life of a single face to the surface. Steiner noticed that the two techniques then changed places, perspective travelling north and oil-painting travelling south, as if each stream needed what the other had found. The synthesis he pressed on his audience is uncomfortable for ordinary art history: the inward, individualising Northern impulse, he insisted, worked its way down even into Raphael and Michelangelo, so the Renaissance was never purely Southern. To stand in front of a Van Eyck Madonna and then a Raphael Madonna is to feel the difference directly, the one drawing you into the human heart, the other raising you past it.
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