Around the year 1000, Europe and the lands of Islam were neighbors, trading partners and sometimes enemies, and their art traveled in both directions. Silk woven in Muslim Spain wrapped the relics of Christian saints; ivory boxes carved in Córdoba ended up in cathedral treasuries. This level looks at both traditions side by side. Byzantine art and its fierce debates over religious images form a story of their own, so here the focus is on Western Europe and the Islamic world.

Books as treasures

In early medieval Europe, much of the finest art was made for books. An illuminated manuscript is a handwritten book decorated with color, gold or silver, usually made in a monastery by monks who prepared the parchment, copied the text and painted the images. The Book of Kells, made around 800 in an Irish or Scottish monastery, opens its Gospels with pages of interlacing spirals and knots so dense they reward a magnifying glass.

Some famous works were made with needle and thread. The Bayeux Tapestry is in fact an embroidery, stitched in wool on linen and about 70 meters long. Probably made in England in the 1070s, it tells the story of the Norman conquest of 1066 in a continuous strip, like a comic, with Latin captions.

Romanesque and Gothic

Between about 1000 and 1150, churches across Western Europe were built in a style later called Romanesque, after its debt to Roman building. Romanesque churches have round arches, thick walls and fairly small windows, giving a heavy, fortress-like feeling.

In the 1140s Abbot Suger rebuilt the eastern end of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, near Paris, and the Gothic style was born. Suger wrote about his project, and he linked light pouring through colored glass with the divine, believing that beauty could lift the mind toward God. Gothic builders combined three devices to make that light possible: the pointed arch, which directs weight more steeply downward; the ribbed vault, a stone ceiling carried on a skeleton of ribs; and the flying buttress. Flying buttresses carry the outward push of the vaults to outside supports, so walls can be thinner and filled with large windows. Cathedrals such as Chartres, largely rebuilt after a fire in 1194, still keep more than 150 of their medieval stained glass windows.

Islamic art: word, pattern and space

Islamic art is not one style but the art of many societies, from Spain to India, where Islam shaped culture. One of the earliest great monuments is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 691 or 692 under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik. Its mosaics show jeweled plants, vases and crowns, but no people or animals, and its long inscriptions quote the Qur'an.

That absence of figures is important but often misunderstood. Islamic religious buildings avoid images of people and animals, while secular art and book painting often include them. Palaces had wall paintings of hunters and musicians, and Persian manuscript painters such as Behzad, working around 1500, filled books of poetry and history with lively figures. The avoidance of figures in mosques reflects worries about idolatry, not a total ban on depicting living things.

In religious settings the written word took the place of images. Calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing, held the highest status among the arts in much of the Islamic world, because it gave visible form to the word of God. Master calligraphers were honored as great painters were in Europe.

Alongside writing came pattern. Geometric designs built from circles and stars could be extended endlessly, suggesting an infinite order, while the arabesque, a pattern of curling stems and leaves, did the same with plant forms. In architecture, builders developed muqarnas: honeycomb-like vaulting made of many small niches, which breaks light into countless facets. The fourteenth century Nasrid palaces of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, have some of the most spectacular examples.

Worked example: two buildings, one goal

Compare the Gothic cathedral of Chartres with the Dome of the Rock. Start with form. Chartres is long and tall, its nave rising about 37 meters, with walls opened up into windows. Colored light, deep blue and red, fills the interior and shifts through the day. The Dome of the Rock is centrally planned: an octagon around a sacred rock, with a golden dome above. Its surfaces glitter with mosaic and marble, and inscriptions run around it like a band of speech.

Content: Chartres tells stories. Its windows and carved portals show Christ, the Virgin Mary, prophets, kings. The Dome of the Rock tells no stories in pictures. Its message comes through words and through an ordered richness of plant forms and geometry.

Context: both were built to make the sacred present and to impress. The Dome of the Rock stood in a city holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims, and its inscriptions spoke directly to Christian beliefs, arguing for Islam's view of God. Chartres was a pilgrimage church that held a relic believed to be the tunic of the Virgin. Different means, figures in one case and words and pattern in the other, serve a shared aim: to make visitors feel they stand somewhere closer to God.