I recently took part in a discussion in which my interlocutor suggested that if the Shroud were a medieval artefact, it should be possible to name the artist who made it. She went on to imply that if I couldn’t, that in itself was evidence of authenticity, which, of course, I disagreed with, but let that pass for now.
It comes as rather a surprise that the very word ‘artist’ did not enter the English language until the 16th century, and was first used to describe someone who produces a picture, as far as we know, in 1608. Before that time such people were simply painters, and the distinction is significant. ‘Artists’, in the current meaning, are independently creative, with their own style, producing works from an inner compulsion to express themselves. A commission is an invitation to imaginative expression, literally a ‘signature’ work, which the commissioner will be proud to display, not as his own design or inspiration, but as tangible evidence of his support for someone else’s.
Painters, on the other hand, do what they’re told. In the Middle Ages their skill, and even to a certain extent their imagination, was entirely subservient to their patron’s wishes. Some were no doubt specialist painters, and possibly even specialists in particular types of painting, such as frescoes, but in general a painter had to be accomplished in all the necessary skills of preparing surfaces and applying colour to anything required, from statues to banners. Cennino Cennini’s 15th century “Il Libro dell’Arte” is a painter’s manual covering every possible task a ‘painter’ might be asked to execute, including wooden panels, cloth, leather, glass, curtains, heraldic tabards, and how to overlay a stone figure with burnished gold.
Even today, craftsmen go largely unrecognised. A house may be constructed by very skilled concrete-mixers, brick-layers, carpenters, tilers, glaziers, plumbers. electricians, gas-fitters, painters and decorators and interior designers, to suggest but a few, but all we will know is the name of the architect, if that. The others are barely dignified with the name of craftsman, let alone their actual name, regardless of their talent. Indeed, even the term craftsman is being subverted to mean only an artist in a non-graphic field, who works more for love than money. Such a vocation was largely unrecognised in the Middle Ages, only emerging very gradually in the painting schools of Italy.
We find this odd, and are at pains to try to recognise the imagination and creativity of the master responsible for some of the great artworks of the Byzantine and Roman church before the Renaissance. Hence the concept of the notname (German for “need-name”), often “the Master of” the artwork which seems to need it. Although it can hardly be considered definitive, it is notable that Wikipedia lists over 150 anonymous “Masters of” various works and places. Most of them are known from a single ‘masterpiece’, although they must have produced other paintings or sculptures in their careers.
Demands to name the artist of the Shroud, or to insist that there ought to be other known works by him, are therefore unjustified. According to Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, his predecessor Henri de Poitiers had discovered who the cunning painter was, which, if he worked for a European cathedral, was probably not difficult. However, it is not at all surprising that he was not named; he was almost certainly not working in a vacuum, but as part of a team of craftsmen employed to maintain the fabric (literally in this case) of a large church. The very existence of the Shroud implies the acceptance of his work by his employer, whom Henri might not have wished to have implicated in the subsequent sacrilegious use to which the originally innocent Shroud was put.