• U.S.

Art: Blazing Exceptions to Nature

9 minute read
Robert Hughes

One can hardly visit the great exhibition of English Gothic art, “The Age of Chivalry,” which opened this month at the Royal Academy in London, without mixed feelings of delight, surfeit and loss. The first, obviously, because this is the first show to trace so large a part of England’s cultural inheritance. It starts in 1216 with the enthronement of Henry III and ends with the death of the last Plantagenet, Richard II, in 1399, a span of nearly 200 years that brought Gothic art to England from France.

Sturdy and reflective, unwilling to accept imported style wholesale, English artists and craftsmen took French Gothic and, once it had been imposed on them by the Norman hierarchy in the major arts like architecture, transformed it in their minor arts. The image of the cathedral as the castle of God, its porches guarded by twin impregnable towers, was inspired by the donjons that the feudal barons built along the Seine and the Loire at the end of the 11th century, but in English cathedrals like Wells (constructed between 1186 and 1300) it acquired a definitive grandeur as the sign of the Church Militant. No cathedral will fit in the Royal Academy, but other things have. To see the engrafting of a high ecclesiastical and court style from across the Channel onto the Anglo-Saxon stock, set forth in these objects, many of which are of the highest aesthetic quality, is fascinating.

The surfeit arises from the sheer size of the show. Its catalog lists 748 items, ranging from a corroded metal pen to a whole stained-glass lancet window from Canterbury Cathedral. It covers manuscripts, paintings, maps, jewelry, seals, coins, heraldry, enamelwork, ceramics, armor, textiles, architecture and a great deal more besides. It traces the patronage of five Plantagenet kings and has a lot to say about how works of art were commissioned by the nobility and the great merchants, executed by their makers and read by the audience. It wanders off into didactic byways and outlines, among other things, the changing reactions to Gothic art and the problem of its conservation for later generations of antiquaries and romantics in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is an anxious longing to put everything connected with the Middle Ages on view, no matter how slight its aesthetic import. One half-expects to find Piers Plowman’s left clog in the next vitrine. It is a gigantic, semidigestible omnium-gatherum, and the visitor needs time and shoe leather to deal with it.

The sheer quantity of stuff is also connected to a pervasive sense of cultural loss, for large as this show is, it is the merest fragment of the vanished whole it attempts to describe. No people in the history of Europe turned on their own traditional art with a more consuming fury than the English did on their medieval heritage. The destruction began in a small way with the random acts of zealots like the Lollards. They were enraged by the apparent contradiction between the Second Commandment (“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”) and the “idolatrous” cult of statues of the Holy Family and the saints set up in English churches, jeweled and gilt and encrusted with innumerable votive offerings. The church’s answer was that you did not worship the image itself; you worshiped the Virgin through her image — a nice point apt to be lost on rustic fundamentalists.

The destructive impulse became much more systematic and serious after 1536, with Henry VIII’s mass pillage of Catholic monasteries and churches. (In one raid on the shrine of the martyr Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, eight men were needed to carry all the gold out to the King’s wagons.) Henry VIII – mainly wanted to raise money, but with Oliver Cromwell the vandalism turned ideological. The Roundheads were determined to erase every last trace of the image in English religious life, leaving only the abstract purity of the Word, the uncompromised Logos. Ordinary plunder, which spares wood and stone, became iconoclasm, which in the name of God spares nothing.

The Puritan massacre of statues and pictures passed all reckoning. The idea that such things were in a sense the general aesthetic or historical property of the people — which did something to mitigate the anticlerical rage of the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks in Russia — did not arise in 17th century England, whose churches were stripped and gutted as thoroughly as those of Byzantium had been by the Frankish thugs of the Fourth Crusade, in 1204.

Today, for instance, not a single English 13th century wooden crucifix figure survives in England; to find a probable example, the organizers of this show had to borrow an exquisite polychrome Christ from Norway, where it had been made by a traveling English artist for a church in Bergen around 1230-45. Just as in the greatest monuments of English Gothic today — the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral, say — one sees only the bare background of a decorative and sculptural scheme whose figural richness can never be restored or even reimagined, so the remains of medieval sculpture that have been assembled for “The Age of Chivalry” cannot really evoke the culture whose mutilated envoys they are.

In details, as with the fragments of two angels from a demolished late 13th century tomb in Sawley in Derbyshire — faces and drapery so refined in their carving, and yet so plain and direct that they bear comparison with the sculpture made for the west door of Notre Dame a century before — one sees the immensity of the loss. One can also sense the sheer range of feeling accessible to Plantagenet sculptors, from the grotesque and grimacing faces on corbels (meant more as effigies of “types” of men than as specific portraits, however sharp and humorous their realism) to the forbiddingly hieratic tomb effigies of dead lords like Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, lying cross-legged and pointy-toed as though about to leap up from the slab, his sword half-drawn from its scabbard to show his readiness to defend the Christian faith.

The past is another country, and nowhere more visibly so than here. One needs to remember how bare of images medieval life was — how utterly unlike the image-haze of competing visual messages, from billboards to print ads to TV, in which we live today. A man in Chicago sees more images in a day than his 14th century ancestor in York saw in 20 years. In medieval England the painted or carved image was the blazing exception to nature.

The medieval eye did not see works of art historically, as elements in a style unfolding over time. The image was more transparent; the eye plunged straight to the fable or narrative illustrated. As Jeffrey Denton, one of the 26 art historians who contributed essays to the enormous catalog, points out, “Symbols and signs were a bridge between things visible and things invisible . . . They were essential elements in comprehension, real links in the chain of realities” — a chain that stretched from earth to God. The whole bent of medieval thought was toward analogy, not empiricism, and this alone gave the carved or painted image a role in thought it lacks today. One “read” a cathedral, from its grand structural form down to the last grotesque detail on a misericord, as one might “read” the world from God’s seven heavens down to the fish and fleas.

To convey that wholeness, a universal style was needed. Another catalog contributor, Nigel Ramsay, remarks that the Gothic style could spread from architecture to all the other arts because it was linear: “It could be drawn in two dimensions as outline tracery, and . . . the design of a work could be separated from its execution.” Chaucer pointed to this when he described the dandified young parish clerk in “The Miller’s Tale” “with Poules wyndow corved on his shoos” (the tracery of St. Paul’s Cathedral carved on his shoes).

The same foliations, crockets, battlementing and, above all, the same wiry line, organic yet abstracted, ran right through the arts of the period, binding them together into a general style with innumerable variations. The lovely relic of heraldic drapery from the Musee de Cluny, embroidered with the leopards of England — so elegant in their whipping elongation, so fierce in spiking claw — comes from the same world of form as Kentish ironwork or East Anglian miniature painting.

Some Plantagenet stained glass remains, though not much in proportion to what there once was; pitching rocks through those glowing windows must have been a special pleasure for the God-serving iconoclast. The show is rich in examples from Canterbury, York and elsewhere. Very few examples of English church panel painting endured intact, and the finest 13th century object of this kind, the much mutilated Westminster Retable, was too fragile to be moved from Westminster Abbey to its place of honor in this show. What come through best of all are smaller, more private images: not the painted screens and wall pictures, of which almost nothing survives, but miniatures done on the leaves of books.

There pictures went hand in hand with words, and words brought the Englishing of English society. During the Plantagenet dynasty, the pattern of linguistic power imposed by the conquering Normans after 1066 — Latin for official and church documents, French for polite usage, English for peasants — began to break up; the common tongue took center stage, even though as late as 1385 it had many dialects, producing (one witness wrote) a “straunge wlafferying, chiterynge, harrynge,” not the uniformity of French or Latin. The first time a duck says “quack” is around 1320, while being grabbed by a fox in the margin of the Gorleston Psalter. (What, if anything, did earlier ducks say in Latin?)

The psalters, hymnals and apocalypses gathered here attest to the sturdiness and independence of English artists’ imaginations. They are a perfect visual equivalent to Chaucer, who installed English as a literary language in 1387 with The Canterbury Tales. The East Anglian manuscript style especially, in its whimsicality and odd narratives, its overflowing, obsessive love of natural forms — leaves, flowers, birds, animals, combining and recombining — is quite unlike the traditional formalities of French Gothic painting. It is both more earthy and more fantasticated. Some of it looks forward to the nature worship of the Romantics, centuries later. Some predicts writers like Edward Lear and Beatrix Potter. This, one realizes, is where the Englishness of English art was born: between the vellum sheets.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com