Regarding The Spectators of The Bayux Tapestry

R E G A R D I N G T H E S P E C TAT O R S O F T H E B AY E U X TA P E S T R Y
Nast Publications. 1 Rea Irvin, Cover illustration from the New Yorker, 1944. Photo: r Conde
& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009
REGARDING THE SPECTATORS OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY: BISHOP ODO AND HIS CIRCLE
T. A . H E S L O P
The front cover of the New Yorker of 15 July 1944 signalled the recent D-Day landings by Allied Forces in Normandy with a reworking of the Bayeux Tapestry (plate 1).1 Of course the format of the magazine meant that it was not possible to produce a continuous, horizontal narrative, so another, more recent, mode was adopted instead: separating the scenes and framing them as though they were on the page of a comic. Despite this disruption, the eleventh-century point of reference is still clearly recognizable, thanks to design characteristics such as the coloured gures silhouetted against an off-white ground, the borders with their diagonal stripwork, the Latin inscriptions, and the imitation of the architectural and landscape styles of the original. Much of the detail shows the knowledge and wit of the cartoonist in adapting and hybridizing his ancient model to suit current circumstances. His success in communicating with his audience depends in large part on their recognizing the visual similarities and drawing certain conclusions: for example, that the historical events were of comparable enormity and that cross-Channel invasion was a common factor. As I aim to demonstrate, very similar strategies were adopted by the designer(s) of the Tapestry itself, especially their deployment of structures from Roman art and literature, such as the frieze format for an epic tale. Thus visual sources complement contemporary verbal representations, for in their histories of the invasion of 1066 French authors turned to the example of Julius Caesar, whose invasion of Britain in 54 BCE is presented as a prototype for their own expedition, even the number of ships and the point of embarkation being comparable.2 There are few works of art so well known and so adaptable as the Bayeux Tapestry: the Mona Lisa and the Laocoon come to mind, but few, if any, from the Middle Ages. Two reasons are its distinctive appearance and its accessibility: it was and is much reproduced and can be appreciated at a number of levels: by scholars, children and, indeed, cartoonists.3 From the outset the Tapestry has catered for different constituencies, rewarding its spectators by gratifying their expectations about history and its representation. This is achieved in part at an apparently factual level: the narrative purports to show what happened, the turn of events and the roles played by certain key people. But the period at which it was
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2009.00669.x
ART HISTORY . ISSN 01416790 . VOL 32 NO 2 . APRIL 2009 pp 223-249 & Association of Art Historians 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
223
made, around 1075, was witnessing a marked change in the status of the visual and verbal arts, based on precedents derived from classical rhetoric but developed with a quite new sophistication and self-awareness that acknowledged the inseparability of form and content. This shift of emphasis prompted a radical re-estimation of the function and understanding of imagery and led, I suggest, to the dramatic increase in the quantity and public availability of art. For example, monumental, architectural sculpture had been virtually unknown in western Europe since the decline of the Roman Empire, but in the century from 1050 to 1150 it became commonplace. Other public media, such as wall-paintings and stained-glass windows, were deployed more widely and in greater quantity than ever before.4 What follows should be understood in part as a case study in the Romanesque revolution. It also explores an issue of more general concern to art historians: the relationship between a work of art, its patron and its target audiences. Writing of fteenth-century Italy, Michael Baxandall regarded painting as the deposit of a social relationship. That may be overstating the case, both for the Renaissance and in general, but it is surely true that if pictures were designed for the clients use, then studying the relationship between a bespoke object and its patron potentially sheds light on both of them.5 And if the designer of the work knew about, and thought to provide for, the interests of his audience, then it should be possible to identify elements included specically to appeal to them. Accordingly, I will explore two propositions: that there was ample material in the Bayeux Tapestry that would have been understood from quite specic contemporary subject positions, and more tendentiously that much of the narrative and imagery was designed to be appreciated in that way. The argument is that within the circle of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, for whom the Tapestry was made, there existed overlapping cultures of interest that would have reacted in distinctive ways to the experience of viewing it. If that sounds overly deterministic, it is doing little more than reformulating an adage: history tends to be written by the victors, as self-justication, to tell them what they wish to hear and what they wish others to know. The Bayeux Tapestry displays victory in a way not seen since late Antiquity. It is both art and history, as those terms came to be understood in the eleventh century, and those perceptions are still largely current, to judge from the ways the Tapestry is written about today.6
O D O A N D T H E TA P E S T R Y
In a brief biographical notice of Odo of Bayeux, a younger contemporary provided an intriguing picture of his character and behaviour. He was high minded, yet occupied with the worlds trivialities, sometimes the Spirit triumphed in him to good ends, but on others the esh overcame the spirit with evil consequences. And though he accumulated wealth by dubious means, he bestowed it generously on churches and the poor.7 He was supportive of men of letters and those with a true spiritual vocation, while ambitious for power for himself. He was, in short, a man of contradictions, an able administrator and counsellor but too keen to create the world to his own liking, and who thus alienated other powerful people, such as his half-brother William, Duke of Normandy and King of England, with disastrous results. He took many political risks but, with the notable exception of his part in the Norman invasion of England, he often made the wrong call. His 224
colourful personality makes him an engrossing subject for study, and for art historians he has the added advantage of being involved in major building projects and the patronage of precious metalwork. Although his status as the owner of, and primary audience for, the Tapestry (actually an embroidery) is generally accepted, it is also occasionally contested. However, none of the alternatives offered has found consistent support, and that may be taken as an indication that they do not stand up to serious scrutiny.8 Rather than tackle the question head-on, which has been done before, my strategy here is to accept the premise, in the hope that my readers will agree that the cumulative evidence, although presented for other purposes, does not permit any other conclusion. The overall characteristics of the Tapestry, and many details found in it, accord with the impression that we get from the written record of the interests of Odo and his dependants. In examining his entourage, the main focus is on two groups of men who owed their success to his support: those who held land from him in his earldom of Kent and those whose literary education he fostered. The former were skilled managers and entrepreneurs, the latter included many of the best Latin poets of the late eleventh century, and, typically, they became senior churchmen. As already implied, the Bayeux Tapestry contains much material that would have had quite specic resonances for the Bishop and his familiars, given their social formation.9 In the rst part of this article, I analyse the appearances in the Tapestry of Odo himself, followed by those of the men who held land from him in Kent, for each of whom a brief career prole is provided against which to measure their respective ge s who take centre stage, and depictions. In the second part it is his clerical prote with them come concerns with history, poetry and the problem of representation, all themes deriving from, and building on, classical precedent.10 Arguably, one of the greatest skills of the Tapestrys designer(s) was the integration of ancient and contemporary ideals so that a range of audiences could subscribe to this representation of events. Odo of Bayeux is represented four times in the length of the embroidery as it survives today. Each occurrence is important for different reasons, showing him in various capacities at crucial moments of the narrative. At the turning point in the Battle at Hastings, immediately after the English have repelled a cavalry charge, and some Normans are pressing this lost cause, Odo is there, wielding his eld marshals baton, encouraging the troops (see plate 3). The inscription above the scene is explicit that, holding the baton, Bishop Odo confortat pueros (strengthens the lads would be another way of putting it). Ahead of him, his half-brother William raises his helmet to reveal that he is alive and still in the game himself, and his standard-bearer Eustace of Boulogne points to him to reinforce the fact. The implication is clear: hitherto William had been just one among the many soldiers, not obviously giving leadership by directing events, but he is now prompted to it by Odos ne words. Indeed, one might interpret the backward direction of Williams gaze towards Odo as an indication that he is responding directly to his brothers command. Within a short span of the embroidery, King Harold is killed and the English are in full retreat. Odo has turned the tide. The way the men respond to Odo is in marked contrast to their earlier reaction to the Duke. Immediately before the battle William addressed his knights, as a good commander should, so that they would prepare themselves manfully.11 However, as represented, they take
225
e de la Tapisserie. 2 Ordering ships to be built, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. Bayeux: Muse
almost no notice of him. They are all riding away as he speaks. Only the rearmost horseman turns in his saddle but, as the pose of his sprightly mount indicates, he will hear at best a few words as he is propelled into the charge. This is not the rst occasion on the Tapestry in which William is shown to be far less effective than Odo, and the earlier one is more striking, because the behaviour of the two men is immediately juxtaposed (plate 2). A messenger, newly arrived from England, has come into the Dukes presence to tell him that Harold has been made king. Williams reaction is indecisive, if not comic: there is no commanding gesture, no assertive pose. In search of advice, he turns to his left to a tonsured cleric who is seated immediately behind him, attired in the long cloak of the high nobility. Responding immediately, the cleric points out of the palace and into the next scenes, where trees are being felled and ships built for the invasion.12 As though to reinforce the point, the master shipwright (carpenters axe already in hand), the other person listening to his advice, also points to the future events, which are clearly consequences of the instructions he is being given by the ecclesiastic. In the learned circles around Odo, the rediscovery of an ancient treatise on physiognomy prompted the reection that it showed the truth, recording things in need of interpretation, such as stature, facial expression, pose, voice, gesture and behaviour, to reveal mens inner character.13 So, although the inscription above the scene states here Duke William orders that ships be built, anyone with eyes to see can tell that the high-ranking ecclesiastic is taking the initiative. There is no one else that it could plausibly be but Odo, and to my knowledge no alternative has been proposed.14 Fortunately, we have documentary evidence of Odos contribution to the invasion eet in the form of a ship list. It identies the Bishops part in the enterprise as one hundred vessels, easily the largest contingent apart from that of his brother Robert, Count of Mortain, which was only twenty more. As readers of Caesars Gallic War would have known, commissioning transports was a crucial element of plan226
e de la Tapisserie. 3 Odo rallies the troops, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. Bayeux: Muse
227
4 Bishop Odo blesses food and drink, the council of war, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. e de la Tapisserie. Bayeux: Muse
ning an invasion of Britain.15 The shipbuilding scenes are immediately followed by the provisioning of the eet, the Channel crossing, and the feasting that follows it. As eleventh-century viewers understood, in military expeditionary terms, supplying a ship meant not just providing the vessel, but its men and equipment as well.16 Odos next appearances occur soon after: some 2.5 m embroidery showing the preparation of meat by various means precede the Bishop blessing food and drink (plate 4). The event is highlighted, for the inscription accompanying it breaks into polychrome: the black wool used hitherto is superseded by alternating blue and red letters, a strategy which is abandoned almost immediately. It has often been pointed out that the design of this scene derives directly from the depiction of the Last Supper in a late sixth-century Italian illuminated gospel book kept at the St Augustines Abbey, Canterbury. So the point of reference as much as the coloured lettering might capture the attention of the viewer.17 To the Bishops left, one of his table companions turns to face him but points up to the words ODO EPS [episcopus] in the next scene immediately above Odos head. Here again is the Dukes trusty counsellor telling him and Count Robert, their brother, what to do next. The consequence is the building of the castle at Hastings. We can deduce from the body language where the initiative is supposed to come from and, true or not, we may well wonder what the Duke, soon to be king, would have made of Odos claim. Again there is likely to be substance behind the rhetoric because the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle specically attributed castle-building to Odo.18 This particular section of the Tapestry would have been hard to miss, as it was apparently designed to hang immediately behind the high table at the top end of the dining hall, where Odo himself would preside and bless the food and drink in person. That is one of the implications of invoking the Last Supper, an episode frequently chosen for the end walls of monastic refectories, where the head of the community would be seated centrally below the gure of Christ.19 228
e de la Tapisserie. 5 Wadard, requisitioning livestock, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. Bayeux: Muse
Such schemes of decoration are usually painted, so their location and association is transparent. Opting for an embroidered hanging suggests other concerns were paramount. Was one of the reasons for representing these historic events on a movable support that, as seems likely, the Tapestry was always intended for two audiences: the rst in centres of Odos secular power in Kent, but later for the canons of Bayeux? That inference may be drawn from the representation of Bayeux in the embroidery, shown as a lofty citadel. Just beyond is where Harold swears an oath to Duke William on two elaborate caskets, presumably containing local relics.20 It is thus probably not an accident that the earliest surviving documentary reference to the Tapestry, in 1476, records that it was displayed in Bayeux cathedral on the feast of the relics, as it was also in the eighteenth century.21 If Odo wanted the work to be given to his church for that purpose, it had to be made to be able to travel. The biographical notice of Odo cited near the beginning of this paper records his gift of precious vessels to his cathedral, and in due course it will also be seen that the Tapestry was probably already there before 1100.
ODOS MEN
There is no serious likelihood that the primary audience of the Tapestry was envisaged as the canons of Bayeux. The cameo roles played in the events depicted by three of Odos tenants in Kent make virtually certain its initial display in or near Canterbury. Whereas all the other men identied by inscription are major gures in the politics of the day, these three are of very minor signicance.22 Their names are Wadard, Vitalis and Turold. It is likely that they had some claim to have been involved in the story of the invasion, but there is more to their inclusion and the ways they are represented, both individually and as a group, than mere participation, and they have long been identied as men who held land from Odo.23 Wadard is shown immediately after the Normans landing in Sussex (plate 5). He is trotting around on horseback while the lower orders seize and prepare food for the feast which Odo blesses. It seems that he has some supervisory role in the requisitioning or logistical aspect of the scene. That would certainly coincide with what we know of his talents. Wadards name is unusual, and that makes him easy to
229
identify in written sources, of which Domesday Book, compiled in 1087, is the most important. In it he is recorded holding land from Odo of Bayeux in six counties. The ve estates in Kent were worth d23, where he held two more from the abbot of St Augustines, worth a further d19. This portfolio put him in the middle rank of landholders, and his estates ultimately formed a barony. For the lands given him by Odo in Kent we not only have valuations for 1087 but also at the moment Wadard acquired them.24 These gures reveal that under his management they rose in value by 70 per cent. Typically land values fell in the aftermath of 1066, and two of the three we know about in Wadards case fared this way. Good managers succeeded in reversing this decline, but Wadard exceeds that performance, transforming d8 worth in 1066 into d11 by 1087, thus increasing the pre-invasion value of his lands. It may thus not have been for want of anywhere else to put him that the designer of the Tapestry showed Wadard supervising the rounding up of a cow, sheep and pig. It has indeed been suggested that his name is cognate with warden.25 If Wadard fought in the battle that followed, it is left obscure, and it may be that his role was primarily in provisioning the army. Successful military operations, then as now, depend upon it, but it is not part of the story that often gets told. Vitalis was equally enterprising and successful, though in other ways. He too held land from both Odo and the abbot of St Augustines, but with half the value of Wadards Kentish estates. However, he controlled perhaps twenty or more houses in the Canterbury suburbs (by permission of Bishop Odo), hence no doubt his being called Vitalis of Canterbury, and had a substantial interest in the archbishops town of Whitstable, on the north Kent coast, adjacent to his own lands in Swalecliffe (held from Odo). The location on the Thames estuary is signicant, for Vitalis was involved in cross-Channel trade, especially, it seems, in the importation of stone from Caen in Normandy to support the post-Conquest building boom. He is referred to in the contemporary Miracles of St Augustine, written for St Augustines by Goscelin of St Bertin, as the kings superintendent (regis exactor), responsible for supplying stone for Westminster Hall, on the banks of the Thames. We are told about this upright man (vir probus) in connection with one particular miracle, in which sailors bringing stone to build the abbey were saved from shipwreck by the saints intercession, while another fourteen ships intended for the kings works were lost with all hands. Vitalis acted as negotiator and contractor on both these projects, providing the surviving shipmaster with sealed letters (the earliest reference we have to the use of seals for business transactions).26 Vitalis was quite probably in the vanguard of royal administrative developments, but he was also serious about religion. He was granted confraternity by Abbot Scolland of St Augustines; one of his sons founded the parish church of St Mary Bredin, at Canterbury; and another became a monk at Rochester. Perhaps most interestingly, his son-in-law William Calvell was involved in the foundation of a small nunnery, holding land from the abbot.27 It was also in the western suburbs, ideally placed for access to the abbey library, which contained several of the pictorial resources used in the Tapestrys design. At this period English women were famed for their skill in embroidery, and it is quite conceivable that the commission was undertaken by the emergent community of St Sepulchre.28 230
6 Duke William asks Vitalis if he has seen Harolds army, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. e de la Tapisserie. Bayeux: Muse
Vitalis appears on the Tapestry as a lookout and messenger, asked personally by Duke William whether he has seen Harolds army (plate 6). He is shown fully armed and mounted, galloping towards his master and having the good sense in doing so to reverse his lance, so that it points behind him, in order to avoid any accidents. The subsequent occurrence of this motif on seals suggests that this combination of safety and protocol was part of military training, so Vitalis was probably more than simply a scout at Hastings.29 This inference is borne out by his responsibility for three of the archbishops knights.30 For the third of the minor Norman gures on the Tapestry we have less to go on, and his identication as Turold of Rochester depends in part on his having a status comparable with the other two. Like Vitalis, Turold appears as the Dukes messenger, but at an earlier stage in the proceedings. He is one of the men sent by William to effect the transfer of Harold (not yet king) from his captivity by Count Guy of Ponthieu into Williams own custody (see plate 7). By 1087, when Domesday Book was compiled, Turold was dead, but apparently his death had occurred recently as several entries refer to his heir, Ralph, simply as the son of Thorold of Rochester, as though the locals had yet to learn the given name of their new master. It is thus probable that the lands of Ralph, son of Turold, in Kent were inherited directly from his father. Ten of the eleven estates were held from Odo, and once again we can see from their increased value what a good farmer Turold must have been. Worth d48 in 1087, as against d30 when they were acquired and d35 in 1066, his return was in some respects better than Wadards and easily outperforms other tenants, such as Ansketel of Rots and Robert Latimer.31 That Turold was an obsessive farmer is implied on the Tapestry itself, for immediately beneath his feet, in the lower border, ploughing, harrowing, broadcasting seed and
231
7 Duke Williams envoys with Count Guy of Ponthieu, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. e de la Tapisserie. Bayeux: Muse
scaring off birds are represented. The last and possibly the rst of these derive from images in the illustrated Anglo-Saxon Hexateuch, belonging to St Augustines, but harrowing and the use of horses as draught animals in England were novelties.32 The point of these details is that in the Tapestry Odo wished to celebrate success, not simply military and not just his own, but that of his entrepreneurial men, too. They succeeded because they deserved to, because of their talents and because of divine favour. When Turold visited his lords hall, he could have seen himself represented as part of the great enterprise that was the Norman takeover of England. He would also have witnessed the death of the previous owner of his two largest estates. That man was Earl Leofwine, a son of Earl Godwine and brother of King Harold, named and shown pierced by a lance in the midst of the conict.33 Should any of Turolds men from those estates, the thirty-eight villagers and six smallholders of Domesday Book, have accompanied him to Odos court, they could have seen both their former and current masters in the account of those great events and could have drawn their own conclusions about the will of God as realized in history.
ODO AND THE POETS
`ge and other cities where he knew philosophical studies He also sent promising clerks to Lie ourished . . . so that they might drink long and deeply from the springs of knowledge.
In these terms Orderic Vitalis describes Odos enthusiasm for the higher education of talented young men.34 He then lists some of those who beneted: the brothers Thomas and Samson of Bayeux, respectively Archbishop of York and camp and Thurstan abbot of Bishop of Worcester, William of Rots the abbot of Fe 232
Glastonbury. From other evidence, that number can be trebled at least, and would include Serlo canon of Bayeux, probably Hilderbert Bishop of Le Mans, possibly Baudri Archbishop of Dol and, in a different capacity, Marbod Bishop of Rennes.35 These last four are signicant as they are notable poets who, with the possible exception of Serlo, wrote some of the most sophisticated and brilliant Latin poetry of the Middle Ages. The work of Marbod, Hilderbert and Baudri includes writing both directly and indirectly about the visual arts, whether comparing painting and poetry, purporting to describe images (ekphrasis), or reecting philosophically on the relationship of representation and reality. The material deserves far more attention than it has received, more than I can give it here, for it is very rich. Although Marbod and Hildebert wrote poems to Odo, we do not know that they ever saw the Bayeux Tapestry, and cannot have been regular viewers.36 They are, therefore, not spectators in the way that Vitalis, Turold or Wadard probably were. Rather, their function in this article is to represent a class of people in the Bishops circle, for it is clear that he supported and promoted clerks with an interest in the classics. As the oldest of the group, as well as the greatest poet, Marbod should come rst. Marbod originated in Angers, where he was schoolmaster and archdeacon at the cathedral before being made Bishop of Rennes in 1096, by which time Odo and Marbod had probably known each other some thirty years. Marbods sycophantic eulogy for Odo relates to his being made Earl of Kent, almost immediately after the Norman invasion of England. Addressed to Odo, at the same time earl and bishop, it marvels at this unique creature, who can equally glorify and give form to sacred and secular leadership. It is not very subtle, but it does raise a point that Odos career demonstrates very well: a man was not individual but composite; he could be called on to play more than one role. Of course, in the poem Odo is represented as good in both capacities, just as on the Tapestry he is seen by turns as counsellor, warrior and priest. The Tapestry has moments at which such variability is presented as comic: not infrequently these are aimed at the late King Harold, who is also seen in different roles but seldom quite in control of his own destiny. By contrast, Odo was never to be laughed at. There is one other probable relic of Marbods contact with the invaders at this early period. According to a contemporary Lotharingian chronicle, at a dinner with King William a certain Breton clerk called Marbod quipped nec pice nec clavis eget haec argentea navis. (this silver goblet needs neither pitch nor nails.) At one level the clerk is complimenting his host, whose drinking vessels are solid silver not assembled from wooden elements sheathed in silver, which would require holding together with nails and waterproong with tar. At another level he is alluding to boatbuilding (navis means ship) and that the planks of ships are riveted to the ribs within and then caulked with pitch. It is the word haec, this, which distinguishes the two kinds of navis: the silver cup and other spoils of victory demonstrate the wisdom of the investment in the ships that William, Robert and Odo had made to invade England. An apparently impromptu composition such as this would have hit home only in the immediate aftermath of success, and its cleverness was no doubt the reason it was recorded. It opens a small but intriguing window on clerical wit in the ambit of the Anglo-Norman court. The famous and problematic scene in the Bayeux Tapestry showing a woman named Aelfgyva suffering the physical advances of unus clericus is a further
233
reminder that in addition to the armed retainers and servants in the entourage of great men, there were educated clerks working as chaplains, administrators and secretaries, while hoping for ecclesiastical preferment.37 More generally, Marbod revived and repositioned for his contemporaries the Roman concept of the relationship between painting and poetry. The root was the Ars Poetica of Horace, with its inuential expression of opinions, such as ut pictura poesis, or poesy is like a picture.38 Into this Marbod mixed various other ideas of equal pedigree: that all good art is built on the model of nature; and that a persons circumstances lie at the root of their perception of life and, in turn, how they are understood.
Meanwhile, those of you who wish to write should have The nature of things as the poets mirror and model. Like one who learns to paint, whoever yearns to craft well Should rst adapt his own work to her exemplar. Having emerged from Nature when aroused by Reason, Art strives to preserve the model of its own foundations. Thus whoever wants to furnish himself with praise by writing Should study to recreate sex, age, emotion and Social status as distinct as they are in reality.39
The last two lines here Sexus, aetates, affectus, condiciones/Sicut in re, studeat distincta referre are reminiscent of the festive mode of address, the sermo festivitatis, as characterized in the classical Ciceronian rhetorical treatises Ad Herennium. Signicantly, these comments are found there in the context of historical narration: how to make the past live again and to tell a plausible story.40 Marbods insistence on nature is also instructive, for he uses it to indicate that he is in touch with the reality of things, not just with artice, and in doing so he shows his sophistication. In a letter addressed to Hildebert he emphasized his lack of ourishes, his rusticity, concluding quamlibet et crassa contexere verba Minerva.41 The phrase crassa Minerva is a quote from Horace, who had used it to suggest a basic natural philosophy. However, Minerva was at once the goddess of wisdom and of skill, especially in spinning and weaving wool, made famous through the extended account of her tapestry contest with Arachne in Ovids Metamorphoses.42 Marbod reminds us of this by means of the verb contexere, to weave together, which was not hinted at in his Horatian source. Thus, Marbod can imply that his, too, is a natural talent, like that of the peasant girl Arachne, who deed the gods. But of course no bumpkin could have mobilized classical allusion so appositely, and that was his skill.43 The tension between simple sentiment and the knowledge implied by his mode of delivery was what kept his contemporaries in awe of him. But perhaps as important is the sense that the moderns could adopt and add new dimensions to the material that they inherited from Antiquity, a point of potential relevance for the reception of the Bayeux Tapestry by the literati and their supporters. The school at Angers nurtured the poetic proclivities of a generation, not a few members of it funded by Odo: Marbods was clearly a talent the Bishop admired. Two of that circle, Hildebert and Serlo, followed Marbod in writing poems addressed to Odo, though at a later date, when he was released from prison in 1087 as a result of King Williams apparently reluctant deathbed concession. 234
Odo had been conned in Rouen since 1083 on the grounds, it has been cogently argued, of treason.44 The alacrity with which Hildebert and Serlo worked up verses celebrating his liberation suggests their long-term indebtedness to the Bishop and perhaps the hope of future benet.45 Just as signicantly, it implies that Odo appreciated vassalage of this kind: poems dedicated to and celebrating him would be well received. Hildebert certainly prospered, becoming archdeacon and then Bishop of Le Mans on the southern border of Normandy in 1096 and later Archbishop of Tours. His fame rested on reviving the style of classical poetics to a degree that impressed the most discerning. For example, the English historian William of Malmesbury, in his Deeds of the Kings, completed in 1124, quoted in full Hildeberts poem on ancient Rome, because he admired its sentiments. It is redolent of nostalgia, awe and aspiration, for even in ruins the city is great beyond compare, a tribute to human skill and ingenuity.
Bid wealth, bid marble and bid fate attend, And watchful artists oer their labour bend, Still shall the matchless ruin art defy The old to rival or its loss supply. Here gods themselves their sculptured forms admire And only to reect those forms aspire; Nature unable such like gods to form, Left them to mans creative genius warm; Life breathes within them, and the suppliant falls Not to the god, but statues in the walls.46
So, Art is challenged to rival and revive Antiquity. Human skill is such that it improves on Nature, making the pagan gods wish they were as beautiful as their marble representations: what holds Hildebert in thrall is not (of course) the pagan deities but the sculptures of them.47 As I shall argue in the nal section, the model of Antiquity was both an inspiration and a challenge to the makers of the Bayeux Tapestry, and it was in the context of classical myth and ancient history that another western-French poet imagined an extensive wall-hanging representing the Norman invasion of England. Baudri was abbot of Bourgueil and later, much less happily, Archbishop of Dol on the NormanBreton border. He was also a close friend of William, abbot of camp; corresponded with Hildebert; and wrote verse for Worcester, where Samson Fe was Bishop. Thus his education in Marbods school seems virtually certain.48 Baudris importance for our understanding of the impact and reception of the Bayeux Tapestry is founded on his long poem dedicated to Adela Countess of Blois, daughter of King William, in which he describes among the decorations of her chamber a bed-hanging representing the rst phase of the Conquest.49 His account, composed between 1099 and 1102, has all the subtlety that we might expect of a pupil of Marbod, when viewing or imagining such an artefact. The opening conceit is that Baudri addresses his poem as though it were a person he is sending as a messenger to Countess Adela. He tells the poem what to expect and how to behave. As Baudri himself had never been in the Countesss bedroom, he does not know about its decoration so he will have to make do with describing what it should be
235
like. Thus the poem he sends contains within it that which the poem may see, if it is there to be seen, but which the poet has not seen. This mechanism forces a wedge between witness account and distant fantasy that is about as sharp as it could be.50 We need not follow all the twists and turns of this work (at 1,368 lines his longest poetic composition), but three aspects of his approach need to be noted. First Baudri locates the Norman invasion in both global and cosmic terms. Adelas ceiling depicts the heavens, her oor the earth. Hebrew, Greek and Roman history are on the walls, but closest to her, around the bed, are the exploits of her father, William the Conqueror. Next, but closely related to this overall conception, is Baudris recourse to classical texts, among which Virgils Aeneid features prominently. It serves as a poetic source, but also structurally links the Homeric past to the Roman empire, and implicitly to the heroic colonial ventures of the Normans: thus, for Baudri, William the Conqueror is an imperial power who made the entire earth tremble and bow to his rule.51 And, nally, because his account is ekphrasis, Baudri can play with levels of reality, for the most part describing the events represented as though he were himself present, but occasionally breaking the spell and reminding his reader that it is only a picture.52 He introduces his account by recalling the contest between Athena and Arachne: both of them set to work, weaving heroic tales.
Pallas is giving her best, and Arachne is trying her hardest . . . (l.221) First you see Normandy, fertile of men, give birth to a warrior . . . (l.235) Look! The skies are brightening; a red-tinged comet is shining. (l.243) Here we see that the Normans have called together their leaders: They hold a council and take counsel among themselves. (ll.25960)53
There follows a long speech (ll.265328) by William laying out his justication and plan to invade England, a eet is built and equipped and sets sail:
Every girl with her eyes follows the man she loves. This woman here says a prayer for a happy and speedy reunion; Men and women alike give free reign to tears. Troy, the Asian fortress, Priams capital city, Which as the poets sing, fell to the conquering Greeks . . . (ll. 3626) Scarcely could have produced such noise. (l. 368)
So, as we look at the tapestry we are told what we see, and, so encouraged, we even notice how the eyes of the women follow the departure of the army; we hear the words spoken and the noises made. Inevitably the intensity increases during battle, especially when the Normans are under pressure, and then
Sensing his soldiers panic, the duke went out to confront them, Taking his helmet off, quickly he shows his face: Stay I beg you; think who you are, and remember our honour. I am alive, as you see, never fear, Im alive. . . (ll.4314) Quickly he turns and with spurs of bronze urges on his charger, Tearing into the foe with his lightning sword. Hector was not as great as he slew the Greeks, nor Achilles Slaughtering Trojan men, fearsome though they were both. (ll.4436)
236
Of course, Baudri was writing for Williams daughter, Countess Adela, and after the death of Odo of Bayeux, so it is no surprise that Baudris tapestry says nothing of Odo at all: indeed, his roles in building the eet, as counsellor and eld marshal could not be mentioned, for they would detract from our focus on the Duke.54 There has been much debate whether Baudri had seen the Bayeux Tapestry, but the issue cannot be resolved, though it does seem that he had been to Bayeux.55 Many of the episodes in the poem are comparable, but there are also lacunae: notably, the whole of Harolds voyage and captivity, but that was of little interest to Baudri or Adela.56 Her tapestry is imagined as silver, gold and silk, not wool and linen but then this was meant to be a piece of attery. Even if Baudri had not seen it, however, the chances are quite good that he knew of it by report. Odo left England for ever in 1088 after his failed rebellion against King William Rufus and, knowing he might never return, presumably he took his movables with him to Bayeux. There the Tapestry would have been seen by those in the circle of the Loire valley poets, such as Serlo and Samson. What is at issue, though, is less which particular individuals might have known it and far more the nature of the literary background of Odos clerkly associates. Schooled in classical Latin poetry and rhetoric, they were alert to the modes of looking at art made accessible to them through the works of Ovid, Horace and particularly Virgil. In Book I of Virgils Aeneid, Aeneas and Achates arrive in Carthage to discover a frieze in the Temple of Juno showing the Trojan Wars. They see their friends and enemies, some represented dying. Aeneas feeds his mind with the mute picture (animum pictura pascit inani) and weeps. He recognizes himself depicted in the melee and, while he gazes on all these wonders, is transxed in amazement (stupet obtutuque haeret dexus in uno).57 The power of the imagery to recollect for him the events of which he was a part is profoundly implicated in his response. If natural sensibility or personal involvement failed to engage those viewing the Bayeux Tapestry, then a classical education still might.
NORMANS, ROMANS AND TROJANS
For Baudri, and indeed for many of his contemporaries, the references to Athenas and Arachnes tapestries and to the Trojan Wars were not just poetical commonplaces. They created a sense of continuity with the past and comparability with its greatness. The continuity was cultural, based on the Latin classics, but it was also racial, for the Normans themselves were described as descended from the Trojan Antenor, and just as the dynasty of Trojan Aeneas had established the greatness of Rome, so the Normans were destined to rule an empire. This idea preceded their invasion of England by fty years. It forms the bedrock of Dudo of StQuentins History of the Normans and was to prove enduringly popular. Orderic Vitalis, among others, directly refers to it a century later.58 In the circumstances, it is not surprising that history-writing in the duchy is replete with echoes of Virgils epic. There are a few key moments in the narrative depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry at which an educated man or woman, such as Adela of Blois, might have been reminded of the founding myth of imperial Rome. The rst of them, as would surely be required given its textual origin, is verbal. Within the opening few yards
237
of embroidery, Harold and his men embark, apparently to go hunting, and with full sails (velis vento plenis) come to the territory of Guy, Count of Ponthieu, where they are arrested (plate 8). This is a misfortune, but it is also an allusion. In Book V of the Aeneid there is a race between four boats. Hoping to gain advantage, one of the two back markers, captained by Sergestus, seeks to cut a corner and is grounded and damaged, eventually coming home last, velis . . . plenis, to the jeers of the onlookers.59 The reference is thus to one who made a foolish decision and ended up a laughing stock.60 With the benet of hindsight, it was an apposite comparison to make with Harolds action, and, more to the point, it would be an inference one might draw if sufciently well versed in classical Latin poetry. There is another prompt to encourage the viewer in the same direction, for this is the moment in the story at which ancient moralizing rst appears in the form of Aesops Fables (in the border immediately below Harolds embarkation), which lead to the same conclusion about foolish behaviour. The stupid Crow is outwitted by the cunning Fox, the hopeful Crane by the ungrateful Wolf, and so on. The introduction of intertext at this early stage in the proceedings alerted spectators to the fact that they were viewing a story located and explained in a broad frame of reference. For example, the most popular set of Latin animal fables in circulation, those of Avianus, begins by explaining their purpose: as a type of common jest they contain the subject matter of life (vitae argumenta), they exercise and delight the mind, and offer solace and wary recognition of the whole pattern of living (totumque vivendi ordinem cautus agnoscas).61 They are another kind of cautionary tale. As there are no inscriptions in the border, identifying the fables depends on matching a known story with recognition of the creatures and their actions. This kind of connection, made by means of visual cues, is representative of a viewing strategy that sees events as morally and typologically related. Most commonly, in terms of biblical history, key moments in the New Testament are pregured in the Old: Abrahams willingness to sacrice his son, Isaac, foreshadows the sacrice on the Cross. In the gospels, Christ foretold His death and resurrection in terms of Moses raising the brazen serpent in the wilderness and Jonahs emergence from
e de la Tapisserie. 8 Earl Harold sets sail, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. Bayeux: Muse
238
the whales belly.62 But history at large was divinely ordained, so such echoes were not conned to the sacred page. What several writers apparently recognized in King Harolds death at Hastings was a parallel with the death of Dido, Queen of Carthage, in the Aeneid. In Book IV Virgil likens the lovelorn Dido to a hind pierced by a lethal shaft ( letalis harundo), and in his poem Baudri says that Adelas tapestry also shows Harold pierced by a letalis arundo.63 William of Malmesbury, apparently quite independently of Baudri, also refers to Dido at this moment, stressing that the shaft was small: letali harundine is understood as an arrow because it is a re-statement of what Virgil wrote four lines earlier (coniecta . . . sagitta).64 We may baulk at imagining Harolds death in terms of the fate of Dido, but it is clear that people at the time did not. One issue might seem to be gender but then, as Baudri makes William the Conqueror say, the English are an effeminate race.65 And again, though Dido may have blocked Aeneass path to his true destiny, she did not occupy the territory he wanted; in that regard the obstacle was Turnus. Not surprisingly, then, William of Poitiers compares the Conquerors battle with Harold and that between Aeneas and Turnus, who dies in the closing lines of the epic after a spear per medium stridens transit femur (passes shrieking through the middle of his thigh). In the Bayeux Tapestry the coup de grace is administered to Harold by a mounted opponent who reaches down from his saddle to strike him in the leg (plate 9).66 It is a curious manoeuvre, given that he has the whole of the head, neck and torso at which to swing, unless, of course, there was a specic allusion intended. Indeed, we may wonder why a lethal shaft was not sufcient. Harolds double death has prompted a good deal of debate among commentators, often hindered by their failure to notice that the second blow is dealt to a man who originally had an arrow carefully embroidered in his eye to make his identity clear.67 The other inhibition has been an unduly positivistic concern with what really happened, as though it could be disentangled from the rhetoric, but that is a point for the conclusion of this paper. For now, we should turn from the beginning and end of the Tapestry to its middle, and to the feasting scene which was behind the high table in Odos hall.
e de la Tapisserie. 9 Death of King Harold at Hastings, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. Bayeux: Muse
239
This area is dense with references. As well as the Last Supper there is the telling comparison, made by Karl Werckmeister, of the woman and child eeing the house that is being torched by two men, with the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan in Rome.68 This is not just a visual connection. Caesar mentions the burning of houses during his rst campaign in Britain, and, no doubt as a consequence, so does Guy of Amiens in his Song of the Battle of Hastings.69 There is an even more striking example nearby: the scene of animal sacrice. The purpose of the suovetaurilia, involving a pig, sheep and bull, was to ask Mars to purify the land, but it is frequently represented in Roman art in the context of military operations, including on triumphal columns (see plates 5 and 10).70 Clearly, it is highly appropriate at this moment in the invasion on both counts, and when we turn to the Aeneid the coincidences multiply. In Book V, on landing in Sicily and following portentous signs, Aeneas placates the spirits of the place and his dead father by killing sheep, pigs and bullocks, while others set cauldrons in their places . . . blew at the res under the spits, and so roasted the meat.71 In the Tapestry, too, cauldrons are set up for stewing and kebabs placed on a barbecue just after the sacrice (plate 11). At this juncture we are told only that Aeneas also poured wine from the bowls, but on other occasions we get more detail. Near the beginning of Book I the Trojans, having landed in North Africa, broach the wine they have brought with them from Sicily.72 Similarly, the Normans are shown loading barrels of wine prior to the Channel crossing and, in case we are in doubt, the caption tells us: HIC TRAHUNT CARRUM CUM VINO ET ARMIS (plate 12). Thus when Bishop Odo blesses the food and drink, he effectively takes the place of the pontifex, Aeneas, whose role as expedition leader and priest involves his control of the equivalent pagan ceremonies. Confronted by these parallels we have a number of interpretive choices, but they are not very different from those experienced by contemporaries. The rst possibility is that the Tapestry represents a record of events. Harold really was shot in the eye and then hacked through the thigh. The Normans really did set re to houses, bring wine with them to drink but relied on nding cattle, sheep and pigs to kill and cook on arrival. There is nothing intrinsically unlikely about such behaviour, but then it was a requirement of good history that it should be plausible. Then again, for those schooled in the Latin poets there was the opportunity to make connections between their own experience and the culture of the past that they so much admired. As a part of Odos entourage, perhaps more in Bayeux than in Kent, was educated in this way, the Tapestry could have fed their minds with more than simply an account of recent events. There would be no advantage for them to distinguish clearly between heroic fantasy and the enormity of modern achievement. That, I suggest, is why some of the particulars of the Tapestry offer themselves readily to comparison with earlier visual and verbal representations. They lend deserved authority to contemporary history. It is also, after all, why the historians of the period cited, or alluded to, passages in Roman and biblical texts: they helped connect then and now, providing a means for understanding each in terms of the other. Thus, those familiar with Isaiah (22.13) will also have recalled the warning Behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating esh and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die. 240
10 Pietro Santi Bartoli, Suove taurilia, after Trajans Column. plate 7 from Colonna Traiana . . . Con lespositione latina dAlfonso Ciaccone, Rome, c. 1673. Photo: Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.
e de la 11 The Normans cooking meat, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. Bayeux: Muse Tapisserie.
12 The Normans loading arms and wine, from The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1075. Bayeux: e de la Tapisserie. Muse
241
THE ART OF HISTORY
Baudris account of the Norman invasion is conceived as a poetic description of a tapestry depicting it, which he imagined to exist. This is a sophisticated mechanism for problematizing the nature of historical representation. Other authors, Guy of Amiens for example, also used verse as their vehicle but omitted the pictorial intermediary.73 As though to compensate, Guy uses the present tense when he wants to provide an especially vivid description: for example, of the embarkation for the Channel crossing or when battle is joined. Other authors still chose prose, because, as William of Poitiers put it in his account, probably to spite Guy of Amiens, poets amplify fact by wandering in the elds of fancy.74 That may explain also why William preferred to quote Caesar rather than Virgil: it encouraged belief in factual, participant description.75 These debates about the nature of history continued into the twelfth century. In his Deeds of the Kings William of Malmesbury noted that the English had not written history since the time of Bede, nearly four hundred years earlier. True, there were annals in the vernacular (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), but nothing that contemporaries would consider as real history, in stylish Latin in the form of a narrative.76 Williams concept of history was very much of its time. It developed from earlier essays on the Continent, such as Dudo of St-Quentins History of the Normans, but with an important admixture of Roman rhetorical theory. That entailed, among other things, that the reader should be able to imagine, indeed envisage, the events described. History, declared Henry of Huntingdon, also writing in the 1120s, represents the past as though to present sight. It was from Ad Herennium that he would have learned It is demonstratio when an event is so described in words that the business seems to be enacted and the subject to pass vividly before our eyes. Quintilian put it thus: it is . . . an important virtue of narrative for a truth not only to be told but, in a sense, presented to the sight.77 A visual history, like that on the Bayeux Tapestry, was thus cutting to the chase by using art to represent the past. And for those who sought conrmation that this was indeed a Roman practice, monuments such as the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius offered it. Though the English had been slow to pick up on developing trends in historywriting across the Channel, they had been more active than any other nation in depicting key narratives, most particularly from the Old Testament. The largest project of this kind was the so-called Aelfrics Hexateuch the ve books of Moses and Joshua translated into the vernacular and planned to have 394 framed illustrations depicting some 500 episodes.78 The manuscript was kept at St Augustines Canterbury and, as commentators from Francis Wormald onwards have shown, provides many very close pictorial analogies with the Bayeux Tapestry.79 The date of the Hexateuch is not xed, but I believe it was begun in the 1050s. In its sheer scale it constituted for the Tapestrys designer a comparable recent project. It was also relevant in another sense, for as many scholars have argued, to the English this history was not remote. Like the Israelites, they too believed that they were chosen by God and understanding the working of history was an aspect of understanding how God controlled their destiny. Bede had made this point in the eighth century, to be followed by Alcuin, and more recently by Aelfric of Eynsham and Wulfstan of York. In 1987 David Bernstein analysed aspects of the Bayeux Tapestry in precisely these terms, 242
providing in effect an account of the cultural baggage that Anglo-Saxon spectators would have brought to their viewing of the work.80 The Tapestry provided food for their minds, too: they had been led to their promised land, but through transgression had been subject to the scourge of a quasi-Babylonian domination. The importance of St Augustines Abbey in this story was encapsulated in its dedication, for as Bedes history made clear, the real conversion of the English to Christianity began with Augustines mission to Kent, in 596, from which all subsequent history owed. As we have seen already, Bishop Odo had close ties with the abbey, and it is likely that he approved the appointment of Scolland, a monk of Mont St-Michel, as abbot elect in 1070. The culture of the abbey was already distinctive, but under Scollands rule it became even more so. He had two handsome volumes of historical texts copied at Mont-St-Michel for the library at St Augustines. That was probably also the source of the manuscript of Dudos History, copied at Canterbury soon afterwards.81 The church of Mont St-Michel appears on the Tapestry, identied by inscription, above the scene where Harold rescues Norman soldiers from the surrounding water as a prelude to his part in a military campaign against the neighbouring Bretons. The inclusion of this material in the Tapestrys narrative has puzzled many commentators. It seems to demonstrate specialist knowledge of events requiring detailed local historical information, but that was precisely what Abbot Scolland, or men in his circle, could have provided.82 The Abbots rule seems to have been generally benign and conciliatory, preserving English traditions and adding continental ones, but he was also alert to the signicance of Antiquity. In the crypt of the great church he built at Canterbury, anking the altar, are two massive, re-used, Roman columns, between which Scolland himself was subsequently buried.83 He had travelled to Rome in the early 1070s to discuss his plans for the new church with Pope Alexander, and of course would have seen ancient architecture in the process. For the library he also acquired the earliest surviving English manuscript of Vitruvius.84 So, as a friend and doubtless a welcome guest in Odos hall, Scolland would have brought to his viewing of the Tapestry another distinct set of interests in history. He was also a scribe and so directly involved in production of books.85 Like so many of the invaders he brought practical and managerial talents to bear on the enterprises with which he was entrusted, and he did so with recourse to reviving and rivalling Antiquity by appropriating and developing it.
CONCLUSIONS
In The Social Production of Art Janet Wolff argued that it was communities of production and reception that made great works of art, not just artists and patrons.86 In general terms I think that is a defensible position, though it begs the question who constitutes such communities? An answer suggested by this study would be that the spectators of the Bayeux Tapestry, or any other object, are themselves plurally constituted. Each might adopt or occupy different subject positions, being (or imagining themselves as) scholars, managers, manufacturers or combatants by turns, and, accordingly, with shifting perspectives on the history they were viewing. It should follow that what constitutes success in such a work of art is its susceptibility to varied readings. If it is a deposit of social relations, it is one in which the elements are uid or at least in mutable relative
243
positions: seeing it deposited as if it were tangible, like bullion in a bank vault or an archaeological stratum, is thus problematic. I would prefer to regard it as a mirror that reects desirable perceptions, echoing whatever mentality is placed in front of it, perhaps as Marbod implied when he identied the distinctions of nature as the painters and poets mirror and pattern (speculum formamque). As a later French poet put it, Those who are masters of mirrors make one image give birth to several: if they have the right form ready, they create four eyes in one head, and they make phantoms appear to those who look within. They even make them quite alive, outside the mirror . . . and they seem to play between the eye and the mirror.87 As the full passage in The Romance of the Rose (from which this quotation comes) indicates, mirrors magnied, diminished and otherwise distorted. Like the frieze of the Trojan War viewed by Aeneas and Achates, they fed spectators with the raw material for mental reection. We cannot ourselves see these mechanisms directly we look obliquely, across the line of the pasts self-regard, trying to imagine the interaction between those minds and the images as they viewed them. However, though the attempt made here to envisage contemporaneous spectatorship is necessarily one of historical imagination on my part, it is one that can be built on fragments of evidence about material and mental reectivity at the time, and by acknowledging that rhetoric is part of the viewers as much as the objects substance. This is an approach to art and history that was invented at the time the Tapestry was created. The Bayeux Tapestry, however, is more than a deposit or a mirror or any other metaphor that we might use to explain to ourselves what we are looking at. In the same way as the contemporary texts used in this paper, it is a careful composition, contrived by a very skilful designer using resonant resources, many available locally but also with knowledge of Roman monuments, possibly only indirectly accessible. From this raw material, whether visual, oral or textual, the components that were chosen are broadly indicative of the designers and presumably the patrons agenda. The brief was to compose an historical epic, an idea, I suggest, only conceivable at a time when the genre was itself subject to close scrutiny and analysis. The great advantage of such a narrative form was that it gave an illusion of coherence, integrity, fullness and closure . . . that is and can only be imaginary.88 Like the Aeneid, detailed so as to atter Caesars dynasty and other leading Roman families, the Tapestry was aimed at an extended community linked by blood and by interests. Their concerns were with legitimacy, for which the appeal to history was crucial, and inseparable from it was the successful control and exploitation of natural and cultural resources.
Notes
1 See Carola Hicks, The Bayeux Tapestry: the Life Story of a Masterpiece, London, 2007, chap. 21, SpinOffs, for other cartoons from June and July 1944 based on the Tapestry. 2 The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy Bishop of Amiens, ed. Frank Barlow, Oxford, 1999, 4, For, another Caesar, by repeating his triumph you [William] compel an unbridled people to love the yoke; The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, eds R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall, Oxford, 1998, 16875, beginning Julius Caesar, who twice crossed over to Britain . . . with a thousand ships, did not perform deeds as great as this . . .. The texts were written by 1075 (perhaps as early as 1067) and 1077 respectively. For the Caesar topos, see also Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, Latin Poetry and the Anglo-Norman Court 10661135: The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, Journal of Medieval History, 15, 1989, 3962, esp. 412 and 567.
244
3 For the reception of the Tapestry, in addition to Hicks, Life Story, see Shirley Anne Brown, The Bayeux Tapestry: History and Bibliography, Woodbridge, 1988, 144; Francis Haskell, History and its Images, London, 1993, 13744; R. Howard Bloch, A Needle in the Right Hand of God: the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making of the Bayeux Tapestry, New York, 2006. 4 The case for sculpture has been the most widely demonstrated: Meyer Schapiro, The Rebirth of Monumental Sculpture in the West, in his Romanesque Architectural Sculpture, ed. Linda Seidel, Chicago and London, 2006, 333; Eileen Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculpture of the Madonna in Romanesque France, Princeton, 1972; and M. F. Hearn, Romanesque Sculpture: the Revival of Monumental Stone Sculpture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Oxford, 1981; but see also the material in Otto Demus, Romanesque Mural Painting, London, 1970, and Louis Grodecki, Le Vitrail Roman, Paris, 2nd edn, 1983. 5 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford, 1972, 12. 6 One consequence has been that the Bayeux Tapestry has been discussed as much by historians and archaeologists as by art historians. In what follows I have particularly used the editions by Frank Stenton, The Bayeux Tapestry, A Comprehensive Survey, London, 1957; David Wilson, The Bayeux Tapestry, London, 1985; Lucien Musset, La Tapisserie de Bayeux, Paris 2002 (English trans. Richard Rex, Woodbridge 2005). For a recent conspectus see, Martin K. Foys, The Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition, Leicester 2003, esp. the commentary section. 7 Marjorie Chibnall, ed., The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols, Oxford, 196980, iv, at 3845 and 11419. For Odos life, see D. Bates, The Character and Career of Odo Bishop of Bayeux (1049/501097), Speculum, 50, 1975, 120, and more recently in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols, eds H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, Oxford, 2004, xli, 500503. 8 George Beech, Was the Bayeux Tapestry made in France: the case for St. Florent of Saumur, New York, 2005, is still sympathetic to the idea that it was made for William; Bloch, A Needle in the Right Hand of God, refuses to rule out the involvement of his queen, Matilda; and Hicks, Life Story, has brought forward Edith, widow of King Edward the Confessor, as a candidate. However, none of the details discussed below indicate that their interests were paramount. 9 References to the Bayeux Tapestry throughout use the colour facsimile edition by Wilson, The Bayeux Tapestry. Essential studies include David Bernstein, The Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry, London, 1986, and Brown, The Bayeux Tapestry; there is a collection of key papers brought together with a helpful essay by Richard Gameson, The Origin, Art and Message of the Bayeux Tapestry, in The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Richard Gameson, Woodbridge, 1997, 157211.
10 Part two was researched at the Getty Research Institute, where I was a Visiting Scholar early in 2006. I would like to register my thanks to its staff, especially George Weinberg and Jed David and my research assistant there Chris Tradowsky. I am grateful, too, for the discussions with fellow scholars Stephen Jaeger, Jonathan Alexander and Robin Cormack, and the encouragement of the then director Thomas Crow. Part one is more recent and has beneted from the comments of colleagues at the University of East Anglia, particularly Simon Dell, John Mitchell and David Bates. 11 Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, pl. 57. 12 For discussion of the revival of ancient gesture in English art of the period, see C. R. Dodwell, AngloSaxon Gestures and the Roman Stage, Cambridge, 2000. Command is represented when a speakers index nger is extended away from the body towards the person being addressed or the object of the speech. In less emphatic versions the arm is less extended. Two people conversing, as Harold and Edward in the opening scene, point to each other. Signicantly, therefore, Williams index nger is directed inwardly and the juxtaposition of his other hand could even imply selfcontradiction. His gestures are thus comparable with Harolds in the scene after the portentous appearance of the comet (Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, pl.32), though Harolds body is more contorted. 13 Gerald Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence and Power in Romanesque France, Philadelphia, 1995, 81, and C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe 9501200, Philadelphia, 1994, 11516, and n. 147, for the Latin verse written to Marbod (see below) by a friend called Walter: Ut fatear verum: scrutentur ut abdita rerum/Hic notat obscuris quedam signata guris/Ut status, ut vultus habitus vox motio cultus/Absque nota morum commendet quemque virorum/Utrum sit iustus, virtutum ore venustus/An nequam, fallax et ad omne scelus nimis audax. The treatise in question, Physiognomonia, is published in Richard Foerster, Scriptores Physiognomonici, 2, Leipzig, 1893, 3145. 14 Here, as in general, the critical opinion assembled by Foys, Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition, commentary section, provides a helpful overview of earlier scholarship. 15 Caesar, The Gallic War, book 5, 1 and 2, trans. H. G. Edwards, Cambridge, MA and London, 1917. 16 Elisabeth M.C. van Houts, The Ship List of William the Conqueror, Anglo-Norman Studies, 10, 1987, 15983. 17 The comparison with the Late Antique gospel book was rst made by Laura H. Loomis, The Table of the Last Supper in religious and secular iconography, Art Studies, 5, 1927, 7190, and further explored by Nicholas P. Brooks and H. E. Walker, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry, Proceedings of the Battle Confer-
245
18
19
20
21 22
23
ence, 1978, ed. R. A. Brown, Ipswich, 1979, 134 at 1415. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collaborative edition, vol. 6, MS D, ed. G. P. Cubbin, Cambridge, 2003, 81: (1066) Bishop Odo and Earl William (tz Osbern) . . . built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people. The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, 168, following Caesar, The Gallic War, book 5.9 etc., notes that Caesar patria consuetudine castra munierit. E. W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting: the Twelfth Century, London, 1944, 120, pl. 27a (and also 134 for the refectory at Ivychurch, Hants) probably explains the choice of prototype for the composition (note 17 above). Although only dealing with later Italian examples, see Creighton E. Gilbert, Last Suppers and their Refectories, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, eds Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, Leiden, 1974, 371407. On the Tapestry, the scene occurs 44.25 m along the embroidery (of its current 68.37 m length). Supposing that the sequence began at a door at the lower end of the hall, it would traverse the far, short wall, continue up the long right wall, along the short wall behind the high table, and back down the left wall to nish at the door. In a hall approximately 30 10 m, Odo blessing the food would thus appear behind the middle of the high table. This model suggests that about 8 m is currently missing, enough to allow for the siege, surrender and coronation scenes implied by Baudri of Bourgueils description of Adelas tapestry (see below). These measurements compare quite well with those proposed by Richard Brilliant, A Stripped Narrative for their Eyes and Ears, Word and Image, 7, 1991, 93125, but his reconstruction (g. 1) unaccountably suggests that the high table was at the opposite end of the hall. Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, pls 246: HIC (written HIE) WILLELM VENIT BAGIAS UBI HAROLD SACRAMENTUM FECIT WILLELMO DUCI. Brown, The Bayeux Tapestry, 38. Other named men are King Edward, Earl Harold and two of his brothers (Earls Leofwine and Gyrth), Archbishop Stigand, Duke William, Bishop Odo and their brother Robert, and two of their relatives: Eustace Count of Boulogne (married to Williams cousin Godgifu) and Guy Count of Ponthieu (see notes 56 and 73). The history of the identication of these three men goes back to the early nineteenth century and the publication of Domesday Book; see Thomas Amyot, A Defence of the early Antiquity of the Bayeux Tapestry, Archaeologia, 19, 1821, 192208, and was followed by Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, 5 vols, Oxford, 187079, iii, 5701. More cautious historians, such as Stenton (note 6 above, 21, and n.16) and David C. Douglas, ed., The Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church Canterbury, London, 1944, 57, have endorsed the identica-
24 25
26
27
28
29
30 31
32
33
34
tions of Wadard and Vitalis, because their names are unusual. Turolds identity is less certain because his name is more common, though Ockhams razor makes it most likely he is Turold or Thorold of Rochester. For references, see K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Domesday People: a Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents, 10661166, 1. Domesday Book, Woodbridge, 1999, 444 for Wadard, 443 for Vitalis, 431 and 341 for Turold and his son Radulf. Philip Morgan, ed., Domesday Book, Kent, Chichester, 1983. Henri Prentout, Essai didentication des personnages inconnus de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, Revue historique, 176, 1935, 1423 at 19 (translated in Gameson, Study of the Bayeux Tapestry), citing the de la Rue. Abbe Richard Gem, Canterbury and the Cushion Capital: a commentary on a passage from Goscelins De Miraclis Sancti Augustini, in Romanesque and Gothic: Essays for George Zarnecki, ed. Neil Stratford, Woodbridge 1987, 83102. William Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings, London, 1967, 62, points out that four nuns were recorded in the Domesday survey in 1087 holding four acres near Canterbury from the abbot of St Augustines (see Morgan, Domesday Book, Kent, 7.11), so well before the foundation charter of c. 1100. C. R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective, Manchester, 1982, 337, index craftsmen: embroideresses. The many references suggest that there were three contexts of production: professional, noble and monastic the last two with inevitable overlap so that in the tenth century Edith of Wilton, a nun and princess, was famed for her embroidery (48) and in the twelfth century so was Christina, prioress of Markyate, who came from the leading family in Huntingdon. For example, the seal of Robert earl of Leicester, English Romanesque Art 1066-1200, eds George Zarnecki, Janet Holt and Tristram Holland, London, 1984, cat. 371. Douglas, Domesday Monachorum, 36 and 105. For Ansketel the increase is barely 12 per cent and for Robert a little over 20 per cent. And although Hugh de Port, for example, managed impressive gains from the point of acquisition, over 50 per cent, he still did not restore 1066 values. Detailed comparisons between Aelfrics Hexateuch and the Tapestry began with this example identied by Francis Wormald, Style and Design, in Stenton, The Bayeux Tapestry, 2536. The comment on the harrow echoes Wolfgang Grape, The Bayeux Tapestry, Monument to a Norman Triumph, Munich and New York, 1994, 28. Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, pls 634. The estates were Luddesdown and Milton, worth d6 and d4 respectively in 1066 and d8 and d6 by 1086. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, iv, 119. For the school `ge in the rst half of the eleventh century, at Lie
246
35
36 37
38
39 40
41
42
43 44
see Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 546, 202210 and 34975. rical et Intellectual David Bates, Le Patronage Cle ve que Odon de Bayeux 1049/501097, in de lE drales en Normandie, Caen, 1997, Chapitres et Cathe 105114. Walther Bulst, Studien zu Marbods Carmina varia und Liber decem capitulorum, Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen, Phil.-Hist., Kl. 4, 1939, 173241, at 1813 shows the link between Marbod, William, Thomas and Samson. Baudris claim is the weakest, but see note 48. Printed in Patrologia Latina, vol. 171: Marbods poem is at col. 1724B, and Hildeberts col. 1407B. Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, pl. 17. The scene is set within the enclave of the ducal palace, presumably at Rouen. According to the historian Eadmer, based at Canterbury, Harolds expedition was mounted to seek the release of hostages, which included his younger brother Wulfnoth, most probably the bearded man to whom Harold points during his interview with William. Aelfgyva is in an adjacent building, so either another English hostage, as her name might imply, or possibly with family ties to the ducal house. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut pictura poesis: the humanistic theory of painting, New York, 1967, discusses the importance of this idea for the Renaissance. As yet there is no overview of its signicance for medieval art. From the epilogue to his De ornamentis verborum, cited by Bond, The Loving Subject, 86. Bond, The Loving Subject, 87, and note 57, for Marbods indebtedness to Ad Herennium, 1.9: A story should have three qualities, brevity, clarity and plausibility. See also F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2 vols, Oxford, 1934 (corrected edn 1957), i, 330, and Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 139. It is enough for me to follow the straight track (calle directo), to weave verbal threads with rough skill. Patrologia Latina, 171, col. 1653B. Horace, Satires, book 2, 2, l. 3. The tapestry contest occurs at the beginning of Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 6. Bond, The Loving Subject, 88. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, 4, xxviixxx. We do not know quite what form it took, but one of his principal opponents was Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. Near contemporaries thought that Odo was conniving to succeed Pope Gregory VII. The idea must have seemed plausible, but it was also dangerous. William had accepted a papal banner from an earlier pope. It is shown held by Eustace of Boulogne on the Bayeux Tapestry (Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, pl. 68). The king of England could thus be seen as a vassal who had received papal investiture. If Odo had become pope, his brother William would have become Odos man. Odo apparently sought to ingratiate himself with the Roman establishment, handing out money and buying a palace in Rome for his own use, decorated with expensive and unneces-
45
46
47
48
49 50
51
52
53
54
sary furnishings (sumptibus et superuis apparatibus exornavit): Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, iv, 40. Hilderberts poem as note 36, and by A. B. Scott, Hildeberti Cenomannensis Episcopi Carmina minora, Leipzig, 1969. It appears to date from the time of Odos return to Bayeux in 1088 rather than immediately after his release. Serlos poem is in Thomas H. Wright, Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammists of the Twelfth Century, 2 vols, London (Rolls series), 1872, ii, 254, and seems to be the earlier of the two. I am grateful to Stephen Jaeger for a copy of his translation of this verse. The translation is from J. A. Giles, William of Malmesburys Chronicle of the Kings of England, London 1847, 36768. For an alternative rendering Jaeger, The Envy of Angels, 162. Implicit in the closing section is an interest in the relationship between ideal and reality, between depiction and imagination, which recurs in Hildeberts work, particularly in his verse inscriptions for Christian images: for example, Patrologia Latina, 171, 1391B super majestatem and 1426B ad Christi crucixi imaginem. camp and addressed Baudri sought refuge at Fe his Itinerarium to the community there, singling out William for attention (Patrologia Latina, 166, 117382). He wrote poems about the organs and candelabrum of Samsons cathedral at Worcester: Jean-Yves Tilliete, Baldricus Burgulianus, carmina, 2 vols, Paris 19982002, ii, nos 21821, 1478. His poem to Marbod is carmina, i, no. 86, 823 (Marbodo poetarum optimo To Marbod, best of poets) and compare his similar praise of Marbod in poems 126, l. 7; 153, l. 59; and 223 l. 19. The poem to Audebert (i.e. Hildebert) Archdeacon of Le Mans is carmina, i, no. 87. For the Latin, I have used the edition by Tilliete, carmina, ii, 143. Christina Ratkowitsch, Descriptio Picturae: die literarische Funktion der Beschreibung von Kunstwerken in der lateinischen Grosserdictung des 12 Jahrhunderts, Vienna, 1991, Introduction and chap. 1 (17127) which considers Baudris poem in detail. Baudri, Adelae Comitissae, l. 16. Ratkowitsch, Description Picturae, 523, points out that Baudri begins his account of the Norman invasion at precisely the point where Virgil inserts in his narrative the ekphrasis of the Shield of Aeneas, with its vision of the future greatness of Rome: Aeneid, VIII, l. 26. James Heffernan, Museum of Words: the Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbury, Chicago, 1993, especially chaps 1 and 2 for the characteristics of the genre in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The translation used here is that of Monika Otter, Baudri of Bourgueil to Countess Adela, Journal of Medieval Latin, 11, 2001, 60141, which also has an introduction to the poem and helpful critical and analytical notes. Adelas husband, Count Stephen of Blois, had joined the First Crusade but came home before the capture of Jerusalem, to the detriment of his
247
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63 64
reputation. He quickly learned his mistake and returned to the Holy Land, where he died in 1102. The tone of Baudris poem seems designed to remind readers that at least Adelas father was no wimp and that she (and implicitly her children) were of Norman mettle: hence the line (35) Surely she would bear arms if custom did not forbid it. Shirley Anne Brown and Michael W. Herren, The Adelae Comitissae of Baudri of Bourgueil and the Bayeux Tapestry, Anglo-Norman Studies, 16, 1993, 5573. Baudri wrote to the Conquerors daughter Cecilia, a nun (later abbess) at Caen, passing on his greeting to her sister, from Bayeux, whom he had met (there?): Tilliette, ed., carmina, ii, no. 136, ll 1718. See also Werner Talesko, Probleme der hochmittelalterlichen Ekphrasis um Beispiel des Teppich von Bayeux, in Christina Ratkowitsch, ed., Die Poetische Ekphrasis: Eine literarische Tradition der Grossdictung in Antike, Mittelalter und . he Neuziet, Vienna, 2006, 4354. fru Harolds captor, Guy Count of Ponthieu, was the brother of the previous count who had been married to Odos sister Adelaide, Adelas aunt, but by the time Baudri wrote she was dead. Virgil, Aeneid, I, ll. 2947 in Virgil, 2 vols, ed. and trans. H. R. Fairclough, revised by G. P. Gould, Cambridge MA and London, 1999 and 2000, i, 2612, 367, and see R.D. Williams, The Pictures in Didos Temple, Classical Quarterly, 10, 1960, 14551. Dudo of St Quentin, History of the Normans, trans. Eric Christiansen, Woodbridge 1998, xxxiv, and for particular citations his footnotes: for example, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 87, 90. etc. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, v, 25. On this topos, see the helpful analysis in Emily Albu, The Normans and their Histories, Woodbridge, 2001, 1220, 256, 62 3, 196, 198, etc. Virgil, Aeneid, V, l. 281. It is surely signicant that plenis is one of only two adjectives used in the Tapestrys inscriptions (cf in magno navigio used to describe Williams Channel crossing), and that it is plural, despite Harolds ship having but one sail. The point was rst made, so far as I know, by B.S. Bachrach, Some Observations on the Bayeux Tapestry, Cithara, 27: 1, 1987, 528 at 1920. The Fables of Avianus, in Minor Latin Poets, 2 vols, eds J. Wright Duff and Arnold M. Duff, Cambridge, MA and London, 1934, ii, 680749, at 6802. Late eleventh-century manuscripts containing it suggest its use as a school text: Richard Gameson, The Manuscripts of Early Norman England (c. 1066 1130), London, 1999, nos 290, 623 and 759. Matthew 12.40; John 3.14. Christopher Hughes, Visual Typology: an Ottonian Example, Word and Image, 17, 2001, 18598, provides a good introduction to the principles of typology. Virgil, Aeneid, IV, l. 73; Baudri, Adelae Comitissae, l. 463. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, Rodney M. Thomson and Michael Winterbottom, 2 vols,
65
66
67 68
69
70
71 72 73
74
75
76
Oxford, 199899, i, 454 iactu sagittae violato cerebro procubuit; and 456 eminus letali harundine ictus mortem implevit. Virgil was not just Williams favourite Latin stylist, a point made by Rodney M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, Woodbridge, revised edn, 2003, 10, 16, 31, 489, etc., but with the exception of Bede probably also his favourite historian. Baudri, Adelae Comitissae, l. 322. The topos of English effeminacy was much exploited by writers to account for their defeat by the Normans: not only were they weaker but they angered God by ignoring appropriate natural difference between the sexes. The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, 1347, Cum Heraldo, tali qualem poemata dicunt Hectorem vel Turnum, non minus auderet Guillielmus congredi singulari certamine, quam Achilles cum Hector, vel Aeneas cum Turno. For the latter Virgil, Aeneid, XII, ll. 697952. For the allusion to Harolds death involving a blow to the thigh, we have William of Malmesburys iacentis femur unus militium gladio proscidit, as in note 64, 456. Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, pl.71. O. K. Werckmeister, The Political Ideology of the Bayeux Tapestry, Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 17, 1976, 53595. Guy of Amiens, Carmen, ll. 146, 152 Vulcano ammis depopulante domos, 160, and also 165 6 Captivos ducit pueros, captasque puellas, insuper et viduas, et simul omne pecus. Caesar Gallic War, IV, l. 35 deinde omnibus longe lateque aediciis incensis se [the Romans] in castra receperunt, and compare V, l. 19. Frank Lepper and Sheppard Frere, Trajans Column: a new edition of the Cichorius plates, Gloucester, 1988, 58: This ritual sacrice of a boar, a ram and a bull to Mars served to purify an army starting out on campaign. Virgil, Aeneid, V, lines 101103. Virgil, Aeneid, I, lines 1958. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, 1847, said that Guy wrote imitating the epics of Virgil and Statius. The author, who was the uncle of Guy Count of Ponthieu, composed the poem between 1067 and 1075. The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, 28: amplicare utcumque cognita per campos gmentorum divagando. On truth topoi in history writing, including William of Poitiers, see Jeanette Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages, Geneva, 1981. The editors of William of Poitiers (18990) identify nineteen citations from Caesar, Gallic War (as against ve from Virgil), all but three of them from books IV and V, four of them used twice, mostly focused in two extended comparisons. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, 1516. For the character of history writing, see Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages, esp. chaps 2 and 6, and for more specic focus
248
Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 77 550 to c. 1307, London, 1974, chaps 39. Ad Herennium, 404405 (4.68). For fuller discussion, see John O. Ward, Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century, in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach, Kalamazoo, 1985, 103165. Quintilians Institutio Oratoria was not as widely available but there was a copy at Bec in Normandy, now lost but known from the manuscripts derived from it; see L. D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmission: a Survey of the Latin Classics, Oxford, 1983, 333. Orderic Vitalis, some forty miles south at St Evroult, may have seen it because he wrote that he was not concerned with imagined tragedies or wordy comedy but revealed true events truly to earnest scholars (Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, i.107). This sequence is found in Quinitilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. H. E. Butler, 4 vols, London and Cambridge, MA, 1966 69, i, 2245 (2.4.2), contrasting unreal tragedy, credible but false comedy and history which is revealed in real deeds (historiam in qua est gestae rei expositio). The order in Ad Herennium, 225 (1.8), is legendary (tragic), historical, and realistic (comic). Benjamin C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv: the frontier of reading and seeing in Anglo-Saxon England, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2007. See, for example, the comparison of everyday objects made by C.R. Dodwell, Loriginalite iconographique de plusiers illustrations anglosaxonnes de lAncien Testament, Cahiers de civivale, 14, 1971, 31928, and more lisation medie generally Bernstein, Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry, 402 and passim. Bernstein, Mystery of the Bayeux Tapestry, 16695. For the general point about the degree that Hebrew history was embedded in the English psyche, see Withers, Old English Hexateuch, chap. 4. The Canterbury copy (c. 10801100) of Dudo is now in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 276, part 2. Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, MS Phillipps 1854 was made c. 1080 at Mont-Stcamp, see Michel, possibly for the abbey of Fe Gerda C. Huisman, Notes on the manuscript tradition of Dudo of St Quentins Gesta Norman-
82
83
84
78
79
85 86 87
80
81
88
norum, Anglo Norman Studies, 6, 1983, 12235, and J. J. G. Alexander, Norman Illumination at Mont St Michel 9661100, Oxford, 1970, 40, 2256. The unique, eleventh-century manuscript of the Encomium Emmae Reginae was also in the St Augustines library, perhaps acquired at this period. Gameson, The Origin, 172, speculated about the connection between the Tapestry, Mont StMichel and Abbot Scolland of St Augustines. More recently Beech, Was the Bayeux Tapestry made in France? esp. chap. 5, argued that knowledge of the Breton campaign might be evidence that the Tapestry was made near Angers, which seems an unnecessarily complicated explanation. For an earlier discussion of the peculiarities of this section, see Bachrach, Some Observations, 1011. I can nd no published study of these columns. The chances are good that they were rst re-used under the arch into the sanctuary of the early seventh-century church of SS Peter and Paul, as implied by the drawing in Richard Gem, ed., St Augustines Abbey, Canterbury, London, 1997, g. 37, and as at Reculver, gs 43 and 44. British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra D i, which also contains Vegetius, De rei militari, to which Solinus was added at St Augustines in the late eleventh century, at which point various initials missing from the original texts were also supplied. Alexander, Manuscript Illumination at Mont-StMichel, 378, 222. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art, London, 1981. From Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose, trans. F. Horgan, Oxford, 1994, 280, cited by Michael Camille, Mirror in Parchment: the Luttrell Psalter and the making of Medieval England, London, 1998, 43 and see also 468. The full discussion of the optics and experience of mirrors in The Romance occupies lines 1798318256. Hayden White, The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality, in W. T. J. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative, Chicago, 1980, 124 at 24. See, more recently, Hayden White, Literary Theory and Historical Writing, in his Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, Baltimore, 1999, 126.
249

Regarding The Spectators of The Bayux Tapestry

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Descrizione originale:

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Regarding The Spectators of The Bayux Tapestry

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

R E G A R D I N G T H E S P E C TAT O R S O F T H E B AY E U X TA P E S T R Y

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

NORMANS, ROMANS AND TROJANS

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

THE ART OF HISTORY

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

Potrebbero piacerti anche