TAITMAIL The community of the Bayeux Tapestry
“Community” has become an over-used word, meaning anything from a Shaker village to half a dozen people gathered on a street corner. In cultural contexts the word is a little more refined, coming to refer to creativity in partnership in a single project.
The annual Hamlyn Awards were announced yesterday, in which five visual artists and five composers get £75,000 each to develop their art. It’s been going for 30 years and each time there is a growing theme of community/partnership. This time the artists are multi-disciplinary, working often in collaborations and concerned with the world around them – one, Sean Roy Parker, even counts “community gardening” as part of his creativity.
Communities make art in all disciplines. The Dulwich Symphony Orchestra is a full-size ensemble made up entirely of amateur musicians who play at almost professional standard in a large local church three times a year. Dance has its own international Foundation for Community Dance, nearly 40 years old now, in which professionals work with community practitioners and aim at people’s “rights of equal access to quality experiences in dance of all kinds”. Blackheath Concert Halls has its own 80-strong amateur opera chorus (pictured below) after whose recent performance of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana the critic Claudia Pritchard wrote: “I know of no chorus as gifted at suggesting the all-walks-of-life nature of a story's observers and participants as the Chorus – or rather, choruses – of Blackheath Halls Opera”. Birmingham Opera has a full-time staff of three and no venue, just an office, but trains hundreds of volunteer participants to create large-scale outdoor performances (once on a burnt-out ice rink) to “reflect the city we work in – with our audiences, artists and stories that we tell”. The Tower Theatre Company in London has more than 700 members, amateurs from all backgrounds and age groups, and puts on 18 full-scale productions a year in its own Stoke Newington theatre.
You need only to look up as you walk our city streets and see the array of street art on the walls around you to know that visual art has become an essential part of urban life. Tate defines community art as “based in a community setting, characterised by interaction or dialogue with the community and often involving a professional artist collaborating with people who may not otherwise engage in the arts”. It says it was a development of the cultural democracy that emerged after the Second World War whose purpose was “to break down the boundaries between high and low culture in order to make art accessible to a wider audience”.
But on the contrary, there’s nothing new in community art. I’ve just been to see an example that celebrates events of almost a thousand years ago, the Bayeux Tapestry. It is the most astounding work of art, in the context of any era, and there’s no signature on it. It was made by many hands and minds.
It is not, of course, a tapestry but an embroidery (it was a careless 19th century use of the word that gave it the wrong name), and medieval critics used to the heavy wall hangings that kept their draughty halls warm were affronted that the whole of the 70-metre long linen space wasn’t covered. Instead, the images leap out of the white background at us now, almost as vividly colourful as when they were stitched, and the exquisite lines as strong as ever.
The Bayeux Tapestry is a miraculous survival. Embroideries like this were not uncommon, recording events and particularly battles, but apart from this one none have survived (often recycled as packaging). It was not, of course, the work of a single hand, and research is still on-going as to how it was done and who might have been behind it.
For a long time the assumption was that it had been made by William the Conqueror’s queen, Matilda, and her ladies-in-waiting in Normandy, but unless the queen was a remarkably accomplished artist and her ladies as versatile as some of today's Hamlyn artists that is simply not possible. It’s much more likely that it was commissioned by William’s bellicose and high-living and apparently art-loving half-brother Bishop Odo. Nor is it likely to have been a team of nuns, as one theory has it: the enthusiasm and graphic detail with which the naked couple having sex is portrayed in one of the margins puts the lie to that.
The exact process would have been complex. It was begun a few years after the events, probably in about 1070, and might have taken more than a decade to finish. There must have been a single overview for this narrative, a director for what is as close as the Middle Ages get to a film. The embroiderers would have had drawn templates to work from probably, but not necessarily, produced by monks in a scriptorium, the finest artists. There would have to have been a large well-lit space for a workshop, and carpenters would have had to build a substantial frame, or series of frames, for such a big work. Researchers have detected maybe as many as 17 different hands at work on it, so that the likelihood is that those on the project at the start were no longer involved at the end. The stitchers – and there might well have been men among them – had extraordinary skill that could convey facial expressions on faces, imply perspective not with shading but with colour choice, depict movement in the body shapes of the horses, portray particular instants such as the death of Harold by isolating an image.
As a work of art, it stands out against that of any age and still draws 400,000 visitors a year. The skills inherent are many, the image made over years by many hands marvellously continuous, so that the narrative – and it’s accepted that the end probably showing William’s coronation is missing – is as thrilling now as in the 11th century, created by a changing community of artists and craftspeople. And it’s not merely Norman propaganda; its graphic portrayal of acts of war, severed heads and limbs sent flying, suggests a pacifist undertone rather than bloodthirst.
But though the tapestry was probably made in Kent, maybe Canterbury, where Bishop Odo was the earl and had his powerbase after the conquest, he was also Bishop of Bayeux and built the cathedral there, an outsize presence in a small community.
It is now believed that the tapestry survived because it has spent almost its entire life in the cathedral where it would be brought out on display at least once a year, traditionally in June for the Feast of St John the Baptist.
And in medieval times our public art galleries were our churches, so that rather than it being shut away in a princely palace for the occasional delectation of some magnate, the tapestry was there for all to see, free of charge, and not just by members of the Bayeux community: community art for all communities.