Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt
– political in purpose, spectacular in spread, enormous in cost, Greek in execution, yet Latin in subject – that William II’s huge cathedral was most admired.17
In late twelfth-century English art, some significance attaches to William II’s marriage in 1177 to Joanna of England, Henry II’s daughter. And there are contemporary English wall-painting schemes, even in remote country churches, which quite clearly have a Byzantine cast. However, the great majority of English pilgrims had always travelled to the Holy Land by way of Sicily. And it was most probably a Greek icon, brought home by one of those, which furnished the inspiration in c. 1150 for two high-quality miniatures (‘the Byzantine Diptych’) in Henry of Blois’s Winchester Psalter. A decade or so later, there is even more direct evidence of a migratory Sicilian art in the Morgan Master’s extraordinary contributions to Bishop Henry’s great Winchester Bible of 1160–75. And that same Master’s exquisite Palermo-based miniatures would themselves become the model for the Byzantine-style frescos, contemporary with Monreale, of the Holy Sepulchre Chapel at Winchester Cathedral.18
Such links are obvious. Nevertheless, the strong Byzantine presence in Western art – in Germany and France, as well as Italy and England – was both too early and too general for eastward-looking Sicily to be its source. A more likely genesis for this characteristically twelfth-century emphasis in the arts was Abbot Desiderius’s rebuilding of Monte Cassino. When planning his great church, Desiderius had visited Rome in the mid-1060s to buy antiques: ‘huge quantities of columns, bases, architraves, and marbles of different colours’. But there had been no native-born mosaicists or opus sectile (ornamental marble) paviours at Monte Cassino when work began, and Desiderius had accordingly used imported Greeks to train his younger monks in those forgotten arts ‘lest this knowledge be lost again in Italy’. ‘Four hundred and fifty years have passed’, wrote his friend Archbishop Alfanus, ‘during which this kind of art has been excluded from the cities of Italy; [but] something that had been alien to us for a long time has now become our own again.’19
That instinctive reaching back into the past for renewal in the arts came to be closely identified with the missionary reforming programme to which Desiderius, as a Gregorian, was committed. While never a fanatic in Gregory VII’s cause, Desiderius followed the pope in condemning lay investiture (royal intervention in church appointments) and simoniacal ordination (clerical office obtained by purchase), and came to support the separation of Church and State – of Papacy and Empire, King and Bishop, God and Mammon – which was what the Investiture Contest was all about. In the almost three centuries since Leo III’s coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor in the West on 25 December 800, German theocracy had travelled too far. And as Desiderius looked to Rome for his direction in Church reform, so Rome’s anti-imperial reforming popes, seeking renewal in building also, took inspiration from Monte Cassino. What resulted was an architecture which, while more antiquarian than scholarly, was archaeologically correct in a way not seen again for three centuries. Rome itself, as Desiderius had discovered, was rich in re-usable antiquities. And when Innocent II (1130–43) began his huge new church at Santa Maria in Trastevere, he was free to plunder Ancient Rome for his materials. Innocent II’s grand parade of columns with their antique Ionic capitals, his re-used sculptured brackets on their classically straight entablatures, his archaizing marble pavements and rich mosaics, would all have been familiar in Early Christian Rome. The model for Santa Maria in Trastevere was no church of its own period but the fifth-century basilica, still standing today, at Santa Maria Maggiore.20
In the long papal schism which began with Innocent II’s disputed election and ended only with the death of the antipope Anacletus II in January 1138, the pope’s most capable lieutenant was Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. Bernard was a reformer of quite a different kind, finding his inspiration in the poverty-driven austerities and literal truths of the primitive Church. Yet there was nothing in the least austere about the lavish mosaics and pavements of Santa Maria in Trastevere. And the church Bernard built at his newly acquired abbey of Tre Fontane on Rome’s Via Laurentia, exactly contemporary with Innocent’s own, was so stripped-down and bare as to be seen as a reproach, inviting unfavourable comparisons. Bernard himself never hid his real feelings. ‘What business has gold in the sanctuary?’, he asked, in a characteristic borrowing from the feisty Neronian satirist, Persius Flaccus (fl.34–62). ‘To speak quite openly, avarice, which is nothing but idolatry, is the source of all this … for through the sight of extravagant but marvellous vanities, men are more moved to contribute offerings than to pray … [and while] eyes feast on gold-mounted reliquaries and purses gape … the poor find nothing to sustain them.’21
There was room, in point of fact, for a renewal of both kinds, each finding its rationale in the fourth-century Church. Nevertheless, it was Bernard’s populist message which caught the tide. ‘See’, exclaimed Orderic Vitalis, echoing Rodulfus Glaber at the Millennium, ‘though evil abounds in the world, the devotion of the faithful in cloisters grows more abundant and bears fruit a hundredfold in the Lord’s field. Monasteries are founded everywhere in mountain valleys and plains, observing new rites and wearing different habits; the swarm of cowled monks spreads all over the world.’ But while generous in his praise of Bernard’s valiant white-monk ‘army’ – a favourite Bernardine metaphor – Orderic (the black monk) was perfectly aware as he wrote of a major public-relations disaster in the making. Old-style Benedictines like himself had always worn black.
Now however, as if to make a show of righteousness, the men of our time [the Cistercians] reject black, which the earlier fathers always adopted as a mark of humility both for the cloaks of the clergy and for the cowls of monks … they specially favour white in their habit, and thereby seem remarkable and conspicuous to others … they have built monasteries with their own hands in lonely, wooded places and have thoughtfully provided them with holy names, such as Maison-Dieu, Clairvaux, Bonmont, and L’Aumône and others of like kind … [so that] many noble warriors and profound philosophers have flocked to them … [and others] who were parched with thirst have drunk from their spring; many streams have flowed out of it through all parts of France … through Aquitaine, Brittany, Gascony, and Spain.22
‘Do as none does and the world marvels’ was a proverb (his biographer tells us) often on Bernard’s lips and ever in his heart.23 And there is no doubting that his timing was impeccable. Furthermore, while his message was wrapped persuasively in the age-old language of renewal, Bernard’s policies were more radical than they appeared. It was at Cïteaux, wrote Philip of Harvengt in the 1140s, using the familiar reformer’s code, that ‘the monastic order, formerly dead, was revived; there the old ashes were poked; it was reformed by the grace of novelty, and by zeal it recovered its proper state … and the rule of Benedict recovered in our times the truth of the letter’.24 But ‘as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also’ (James 2:26). And those many ‘workshops of total sanctity’ which so exhilarated Philip would not have survived long – let alone multiplied as they did – had they failed to make their way in the real world. Throughout the Catholic West, and deep into its marches with Muslim Spain and the Slavic East, there had never been a boom quite like this one. The Cistercians were not the only monks to make a killing.
O how innumerable a crowd of monks [apostrophized Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny] has by divine grace multiplied above all in our days, has covered almost the entire countryside of Gaul, filled the towns, castles, and fortresses; however varied in clothing and customs, the army of the Lord Sabaoth has sworn under one faith and love in the sacraments of the same monastic name.25
Peter the Venerable’s increasingly démodé Cluniacs had long ceased to function as the Lord of Hosts’ front-line troops. However, they had already profited hugely from the new