Lending

While some people see this book as art history I read it as history of Britain and Normandy. It is, however, largely made up of photos and interpretations of the various panels making up the tapestry. I spent a lot of time examining the plates and puzzling out rough meanings of the Latin inscriptions before reading Wilson's notes and translations. Also found his essays in the last part of the book to be quite informative. A nice, coffeetable-sized book.

This book is a fabulous reproduction of the entire tapestry in full color, photographic format. The photography is amazing and allows seeing down to the stitch level. The accompanying text is superb and detailed, explaining the text and subtext of the Tapestry, the history behind it, and various studies and conservation efforts which have been attempted upon it. There is also some discussion about the context of this work in embroidery, including its similarity to Scandinavian tapestries. A must have for those interested in early-medieval embroidery. ( )

RARE AND BEAUTIFUL EXPLICATION OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

Coffee table books are to be seen, not read.

At least, that’s the way I had always thought of them. Even so, sometimes they reach out and grab my attention from the remainder table at Barnes & Noble or on a clearance sale at a used book store. I mean, who could have passed up Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet? Or Frank Lloyd Wright or Thomas Hart Benton or Ansel Adams? The Voyages of Ulysses? Icons of the Twentieth Century? The Grand Ole Opry or The American Barn or Baseball: The National Pastime? Or the Eighteenth Century and the Nineteenth Century (in a matched set)?

And a pleasure each one has been. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Even without reading the words. For one’s elbow would become arthritic just reading a few pages of these weighty tomes, not to mention the whole text. Or so I thought.

But The Bayeux Tapestry: The Complete Tapestry in Color with Introduction, Description and Commentary by David M. Wilson (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985) proves that for every rule of thumb there is an exception. Oh, there are indeed 148 pages of color plates, presenting every bit of the 70-meter tapestry for one’s examination and enjoyment. And what a glorious experience that is! But you can’t pore over those plates without reading the inscriptions from each one translated into English, and the plate-by-plate commentary explaining the history, symbols, and art involved. Even the foreword by the Mayor of Bayeux hooks you into the story of his personal obsession with the tapestry from the age of twelve on. Here’s his account of his first encounter when he was twelve years old:

“In my imagination, I moved among the characters, identifying myself now with one, now with another in turn. I was King Edward, and then, just as vividly, I became Harold. I came ashore on the coast of Ponthieu; I was both Count Guy and his prisoner; I was William, then Harold again — and then I was one of those he saved from drowning at the crossing of the Couesnon. I was William again to receive the keys of Dinan on the tip of a lance; and I was Harold once more, swearing his oath upon the holy relics. Then came the sea voyage, the landing, and the Battle of Hastings. Once more I was both William and Harold; the arrow was in my eye; I was the linen of the canvas and the wool of the embroidery.”

Once you are hooked with that dramatic account, you can hardly overlook the introduction (did you know they ran of the dark blue thread at the beginning of plate 48?), “the story told in the tapestry” (and the way it allowed ambiguous readings of history), an essay on “Style, Art and Form,” maybe even the description of buildings, dress, objects, what have you. The history of the tapestry itself, as summarized in the introduction, is gripping. Apparently made in the south of England in 1082, less than two decades after the Battle of Hastings, it has survived — almost incredibly — intact. Of course, the plates show patches, mending, repair of embroidery, raveling, slight discoloration of the fabric, but virtually no fading of the embroidery thread. Because it was housed in a church and displayed only on certain holy days, it did not fall prey to the ravages of time nor, even more surprisingly, to the pillage and plunder of war. At one point during the French Revolution it was almost ripped up to supply material for a float, but a lawyer stepped in to preserve it. The frontispiece to the color plates shows a life-size reproduction of a meeting of Harold and William, picturing the time of their alliance in Normandy. Every stitch can be counted; every minor repair is obvious; even the weave of the fabric is clear to the eye. Because the tapestry is currently shown behind security glass and in dim lighting to preserve its colors, one is probably able to see its details more clearly in these pages than in person.

The history depicted in the tapestry, not to mention the story behind the history, is even more fascinating. Because there are few written accounts of events leading up to the Norman Conquest, and each of them is probably biased, the tapestry itself may be the most authentic documentation of the times. Even so, there are ambivalences. Did Harold come to Normandy to secure William’s affiliation, even to offer him the role of successor to King Edward the Confessor (the Norman-French version)? Or was he simply lost at sea as he made a personal voyage, perhaps a hunting trip, and captured by Count Guy of Ponthieu (an Anglo-Saxon explanation)? The tapestry follows the Norman-French version (after all, to the victors go the spin, right?), but the fact that Harold sets sail with hunting dogs, not fighting armor, may be a subtle hint that the Anglo-Saxon version is the valid one. Both Harold and William are portrayed heroically, though in real life neither was probably a model of ideal virtue, rather each was more likely an epitome of political ambition.

The tapestry climaxes with the horrors of battle, and the horrifics are seen no more clearly than in plates 65-66:

“The battle gets fiercer; in pl. 65, for example an axe is decapitated by a sword, a horse is killed with an axe and swords are wielded with great abandon. Horses stumble onto a spiked defence, and in pl. 66 a solider is actually holding he end of the girth of a toppling horse, as though pulling it down. . . . The lower border is filled with dead and dismembered corpses, broken weapons and even a dead horse.”

In the next plate, Harold is killed with an arrow shot into his eye but also attacked in the leg by a sword. The lower border shows massive looting (the actual pulling of armor and coats of mail from the denuded bodies of the victims) and even quarrelling among the looters. English soldiers flee on foot, pursued by the victorious Normans.

That the text of this massive work was composed by a man is obvious in the emphasis on history, battles, and political intrigue and the sparse comments on the needlecraft itself. Even the essay on style, form, and art is really an argument that the tapestry was an English work, not a Norman-French one, though it came to be housed in Bayeux. To pay decent respect to the real heroes (heroines, should I say?) of the tapestry, one has to read the little novel, The Invention of Truth, by the Italian novelist, Marta Morazzoni (trans. M. J. Fitzgerald, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). In her version, a young queen in northern France summons three hundred embroideresses to her court, and they devote themselves to bringing the queen’s vision to life with their needles and thread. It is a book about art and its endurance; in a parallel story John Ruskin in the nineteenth century visits and comments upon the temple in Amiens with its massive and artful pillars and labyrinth.

On our coffee table, we keep The Bayeux Tapestry, and next to it this little novel. The text of one balances that of the other, and both pay homage, in their own way, to the tapesry — and to the artisans with thread who produced it almost a millenium ago. ( )