Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914

In point of fact, Glaber probably owed his life to Abbot Odilo. For it is thought that he was at Cluny during the three famine years when ‘the rain fell so continuously everywhere [that] no season was suitable for the sowing of any crop, and floods prevented the gathering in of the harvest’. ‘Heu! proh dolor!’, Glaber laments, ‘Alas! a thing formerly little heard of happened: ravening hunger drove men to devour human flesh!’2 But then, in the next millennial year, the Almighty intervened and the chronicler’s tone again lightens:

At the millennium of the Lord’s Passion [1033], which followed these years of famine and disaster, by divine mercy and goodness the violent rainstorms ended; the happy face of the sky began to shine and to blow with gentle breezes and by gentle serenity to proclaim the magnanimity of the Creator. The whole surface of the earth was benignly verdant, portending ample produce which altogether banished want.3

Glaber died in 1046. And long before that time, ‘like a dog returning to its vomit or a pig to wallowing in its mire’ (Glaber again), the rich had reverted to type: ‘they resorted, even more than had formerly been their wont, to robbery to satisfy their lusts’. However, it was in 1046 also that the Emperor Henry III first intervened in Roman politics. And the new reforming papacy of Leo IX (1049–54) and his successors would bring about triumphantly in a very few years almost everything that Glaber had desired. ‘Everything flows and nothing stays’, said Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Greek philosopher. And of the many changes which Glaber witnessed in his own millennia-crossed lifespan, none were more important than those which were the consequence of vigorous economic growth.

Improving weather and more reliable harvests, technical innovations in agriculture, the absence of plague, the retreat of invading armies and the banning of private war – even the supposed efficiency gains of a new feudal order – have all been given credit for this increase. And certainly the two main exogenous factors in the late-medieval Recession – a deteriorating climate and heavy plague mortalities – were neither of them present at this time. Nevertheless, the scourge of famine would return regularly to Western Europe every three or four years for many centuries yet; while the only agrarian revolution to bring permanent relief to the poor began in the nineteenth century, and not before. ‘Peace! Peace! Peace!’ had cried the bishops after 1033, their croziers raised to heaven; ‘Peace!’ had echoed the crowd with arms extended.4 Yet the Truce of God, thus proclaimed so charismatically in the aftermath of famine, was broken almost as soon as it was made.

That collapse of public order during the millennial decades, causing a widespread flight to lordship in almost every Western society, was instrumental in promoting what some historians have described as a ‘feudal revolution’.5 And if almost every element of that revolution has since been challenged, nobody now disputes that the tax-raising royal governments of the ninth (Carolingian) and twelfth (Capetian) centuries sandwiched between them a long and dismal interlude of violentia. At this directionless time, when vendetta ruled, the building of private castles was yet another sympton of mounting lawlessness. Yet Europe’s population and its economy kept on growing. In Glaber’s Burgundy, the Churches of Saint-Philibert at Tournus, Saint-Bénigne and Cluny were the subject of major rebuildings. To the north and west, Saint-Rémi at Reims, Saint-Martin at Tours, Saint-Hilaire at Poitiers, and Bishop Fulbert’s Chartres were all being rebuilt in Glaber’s lifetime. In Germany simultaneously, the cathedrals at Augsburg and Strasbourg, Hildesheim, Goslar and Paderborn, Speyer, Trier and Mainz, were either rebuilt completely or substantially extended, as were many of the larger abbey churches.6

Building on this scale, which may call for special skills, cannot usually be done without money. And it is no surprise, accordingly, that this building boom coincided precisely with what is now widely recognized as ‘the most significant period for the early growth of the use of coin in Western Europe … witnessing the real start of a money economy’.7 In the mid-960s, a prodigious new silver source had been found on the Rammelsberg, just above Goslar in the Harz mountains. Some thirty years later, the mines were in full production and would pay, among other things, for Goslar’s new cathedral, built in the 1040s, and for Henry III’s enormous Kaiserhaus in that city. Huge contemporary coin hoards, their principal constituent being Adelaide-Otto silver pfennigs from central Germany, have been found in Sweden. And it was the Rammelsberg mines again that furnished the silver for the locally-minted coinages of Russia and Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which would play a major role in Christianization. Furs from the Baltic, wine from the Rhineland, wool and cloth from England and Flanders, were all to be bought with German ingots. But equally important for European rulers everywhere was their growing understanding of how a coinage worked, its symbolism as meaningful as bullion weight. It was Vladimir the Great, Prince of Kiev (977–1015), who brought Christianity to Russia in the late 980s. And a significant function of his new coinage on the remote Christian rim was to spread the propaganda of Church and State. On one face of Vladimir’s coins is the political legend ‘Vladimir on the throne’; on the reverse is an all-powerful Christ Pantocrator.8

On Swedish coins of this date, there is a cross on the reverse; on the coins of contemporary Poland, a church is shown. And Vladimir of Kiev, having set up pagan idols in his pre-conversion days, at once became a builder of Christian churches. He owed his baptism in 988 to an alliance with Byzantium, sealed by his marriage the following year to Anna, sister of the Greek Emperor Basil II (‘the Bulgarslayer’). And he dedicated his first Kievan church to the eponymous St Basil (d.379), monastic legislator and Bishop of Caesarea. Neither Vladimir’s Church of St Basil nor his Cathedral of the Dormition (Church of the Tithe) have survived. But both are thought to have been based directly on Byzantine originals, and it was Constantinople again which set the style for the new stone churches of Yaroslav, Vladimir’s son. Yaroslav the Wise (1019–55) ‘loved religious establishments and was devoted to priests, especially to monks. He applied himself to books, and read them continually day and night.’ During Yaroslav’s reign, the same chronicler adds, ‘the Christian faith was fruitful and multiplied, while the number of monks increased, and new monasteries came into being’. Of Yaroslav’s new churches, the most important was the huge multiaisled and cupola’d Cathedral of St Sophia at Kiev, described by Bishop Hilarion as ‘adorned with every beauty, with gold and silver and precious stones and sacred vessels … wondrous and glorious to all adjacent countries … another like it will not be found in all the land of the North from east to west.’9 And whereas the bishop’s praise was surely generous, for Prince Yaroslav himself was in the audience, Hilarion had already built a cathedral of his own at Rostov east of Novgorod, knew Kiev’s many churches (said to number more than 200 before Yaroslav’s accession), and could recognize superior quality when he saw it.

Novgorod’s Cathedral of St Sophia, built in the mid-century by Yaroslav’s son, again had a Byzantine model. Yet there are borrowings here also from Western Romanesque. And it was the contemporary development of long-distance trading systems – to the Baltic (and the West) from Novgorod, to the Black Sea (and Constantinople) from Kiev – that chiefly funded the construction of these great churches. Beneficial to all, such silent revolutions are much more likely to survive than military conquests. ‘Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight’ (Psalm 144) ran the legend on a Frankish sword-hilt found in Sweden.10 But it was Christian wealth rather than force of arms that defeated the Viking gods, and it was towns as much as churches that spread Christ’s message. Well before 1200, by which time Novgorod and Kiev were each as large as London, urban centres had multiplied across Russia. And although every new town of this period was market-based, none was just about money. Thus it would be said of Baltic Riga, founded in 1201, that ‘the city of Riga draws the faithful to settle there more because of its freedom than because of the fertility of its surroundings’.11 And while Riga’s situation as the crusading headquarters of the Livonian Knights of the Sword was necessarily unique, there was nothing exceptional about the liberties it shared with almost every market-town in Western Christendom. ‘Perhaps the greatest social achievement’, writes Susan Reynolds, ‘of towns in this period was that they offered a way of life that was attractive. People flocked into them and … went on coming.’12

It was the steady flow of immigrants, attracted by freedoms denied to them in rural hinterlands, which kept the towns intact through the famines and feuding of the late eleventh century. When Goslar’s silver ran out, as it had begun to do already in the 1050s, most towns survived the consequent recession. But aristocracies everywhere had learnt to love good living. And one result of the growing silver shortages of the second half of the eleventh century was to focus attention, both north and south of the Alps, on those regions which were still bullion-rich. It was not by chance alone that German interest in Italy revived sharply from the mid-eleventh century. And it was in Italy, south of Rome, that German knights first encountered Norman mercenaries. ‘Accustomed to war’, wrote William of Malmesbury (d.1143), half-Norman himself, the Normans ‘could hardly live without it’. They are ‘a warlike race … moved by fierce ambition … [and] always ready to make trouble’, was the verdict of another Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis (d.1142), who, after spending most of his life among them at the abbey of Saint-Evroult, knew the Normans as ‘the most villainous’ of neighbours.13 Unable to tolerate another’s dominance and always spoiling for a fight, Norman adventurers carved up Southern Italy between them. They took Capua in 1058; drove the Byzantines out of Calabria by 1071; the Lombards out of Salerno by 1077; the Arabs out of Sicily by 1090. They became the masters of Malta and Corfu. Silver-rich England, always the North’s most tempting prize, made a kingdom for Duke William in 1066.14

Windfall fortunes, won and held by force, need legitimizing. And it was through the Church that the Normans laundered their new money. In the Conqueror’s England, there was hardly a major church which was not at once rebuilt by its first Norman abbot or reforming bishop. But whereas the scale of this new construction – as at Bishop Walkelin’s Winchester – was almost without precedent, and while some of these great churches – in particular, William of St Calais’s Durham – could readily bear comparison with the most advanced continental buildings of their day, it was not in England that Norman patronage was most productive. Southern Italy allowed its Norman appropriators to take everything they wanted from a long-established melting-pot of cultures: Latin, Byzantine, and Saracenic. It was in Norman Apulia and Capua, Calabria, Salerno and Sicily – not in Lombardy or in Germany, in England, France or Russia – that the ‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’ first originated.

This Renaissance was not limited to the arts. However, it was in church-building, in particular, that scholar-priests and princes found common ground. And one of their earliest cooperative ventures was at Monte Cassino, in Norman Capua, the sixth-century birthplace of Benedictine monachism in the West. It was there, after Richard of Aversa drove the Lombards from Capua in 1058, that Abbot Desiderius, with Richard’s help, made Monte Cassino a busy hive of the arts, drawing on every culture of the region. And it was from Desiderius’s new church that Abbot Hugh of Cluny (a visitor there in 1083) took some of the ideas – the Byzantine vault and the Saracenic pointed arch – which he would re-use almost immediately in his comprehensive rebuilding of Cluny III. Another eminent Monte Cassino scholar, the Latin poet Alfanus, was raised to Archbishop of Salerno in 1058. And when, two decades later, the Norman Robert Guiscard took Salerno as well, it was Duke Robert’s sudden riches which built Archbishop Alfanus a fine new cathedral, equipped with costly mosaics in the best Greek tradition and with great bronze doors (as at Monte Cassino) from Constantinople.15

The dedication of Salerno Cathedral in 1084 was one of Gregory VII’s last public acts as pope-in-exile. Following his death in 1085, Abbot Desiderius, against his better judgement, accepted office as Victor III. And Desiderius, in turn, was succeeded by Urban II (1088–99), a former prior of Cluny. Each had Norman support. Gregory VII (1073–85) had first enlisted Normans as his principal allies against the Germans; Desiderius, when pope as much as abbot, remained dependent on the support of Norman princes; and Urban II’s great Crusade, preached so charismatically at Clermont on 27 November 1095, would probably never have reached Jerusalem without their leadership.

Only five years before, the successful expulsion of Sicily’s Arab rulers by Roger ‘the Great Count’, younger brother of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, had established a model for Christian renewal in the Mediterranean. And Sicily’s enormous wealth, fuelling Crusader hopes of similar booty in the East, was in truth far more real than the legendary golden pavements of Jerusalem. Significantly for the arts, that wealth was almost entirely Mediterranean-based, combining seaborne commerce – the Arab, Byzantine, and (increasingly) North Italian trades – with the export of Sicily’s high-quality grains. And the island’s new rulers soon found it more convenient to forget – or ignore – their Norman origins. Roger II, crowned King of Sicily and Apulia on 25 December 1130, had been Count of Sicily since 1105 and Duke of Apulia from 1122. At Roger’s cosmopolitan court – over which he presided with Byzantine pomp – French and Latin, Greek and Arabic were all in common use. And although, from Roger’s death in 1154, the Latinization of Norman Sicily appreciably gathered pace, it would be a long time yet before incoming Latin settlers outnumbered the indigenous Greeks, and almost as long before the last Arab merchant left Palermo.16 Roger II’s two outstanding buildings – the new cathedral at Cefalù and his Palatine Chapel at Palermo – were both begun soon after he was crowned king. And in this exceptional context of cross-fertilizing cultures, whereas each church is of Latin (or Romanesque) plan, the expensive high-quality mosaics which ornament both buildings are unmistakably Greek, while the pointed arches of Roger’s palace chapel, and its rich stalactite-style ceiling, are just as obviously of Arab inspiration. That identical mix of Latin, Greek and Arab, on an even grander scale, again characterized the new cathedral at Monreale, west of Palermo, built by William II (1165–89). King William, Ibn Jubayr relates, spoke Arabic. And the pointed arches of Monreale’s nave arcades and cloister, completed in the 1180s, are at least as Saracenic as those of the Palatine Chapel of William’s grandfather. Similarly, while Monreale’s plan is Latin, its mosaics are Greek. And it was for those mosaics in particular – 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 reforming emphasis which their long-lived abbots, Odilo (994–1049) and Hugh (1049–1109), had each helped promote in his turn. And what the reforms had begun to bring to them, even before 1100, were large numbers of parish churches, with their tithes and other offerings, formerly treated by lay owners as private property. It was Leo IX’s Council of Rome in 1050 which urged the restoration of all lost church revenues to their clergy. And that was immediately the message of Bishop Airard of Nantes in the 1050s, having in mind – he told his hearers – that ‘in France more than elsewhere the wicked custom has grown up that ecclesiastical revenues, tithes, and oblations are usurped by others than the ministers of the churches to which they rightly belong, and sustenance is evilly transferred from the clergy to laymen and from the poor to the rich.’ Airard’s message came too early to win general support; and he was driven from office in 1059 in favour of a pastor of the landowning party. Nevertheless, he had already secured the release before that time of several parish churches, including those of Rodald ‘who set an example to others and gave up everything he possessed and left it to me what to do with it, and I gave it all, just as it had been given to me, to St Martin and the monks of Marmoutier’.26