Kenneth Clark's Civilisation 02_ The Great Thaw

There have been times in the history of mankind when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radioactive. Well I don't put this forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history, man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about the year 3000 BC when, quite suddenly, civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but in the Indus Valley. Another was in the late 6th century BC when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece, philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn't reached again for 2,000 years, but also in India, a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled. And another was round about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world, India, China, Byzantium, but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europe where it was most needed. It was like a Russian spring. In every branch of life, action, philosophy, organisation, technology, there was an extraordinary outpouring of energy, an intensification of existence. Popes, emperors, kings, bishops, saints, scholars, philosophers, they were all larger than life. And the incidents of history, our great heroic dramas or symbolic acts, that still stir our hearts. The evidence of this heroic energy, this confidence, this strength of will and intellect, is still visible to us. From where I'm standing, the east end of Canterbury still looks very large and very complex. In spite of all our mechanical skills and the inflated scale of modern materialism, Durham Cathedral remains a formidable proposition. These great orderly mountains of stone rose out of a small cluster of wooden houses. Well, everyone with the least historical imagination has thought of that, but what people don't always realise is that all this happened quite suddenly, in a single lifetime. Of course, these changes imply a new social and intellectual background. They imply wealth, stability, technical skill, and above all, the confidence necessary to push through a long-term project. How had all this suddenly appeared in Western Europe? There are many answers, but one is overwhelmingly more important than the others, the triumph of the church. It could be convincingly argued that Western civilisation was basically the creation of the church. In saying that, I'm not thinking for the moment of the church as a repository of Christian truth and spiritual experience. I'm thinking of her as the 12th century thought of her as a power. Ecclesia, sitting like an empress, and she was powerful for positive reasons. Men of intelligence naturally and normally took holy orders and could rise from obscurity to positions of immense influence. The church was basically a democratic institution where ability, administrative, diplomatic, sheer intellectual ability, made its way. And then the church was international. The great churchmen of the 11th and 12th centuries came from all over Europe, Anselm came here from Aosta via Normandy to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Landfrank had made the same journey, starting from Pavia. It couldn't happen in the church or in politics today. One can't imagine two consecutive Archbishops of Canterbury being Italian. But it could happen, and it does happen, in the field of science, which shows that where some way of thought or human activity is really vital to us, then internationalism is accepted unhesitatingly. This internationalism of the 12th century extended to architecture and sculpture. The master masons, who were both sculptors and architects, travelled all over Europe. Canterbury was built by a Frenchman, William of Sens. The extraordinary thing is that wherever they went, these masters seemed able to recruit a force of skilled workmen who carried out technical feats which seem infinitely beyond all that we know, or think we know, of the mechanical skill of the time. MUSIC They were inspired by the feeling that, beyond all their hoisting and hammering, there was some great controlling intelligence based on mathematical laws, a human reflection of God, the great architect. This expansion of the human spirit was first made visible in the Abbey of Cluny, about 250 miles to the southeast of Paris. It was founded in the 10th century, but under Hugh of Sémur, who was abbot from 1049 to 1109, it became the greatest church in Europe. A huge complex of buildings with a famous library in which was made the first translation of the Koran, the first attempt to understand the infidel instead of merely fighting him. Well, the buildings were destroyed in the early 19th century, used as a quarry, like Roman buildings, and only a part of the south transept remains where I'm standing now. But with many descriptions of its original splendour, the abbey church alone was the size of a large cathedral, and on feast days the whole of the walls were covered with hangings, the floors were a mosaic with figures like a Roman pavement. And of all its treasures, the most astonishing was a seven-branched candlestick of gilt bronze in which the shaft alone was 18 feet high. Formidable piece of casting even today. Of all this, nothing remains. Only a few candlesticks later and much smaller. This is one of them. It's only about 18 inches high. But it's so full of detail that one can imagine it 18 feet. Although made for the cathedral of Gloucester, it's a perfect example of Cluniac elaboration. Well, this first great eruption of ecclesiastical splendour was unashamedly extravagant. Apologists of the Cluniac style tell us that all the decoration was subordinated to philosophic ideas. My general impression is that the invention which boiled over into sculpture and painting in the early 12th century was self-delighting. As with the similar outbursts of the Baroque, one can think up ingenious interpretations of the subjects, but the motive force behind them was simply irrepressible, irresponsible energy. The Romanesque carvers were like a school of dolphins. All this we know not from the mother house of Cluny itself, but from the dependencies that spread all over Europe. There were over 1,200 of them in France alone. And I'm sitting in the cloisters of a fairly remote one, the Abbey of Boissac in southern France, which was important because it was on the pilgrimage route to Compostela. The carvings have much that is typical of the Cluny style. The sharp cutting, the swirling drapery, the twisting line, as if the restless impulses of the wandering craftsmen, the goldsmiths of the Viking conquerors, still had to be expressed in stone. You can see this on the mullion of the door with its fabulous beasts. When one considers that they were once brightly coloured, because the Cluniac ornament seems all to have been painted and the manuscripts show what kind of colour it was, they must have looked even more fiercely Tibetan than they do today. And I can't imagine that even the medieval mind, which was adept at interpreting everything symbolically, could have found much in them of religious meaning. But what has this column to do with Christian values, with compassion or charity or even hope? It's not at all surprising that the most influential churchman of his day, St Bernard of Clairvaux, should have become the bitter and relentless critic of the Cluniac style. Some of his attacks are the usual Puritan objections, as when he speaks of the lies of poetry, words that were to echo through the centuries and become particular favourites in the new religion of science. But St Bernard had an eye as well as an eloquent tongue. And in the cloisters, he says, under the eyes of the brethren engaged in reading, what business have those ridiculous monstrosities, that misshapen shapeliness and shapely misshapenness, those unclean monkeys, those fierce lions, those monstrous centaurs, those semi-human beings? Here you see a quadruped with the tail of a serpent, there a fish with the head of a bird. In short, there appears on all sides so rich and amazing a variety of forms that it is more delightful to read the marbles than the manuscripts and to spend the whole day in admiring these things piece by piece rather than in meditating on the divine law. That last sentence shows, doesn't it, that Bernard felt the power of art. And in fact, the buildings done under his influence, in the Cistercian style, are closer to our ideals of architecture than anything else of the period. Alas, most of them are abandoned and half-ruined simply because it was part of St Bernard's ideal that they should be built far from the worldly distractions of towns. And so, when, after the French Revolution, town monasteries were turned into local churches, the Cistercian monasteries fell into ruins. And yet it's there that the spirit of monasticism has survived. and, as it is said, to ask for Eremosina to be brought into the temple. When he saw Peter and John being brought into the temple, he asked for Eremosina to be brought in. But Peter and John said to Eremosina, Stay with us. And Eremosina, hoping that someone would accept her, said to Peter, I am not the silver of your hands, because I have... These white monks, in their unchanging habit, this round of work and prayer, which has continued unbroken since the 12th century, bring the old building back to life. It's a way of life that is concerned with an ideal of eternity, and that is an important part of civilization. But the great thaw of the 12th century was not achieved by contemplation alone, that can exist at all times, but by action, a vigorous, violent sense of movement, both physical and intellectual. On the physical side, this took the form of pilgrimages and crusades. I think they're one of the features of the Middle Ages, which is hardest for us to understand. It's no good pretending that pilgrimages were like cruises or holidays abroad. For one thing, they took far longer, sometimes 2 or 3 years. For another, they involved real hardship and danger. In spite of efforts to organize pilgrimages, and a series of hostels along the chief routes, elderly abbots and middle-aged widows often died on the way to Jerusalem. Pilgrimages were undertaken in hope of heavenly rewards. In fact, they were often used by the church as a form of penitence, a spiritualized form of extradition. The point of a pilgrimage was to look at relics. The medieval pilgrim really believed that by contemplating a reliquary containing the head or even the finger of a saint, he could persuade that saint to intercede on his behalf with God. Well, how can one hope to share this belief, which played so great a part in medieval civilization? I'm on my way to the town of Conques, a famous place of pilgrimage dedicated to the cult of Sainte-Foy. She was a little girl who, in late Roman times, refused to worship idols. She was obstinate in the face of reasonable persuasion, a Christian antigone. And so she was martyred. Her relics began to work miracles, and in the 10th century, one of them was so famous that Bernard of Angers was sent to investigate it and report to the Bishop of Chartres. It seemed that a man had had his eyes gouged out by a jealous priest. After a year or so, the blind man went to the shrine of Sainte-Foy, and his eyes were restored. The man was still alive. He said that at first he had had terrible headaches, but now they had passed, and he could see perfectly. There was a difficulty. After his eyes had been put out, witnesses said that they had been taken up to heaven. Some said by a dove, others by a magpie. That was the only point of doubt. The report was favorable. A fine Romanesque church was built at Conques, and in it was placed this strange Eastern-looking figure to contain the relics of Sainte-Foy, a golden idol studied with gems. How ironical that this little girl, who was put to death for refusing to worship idols, should have been turned into one herself. That the very head should be a gold mask of a late Roman emperor. Well, that's the medieval mind. They cared passionately about the truth, but their sense of evidence was different from ours. From our point of view, nearly all the relics in the world depend on some completely unhistorical assertion. And yet they, as much as any factor, led to that movement and a diffusion of ideas from which Western civilization derives part of its momentum. Of course, the most important place of pilgrimage was Jerusalem. After the 10th century, when a strong Byzantine empire made the journey practicable, pilgrims used to go in parties of 7,000 at a time. And this is the background of that extraordinary episode in history, the First Crusade. Because, although other factors may have determined its course, Norman restlessness, the ambitions of younger sons, economic depression, all the factors that make for a gold rush, there can be no doubt that the majority of people joined the crusade in a spirit of pilgrimage. Among many things they brought back from the East were Persian decorative motifs, which were combined with the rhythms of Northern ornament to make the Romanesque style. I see these as two fierce beasts tugging at the carcass of Greco-Roman art. Very often one can trace a figure back to a classical original, but it has been entirely tugged out of shape, or perhaps, one should say, into shape. By these two new forces. This feeling of tugging, of pulling everything to bits and reshaping it, was characteristic of 12th-century art, and was somehow complementary to the massive stability of its architecture. And I see rather the same situation in the realm of ideas. The main structure of the Christian faith was unshakable, but round it was a play of minds, a tugging and a tension that has hardly been seen since, and was, I think, one of the things that prevented Western Europe from growing rigid, as so many other civilizations have done. It was an age of intense intellectual activity. To read what was going on in Paris about the year 1130 makes one's head spin. And at the centre of it all was the brilliant, enigmatic figure of Peter Abelard, the invincible arguer, the magnetic teacher. Abelard was a star. Like a great prizefighter, he expressed contempt for anyone who met him in the ring of open discussion. The older medieval philosophers, like Anselm, had said, I must believe in order that I may understand. Abelard took the opposite course, I must understand in order that I may believe. He said, by doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we perceive the truth. Strange words to have been written in the year 1122. Of course, they got him into trouble. Only the strength and wisdom of Cluny saved him from excommunication. He ended his days calmly in a Cluniac house, and after his death, the abbot of Cluny wrote to Heloise saying that she and Abelard would be reunited where, beyond these voices, there is peace. I'm standing in a Cluniac house, the Abbey of Vézelay. I'm in the covered portico where the pilgrims gathered. Above my head is the relief on the main door showing Christ in glory. He's no longer the judge, as at Moissac, but the Redeemer. Vézelay's full of sculpture, on the doors, on the capitals everywhere. But fascinating as this is, one forgets about it when one looks through the door at the architecture of the interior. It's so harmonious that surely St Bernard, who preached the Second Crusade here, must have felt that this was an expression of the divine law and an aid to worship and contemplation. It certainly has that effect on me. Indeed, I can think of no other Romanesque interior that has this quality of lightness, this feeling of divine reason. And it seems inevitable that the Romanesque should here merge into a beautiful early Gothic. We don't know the name of the architect of Vézelay, nor of the highly individual sculptors of Moissac and Toulouse. And this used to be taken as a proof of Christian humility in the artists, or, alternatively, a sign of their low status. I think it was just an accident. Because, in fact, we do know the names of a good many medieval builders, including the architects of Cluny, and the form of their inscriptions doesn't at all suggest excessive modesty. One of the most famous is bang in the middle of the main portal of the Cathedral of Autun. You can see it under the feet of Christ. Gisilbertus hoc faecid. Gisilbertus made this. One of the blessed looks up at the name of Gisilbertus with admiration. He must be considered a very important man for his name to have been permitted in such a prominent place. At a later date, it would not have been the artist's name, but the patron's. And, in fact, Gisilbertus was important to Autun because he did something unique in the Middle Ages and very rare at any time. He carried out the whole decoration of the cathedral himself. This extraordinary feat was in keeping with his character as an artist. He wasn't an inward-looking visionary like the Mossack master. He was an extrovert. He loves to tell a story, and his strength lies in his dramatic force. Look at the row of the damned under the feet of their judge. They form a crescendo of despair. They're reduced to essentials in a way that brings them very close to the art of our own time. A likeness terrifyingly confirmed by these gigantic hands that carry up the head of a sinner as if it were a piece of rubble on a building site. The capitals also have this vivid narrative quality. They contain rich pieces of ornament, but in the end, it's the story that counts. Look at this charming donkey and at the protective way in which the Virgin holds the Christ Child on their journey to Egypt. Even in this abstract-looking design of the three kings asleep under their magnificent counterpane, what matters is the angel's gesture and the delicate way he places one finger on the hand of a sleeping king. Like all storytellers, he had a taste for horrors, and he went out of his way to depict them. This really horrifying work is the suicide of Judas. However, I must, in fairness, admit that he also did a figure of Eve, which is the first female nude since antiquity to give a sense of the pleasures of the body. ESTIVALI SU PERVOR QUANDO CONTA SU DIMIN FLOR DO TU SERA SU BALLE E STUPE SU METTU E CIN E BALMOR The work of De Silbertus was finished at about 1135, and by that time, a new force had appeared in European art, the Abbey of Saint-Denis. The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis had been famous enough in earlier times, but the part it played in Western civilisation was due to the abilities of one extraordinary individual, the abbot Suger. He was one of the first men of the Middle Ages whom one can think of in modern, I might almost say transatlantic terms. His origins were completely obscure, and he was extremely small, but his vitality was overwhelming. It extended to everything that he undertook, organisation, building, statesmanship. He was regent of France for seven years and a great patriot. Indeed, he seems to have been the first to pronounce those now familiar words, the English are destined by moral and natural law to be subjected to the French and not contrary-wise. He loved to talk about himself without any false modesty, and he tells the story of how his builders assured him that beams of the length he needed for certain roof could never be found because the trees just weren't as tall as that. Whereupon he took his carpenters into the forests. They smiled, he says, and would have laughed if they had dared. And in the course of the day he discovered 12 trees of the necessary size and had them felled and brought back. You see why I use the word transatlantic. And like several of the pioneers of the New World, he had a passionate love of art. One of the most fascinating documents of the Middle Ages is the account he wrote of the works carried out at Saint-Denis under his administration. The gold altar, the crosses, the precious crystals. There they are, seen through the eyes of a 15th-century painter, who has no doubt made his figures much too large in proportion. Actually, Suger's great gold cross was 24 feet high, and it was studded with jewels and inlaid with enamels made by one of the finest craftsmen of the age, Godfrey Leclerc. All destroyed in the Revolution. All that is left of Suger's treasures is a few of the sacred vessels, like this Egyptian porphyry jar, which he tells us he found forgotten in a cupboard. Suger's feeling for all these objects was partly that of a great collector, love of brightness and splendour and antiquity, and a love of acquisition. But he was not merely a collector. He was a creator. His work had a philosophic basis that is very important to Western civilisation. Suger accepted the belief that we could only come to understand the absolute beauty, which is God, through the effect of precious and beautiful things on our senses. He said, the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material. Well, this was really a revolutionary concept in the Middle Ages. It was the intellectual background of all the sublime works of art of the next century, and in fact has remained the basis of our belief in the value of art until today. In addition to this revolution in theory, Suger's Saint-Denis was also the beginning of many new developments in practice, in architecture, in sculpture, in painted glass. But one can still see that Suger introduced, perhaps really invented, the Gothic style of architecture. Not only the pointed arch, but the lightness of high windows, what we call the clear story. Bright, he says, is the noble edifice that is pervaded by new light, and in these words he anticipates all the architectural aspirations of the next 200 years. Alas, the exterior of Saint-Denis doesn't look too bright today. It's been knocked about and restored and is now engulfed in a squalid industrial suburb. To form any notion of its first effect on the mind, one must go to Chartres. In some miraculous way, Chartres has survived. Fire and war, revolution and restoration, have attacked it in vain. One can still climb the hill to the cathedral in the spirit of a pilgrim. Even the tourists have not destroyed its atmosphere, as they have in so many temples of the human spirit, from the Sistine Chapel to the Todai-ji in Japan. The South Tower is still more or less as it was when it was completed in the year 1164. It's a masterpiece of harmonious proportion. Was this harmony calculated mathematically? Well, ingenious scholars have produced a system of proportions based on measurements, but it's so complex that I find it very hard to credit. However, Chartres was the centre of a school of philosophy devoted to Plato, and in particular to his mysterious book called the Timaeus, from which it was thought that the whole universe could be interpreted as a form of measurable harmony. So perhaps the proportions of Chartres reflect a more complex mathematics than one is inclined to believe. Chartres contained the most famous of all relics of the Virgin, the actual tunic she had worn at the time of the Annunciation. From the first, this relic had worked miracles, but it was only in the 12th century that the cult of the Virgin began to appeal to the popular imagination. I suppose that in the earlier centuries, life was simply too rough. At any rate, if art is any guide, and in this series I am taking it as my guide, the Virgin played a very small part in the minds of men during the 9th and 10th and even the 11th centuries. The Romanesque churches we've been looking at were dedicated to saints whose relics they contained, St. Etienne, St. Lazarus, St. Denis, St. Mary Magdalene, none of them to the Virgin. Then, after Chartres, almost every great church in France was dedicated to her, Paris, Amiens, Reims, Rouen, Beauvais. What was the reason for this sudden change? Well, I think the cult of the Virgin must have come from the East, because all the early representations of the Virgin as an object of devotion are in a markedly Byzantine style. This is a page from a manuscript from Citeaux, the community of St. Bernard. St. Bernard was one of the first men to speak of the Virgin as an ideal of beauty and a mediator between man and God. But certainly, a strong influence in spreading the cult of the Virgin was the beauty and splendour of Chartres. The main portal of Chartres is one of the most beautiful congregations of carved figures in the world. The longer you look at it, the more moving incidents, the more vivid details you discover. I suppose the first thing that strikes anyone is this row of pillar people. In naturalistic terms, as bodies, they're impossible, and the fact that one believes in them is a triumph of art. The sculptor was not only a man of genius, but one of great originality. He must have begun carving when style was dominated by the violent, twisting rhythms of Cluny. And he's created a style as still and restrained and classical as the Greek sculptors of the 6th century BC. But was it really Greek? I mean Greek in derivation. Were these reed-like draperies, the thin straight lines, the fluted folds, the zigzag hems, and the whole play of texture, which so obviously recalls a Greek archaic figure, arrived at independently? Or had the Chartres master seen some fragments of early Greek sculpture in the south of France? Well, for various reasons, I'm quite certain that he had. But the most important thing about the central doorway, more important even than its Greek derivation, is the character of the heads of the so-called kings and queens. No-one knows exactly who they are. These heads seem to me to show a new stage in the ascent of Western man. Indeed, I believe that this refinement, this look of selfless detachment and spirituality, is something entirely new in art. Beside them, the gods and heroes of ancient Greece look arrogant, soulless, even slightly brutal. I fancy that the faces which look out at us from the past are perhaps the surest indication we have of the meaning of an epoch. And the faces on the west portal of Chartres are amongst the most sincere and the most aristocratic that Western Europe has ever produced. From the old chronicles, we know something about the men whose states of mind these faces reveal. In the year 1144, we are told, when the towers seemed to be rising as if by magic, the faithful harnessed themselves to carts which were bringing stone and dragged them from the quarry to the cathedral. The enthusiasm spread throughout France. Men and women came from far away, carrying heavy burdens of provisions for the workmen, wine, oil, corn. Amongst them were lords and ladies, pulling carts with the rest. There was perfect discipline and a most profound silence. All hearts were united and each man forgave his enemies. Its very construction was a kind of miracle. The old Romanesque church had been destroyed by a terrible fire in 1197, only the towers and the west front remained. And the people of Chartres feared that they had lost their precious relic. Then, when the debris was cleared away, it was found intact in the crypt. And the Virgin's intention became clear, that a new church should be built, even more splendid than the last. The building is in the new architectural style to which Suger had given the impress of his authority at Saint-Denis, what we call Gothic. Only at Chartres, the architect was told to follow the foundations of the old Romanesque cathedral. This meant that the Gothic vaulting had to cover a space far wider than ever before. It was a formidable problem of construction. And in order to solve it, the architect has used the device known as flying buttresses. One of those happy strokes where necessity has led to an architectural invention of marvellous and fantastic beauty. Since the beginning of settled life, say, the Pyramid of Saqqara, man had thought of buildings as a weight on the ground. He had always found himself limited by problems of stability and weight. In the end, it kept him down to the earth. Now, by the devices of the Gothic style, the shaft with its cluster of columns passing without interruption into the vault and the pointed arch, he could make stone seem weightless, the weightless expression of the spirit. By the same means, he could surround his space with glass. Suger said that he did this in order to get more light. But he found that these areas of glass could be made into an ideal means of impressing and instructing the faithful. Man may rise to the contemplation of the divine through the senses. Well, nowhere else, I think, is Suger's favourite saying so convincingly illustrated as it is in Chartres Cathedral. As one looks at the painted windows which completely surround one, they seem almost to set up a vibration in the air. CHORAL MUSIC Chartres is the epitome of the first great awakening in European civilisation. It's also the bridge between Romanesque and Gothic, between the world of Abelard and the world of St Thomas Aquinas, the world of restless curiosity and the world of system and order. Great things were to be done in the next centuries of high Gothic. Great feats of construction, both in architecture and in thought. But they all rested on the foundations of the 12th century. That was the age which gave European civilisation its impetus. Our intellectual energy, our contact with the great minds of Greece, our ability to move and change, our belief that God may be approached through beauty, our feeling of compassion, our sense of the unity of Christendom. All this and much more appeared in those 100 marvellous years between the consecration of Cluny and the rebuilding of Chartres. CHORAL MUSIC