Finding an Ancient Matrix in a Very Messy Room

The Unswept Room

Hardham’s trompe l’oeil representation of ‘The Deception of Eve and Adam’, painted to look like a curtain suspended by loops from wall hooks, has been described as ‘most unusual, if not unique’. The two elegant, long-limbed figures of the protoplasts certainly remain a main attraction for visitors to Hardham. Appropriately enough, this scene from the Garden of Eden is itself a reflection upon truth and deception. Yes, we can see Eve being deceived by the Serpent, but at the same time the artist is drawing us into our own, new deception. 

'The Deception of Eve and Adam', painted to look like 

a wall-hanging, suspended by loops from hooks 

which seem to stick out from the wall 

(Hardham, chancel arch west)

Well, this is Eve and Adam, right? Or is it a painting of Eve and Adam? Or a painting of a curtain with Eve and Adam? We're very much in the realm of Magritte's pipe, ‘The Treachery of Images’ (1929), where the testimony of our eyes evaporates, and we're left wondering if there is anything more to the world than what we take in with our senses. The Hardham artist puts us in a position like the Wachowskis's Neo, where we must consider whether to remain as participant in this comfortable deception, or to wake up to the more difficult but satisfying life which we glimpse beyond. The deceptive Hardham painting steers us towards renewing our relationship with the unseen, and with the divine.

The idea of shepherding the viewer towards spiritual reflection through self-regarding, deceptive art was, of course, far from new with the Hardham artist. Trompe l’oeil had played a significant role in the art of Ancient Greece, and continued to do so in later replicas created to satisfy the Roman desire to tap into the authentic mysticism of the older Greek tradition. The triclinium (dining room) of Emperor Hadrian’s Villa on the Aventine Hill in Rome boasted an extravagantly deceptive and playful mosaic floor decoration, the remains of which are now on display in the Vatican Museum. 

'The Unswept Room'

Deceptive mosaic from the triclinium of Hadrian's Villa, Rome c. 120 CE

based on work by Sosus of Pergamon c. 130 BCE

(Vatican Museum)

The centrepiece of the surviving pavement is now mostly lost, leaving a border of illusionistic friezes which hold up a mirror to our lives, a signal that we're here for a moment of reflection. A tableau of theatrical masks establishes an association between ephemeral human life and the illusion of the stage, while the whole piece is framed by a repeating pattern of acanthus leaves and bull’s skulls, a motif beneath our feet which once mirrored similar decoration on the ceiling high above our heads. Much of the rest of the composition has the appearance of a messy floor, the morning after a sumptuous banquet. The work is signed in Greek by Heraklitos, but evidently made in tribute to a famous design created over three centuries earlier by his compatriot, the master mosacist Sosus (fl. c. 130 BCE) working in the city of Pergamon, now in modern Turkey. Here's how Pliny describes Sosus’s original: 

On Pavements, and the ‘Unswept Room’

Pavements are an invention of the Greeks, who also practised the art of painting them, till they were superseded by mosaics. In this last branch of art, the highest excellence has been attained by Sosus, who laid, at Pergamon, the mosaic pavement known as the ‘Unswept Room’ from the fact that he there represented, in small squares of different colours, the remnants of a banquet lying upon the floor, and other things which are usually swept away with the broom, they having all the appearance of being left there by accident. 

Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, Book 36, Chapter 60

A carefully arranged tableau of dismembered crustacea, shells of nuts and snails, gnawed bones of fish and poultry are all created in opus vermiculatum, a mosaic technique which uses very small and irregular tesserae. From the cube shadows which the objects cast over the cube floor it looks like the sun is low. I can almost smell the stale aroma of party left-overs, imagine how it might feel on the soles of my feet to walk over this scattered detritus. The rustle and crunch made by my light gait might briefly stop the teeth of a scurrying mosaic mouse who joins me in enjoying the memories of yesterday’s feast. Me and the mouse are the only ‘living’ beings left to pick over the dead remains, in our own differing ways.

It’s tempting to hear gales of ancient Greek laughter (xa xa xa!) as diners noticed the mess beneath their couches. Ehud Fathy ('The Asàratos òikos mosaic', Tel Aviv 2017) points out, however, that once the dining couches were arranged in the triclinium, the costly mosaic floor would hardly have been seen. The exquisite mosaic was not created solely to play some cheap gotcha trick during an actual banquet. Instead it took sophisticated guests on a ‘voyage of contemplation and erudite conversation … [to consider] the very nature of reality and limits of human vision and knowledge’. 

Even if we could, we’re not supposed to touch the debris left on the floor after a banquet: ‘to sweep the floor even as a guest rises from the table … is considered seriously bad luck’ (Pliny again). Even today some people won’t sweep under the bed of a sick person, or have to spit on a broom that touches their feet for fear of offending the spirits. Scraps were to be left on the floor to nourish dead heroes and ancestors. Nonetheless, like the mouse, we are compelled to nibble at Sosus’s Unswept Floor, chewing over our place in the ontological chasm between the seen and the unseen worlds. The allure of  'The Unswept Room' was a pre-Christian way of tricking us into a mystical contemplation of a spiritual world which lies beyond our dull senses.

We can think of the Hardham trompe l’oeil curtain within the same mystical tradition, taking us on a similar 'voyage of contemplation' as Sosus’s ‘Unswept Room’, using art to challenge the limits of our perception, and to pull us towards reflection upon the mystery of the unseen and the divine. Recasting the theme of artistic deception at Hardham to include biblical Eve and Adam, the artist transports us from the mystical, pagan outlook of Sosus to see things from a personal, Christian perspective. The Hardham muralist exposes us not as detached observers. We become Eve and Adam, reaching out towards the Serpent’s alluring apple, the mouse who can't resist the scraps on a mosaic floor. Like Hadrian's erudite guests who contemplated the divine through a messy floor mosaic, our active engagement with art at Hardham can lead us away from the fate of Eve and Adam, and towards Christian enlightenment. 

'Stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes'

So what does this all mean for a modern viewer? Hadrian's guests may have used the trompe l'oeil pavement to go on a voyage into mystical neo-Platonic ideas, the sort of spiritual, gnostic discussion which would flow into the thinking of early Egyptian Christian teachers such as Valentinus (fl. 150 AD), before being roundly rejected by Irenaeus of Lyons in his tract entitled Against the Heresies (c. 174-189 AD). In twelfth century Hardham, personal spiritual regeneration through immersive art seems to have been considered so transformative that it quite literally formed part of the preparation for Christian baptism. Time-travelling devotees of Rome's Villa Adriana may have felt quite at home with Hardham's continuing love for Classical deceptive art, and its unique adaptation here as part of a Christian ritual of spiritual confirmation. 

A modern cinematic audience may prefer to think of such desire for spiritual transcendence through art as like Neo's own rebirth, emerging from a world of being at his desk on time, paying taxes, into a world beyond The Matrix. Becoming aware that there is more to his life than sensory experience had told him, Neo accepts Morpheus's offer: 'stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. The truth and nothing more'. We'll continue our own search for unseen truth in the works of ancient Greco-Roman spirituality, the creative innovation of the Hardham artist, and The Matrix's immersive world of the moving image in future posts.

'The Deception of Eve and Adam'
(Hardham, chancel arch west)

In choosing an illusionistic curtain to represent the biblical deception, the Hardham artist seems to be alluding to another great feat of Ancient Greek artistic illusion, also celebrated by Pliny. In the next post we will look in further detail at the ways in which Classical deception in art was given fresh meaning in West Sussex.

How to whitewash the contribution of marginal groups from Byzantine history

I've had a great response to my post 'Breaking the image: a 12th-century Ai Weiwei?' There are over fifty individual images at Hardham, and many more in the fresco ensembles at Coombes and Clayton. Together they offer an extraordinarily vivid snapshot of cultural life in Southern England during the early twelfth century, testifying to the essential role of migrants in the evolution of music, drama and painting in Britain. I'm making this blog as an open access resource to help people understand and enjoy this exceptional artist's work. Do click the Follow button to receive news and updates, and come back to find out more.

In the meantime, however, I realise that there are some themes in here could do with unpacking, without preempting and giving spoilers for some of the stories I'm working on at the moment. With that in mind, here's some useful background information to the Sussex muralist, and how I have approached their unique artwork.

1. Slavery and persecution

The Sussex Greensand frescos appear within a context of centuries of persecution. If 'heretics' were persecuted for being different, then the abundance of unusual features in the Sussex frescos offer clues to the ways in which the artist celebrated practices which set the the Sussex Christians apart from their cousins in Western Catholicism or Byzantine Orthodoxy. 

Christianity had come early to the Hardham peninsula during its time as a Roman industrial hub, probably as a consequence of the long-distance transportation of unfree labour from around the empire. Convicts, perceived religious troublemakers, the subjugated and vanquished satisfied an insatiable Roman appetite for hard-won minerals. Displaced people provided the considerable manpower necessary to construct an infrastructure dedicated to the movement and processing of Wealden iron, from the Isle of Thanet on the Kent coast to Noviomagus Reginorum (Chichester) in the west. The beautiful twelfth-century Sussex frescos are late blooms, flowering from seeds scattered by Roman slavery.

Using his rudis or staff, a referee adjudicates a fight between a
secutor with shield and short sword and a retiarius with trident and net.
The gladiators are tethered to the stone between them, forcing them to fight.
Mosaic showing a gladiatorial combat between winged cupids:
Bignor Roman Villa
6 km west of Hardham Church 

Following a similar route some seven centuries later, the Sussex artist seems to have arrived in Britain from Constantinople in the late 1090's, coming to this remote and inaccessible part of Southern Britain as a refugee fleeing religious persecution, now at the hands of the Eastern Romans. Intolerance towards unorthodox Christian sects had been fomented during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (reigned 1081-1118). Although their principles of fellowship and worship looked back to the earliest Christian communities in Syria and Egypt, this latest community in exile in Britain had been chased out of Constantinople by Emperor Komnenos and the Orthodox Church for the many ways in which their Christian faith differed from the belief and practice of Byzantium: 

1. Women played an equal role as leaders and teachers. They served a community which had no interest in the patriarchal structure typical of most other Christian sects

2. Their social structure seems to have been largely egalitarian and non-hierarchical, leaving no vacancy for Komnenos's ambitions to be the imperious 'defender of Orthodoxy'  

3. Their diet was essentially vegan, living without meat, dairy products and eggs 

4. They didn't consume wine, even in Eucharistic rites 

5. They practiced sexual abstinence (at least among the initiates) 

6. Their highly original approach to art set out to challenge the veneration of cult objects, particularly Orthodoxy's holy icons

Such enduring characteristics, reminiscent of certain early, ante-Nicene manifestations of Christian belief, had become portrayed in medieval Byzantium as clear signs of degeneracy and malevolent intent. The Sussex murals seem to manifest the artist's relief at being able now to express freely each of these six principles in their fresco schemes. The ever-present evidence of obliteration and partial destruction of these paintings, however, shows their confidence was sadly misjudged: intolerance, censorship and persecution did eventually catch up with the artist, even at this far end of Christendom. The extensive Byzantine anti-heretical hate literature concerning this unorthodox Christian sect is the key to understanding the frescos, and the history of the persecuted community which made them.

Three joyous souls have arrived in a six-sided Paradise;
the dome of a new Jerusalem hovers above.
Clayton nave, north wall

2. Iconoclasm: did 'heretics' really 'destroy icons'?

Mutual animosity between Orthodoxy and those Christians it viewed as duplicitous turncoats came to focus on attitudes towards art. After over a century of furious debate, the 'Triumph of Orthodoxy' in 843 celebrated the Orthodox Church's official encouragement of the veneration of images, under strict conditions. This could involve kissing and prostration before icons, a belief in the health-giving and healing properties of an image, and public celebration of cherished holy images in joyous processions. The respect shown to the icon in these ways was said to express a love for the holy figure it represented, a 'window to the saints', but was in no way to be mistaken for idolatrous worship of an image. The Byzantine icon itself became highly stylised. Any expression of excessive emotion or artistic individuality was out of the question. 

An icon of the Hodegetria (Virgin and Child), placed on a stand,
venerated by a group of eight worshippers
Hamilton Psalter, c. 1300.
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

Orthodoxy's compromise of 843, however, did not please everyone, least of all adventurous artists among the miaphysite communities of Syria, Coptic Egypt and Armenia who didn't see why they had to paint stylised icons to suit an Orthodox Church which didn’t, in any case, represent their beliefs. The Hardham artist and their community considered the highly constrained use of painting in the Byzantine icon an unimaginative abuse of the art form. They intentionally set out to make innovative work that was playful, often allegorical, and open to a variety of interpretations. 

An Orthodox believer approached an icon as a window to commune with a designated saint. Orthodoxy found the idea of allegory, looking into the window and seeing a gallery of changing faces, profoundly abhorrent. In criticism reminiscent of reactions to the artistic innovations of late nineteenth-century modernism, appalled traditionalists declared the new paintings a game (empaiktikós), and an insult (hubristikós) to sacred icons, conjuring up the rank atmosphere of a latrine more than the reverence of a church. The Orthodox iconophile community whipped up animosity towards imaginary icon-stabbing heretics, suspicious of innovatory artists who used painting to explore the full creative potential of the image in Christian exegesis and worship. 

Although highly critical of the Orthodox icon, and keen on stories which celebrated Christians who overturned or refused to venerate idols, the innovators did not go around literally 'destroying art'. The Hardham artist had to leave Byzantium, both to escape persecution for their beliefs, and to be able to express their faith in art, painting how they chose to. The twelfth-century artistic exodus from Byzantium of painters who were no longer welcome there would have a profound effect on the development of art in Europe. The Hardham fresco cycle, in this sense, is a precursor to the Byzantine-inspired work of Florentine artist Cimabue (c. 1240-1302), and the human emotion and realism of Giotto's celebrated cycle of frescos made for the Arena Chapel of Padua (c. 1305).

Hardham rejects the veneration of artwork:
one of the Idols of Sotinen (Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew Ch. 23)
tumbles to the ground when Christ enters the pagan temple. 
Hardham nave, north wall/upper frieze

3. Degenerate art: what’s so shocking about Hardham?

Orthodoxy refused to regard any artistic challenge to the icon as 'art', instead calling such pieces an insult to the tradition of icon painting, while portraying its practitioners as weak-minded and polluted 'heretics'. Setting aside any wider political comparison, such a  profoundly intolerant attitude towards innovation in art has similarities with the NSDAP categorisation in the 1920's of any modernist art (Dadaist, Fauvist, Expressionist, etc.) as entartete "Kunst", or degenerate 'art'. Once denounced as 'degenerate', an 'artist' faced arrest, and their work would be confiscated to be sold abroad, or destroyed. The playful and innovative Sussex murals can be seen to be very closely aligned to the sort of anti-iconic artwork which Orthodoxy loathed as 'degenerate', and wished to eradicate. 

This antipathy was clearly mutual. The Sussex frescos were made within a community which, in return for their hereticisation, had branded the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos a new Herod. The Sussex artist casts him by turns as a murderous and idolatrous tyrant, and a jealous, impotent old man. We will see the motif of 'Emperor-as-foolish-tyrant' several times in the murals, expressed in imaginative ways.

Otto Freundlich: 'Der neue Mensch' (1912)
A photograph of the artist's work was reproduced on 
the cover of the Entartete "Kunst" exhibition guide (Munich, 1937).
Freundlich was killed in the Lublin concentration camp in May 1943;
his sculpture is presumed to have been destroyed.

4. Against the grain

The only written sources covering this image-conflict come from heretic-hating, pro-icon Orthodox commentators. No first-person written sources survive to represent the viewpoint of the opposing side. Why would there be any? It was the well-endowed pro-icon faction who did most of the hating, perpetrated most of the censorship, and was constantly whining about the 'snake-in-a-hole, stinking chameleon, icon-trashing heretics', bogeymen who lived rent-free in their heads.  

The testimony of these unreliable narrators nevertheless yields a rich and meticulous description of the 'heretics'. By reading writers like Anna Komnene and Euthymios Zigabenos against the grain, in particular their accounts of people and locations associated with 'degenerate' art, we can build a very detailed picture of the nature and extent of what was clearly a widespread and important counter-cultural movement. 

'...women of bad character, and wholly pernicous'
Three of the Hardham apostles, seen at
'The washing of the disciples' feet' (John, Ch. 13).
Hardham chancel, south wall/lower frieze

5. A twelfth-century refugee's story

The Sussex frescos themselves seem to follow closely Anna Komnene’s vituperative condemnation, yet the artist’s reality has been hideously twisted and distorted in the Orthodox writer’s warped mirror of heretical fantasy. Using the frescos as an aid to reading The Alexiad book xv against the grain compensates for Anna’s vivid imagination, and her supremely subjective style in lauding her father’s triumphs. Viewing the frescos side-by-side with Anna's book, what emerges is a rich artistic mix where the Sussex painter and the Byzantine historian, although separated by over three thousand kilometres, occupy the same narrative space. They describe similar events and circumstances, each telling her own version of the story in art and prose respectively, yet with entirely opposed intentions.

For example, Anna describes the female leaders of the sect as '...women of bad character, and wholly pernicious'. By contrast, the unique artwork of the Hardham chancel shows Christ with the twelve disciples in two familiar Biblical scenes, where six of the apostles are men, and six are women. The idea of a mixed-gender group of apostles might be a heretical nightmare for Komnene (and apparently can still raise eyebrows today) yet Hardham's visual statement of gender-equal leadership was natural, even unremarkable within the long tradition of the artist’s own eastern Christian community.

Anna’s Alexiad goes on to describe a horrific show trial in which her father, the Emperor Alexios, attempted to winnow the irredeemable 'heretics' from any misguided waverers by offering his suspects the invidious choice of two enormous pyres. Alexios's macabre theatre of terror was, according to Anna, not intended to kill any of the accused. It appears, however, that Alexios's plan was bungled by overzealous guards, causing the death by burning of the ‘heretical’ leader Basileos. Anna tailored her version of Alexios’s righteous duel with ‘heresy’ to end on this high note, the triumphant conclusion to her epic account of her father's achievements. Even Averil Cameron felt that Anna’s imaginative approach to historical accuracy had been stretched beyond credibility for the sake of this spectacular ending.

The terrified Emperor is cast into the pit of Hell by a demon.
Clayton nave, north wall.
Tracing made by restorer P. M. Johnston (1900)

Anna's hero-worship in The Alexiad presents only half the story: the same events apparently form the underlying narrative for the dramatic apocalypse paintings at Clayton. Clayton's bande dessinée version of the same story illustrates the trial of two pyres along one long wall of the nave, but continues on the facing wall with the upbeat sequel in which Alexios gets his just comeuppance. The terrified Emperor is cast into the pit of Hell, and the tables are turned. The souls who survived Alexios’s persecution are now seen emerging from the grave to establish a new Jerusalem in exile. The closing frame shows a mixed-gender group of three blessed souls who find safe refuge within a walled garden of paradise in West Sussex: they look across the void of the nave to the violence which they have left behind, a Guernica-like scene of terror taking place far away on the opposite wall. Who knew that a twelfth-century refugee, branded a 'heretic' in their homeland, could leave such an evocative and eloquent testimony of their experience? A disruptive artist calling for change through powerful artwork which echoed over continents and across borders: this was, indeed, a medieval Ai Weiwei.

Tears of despair fill the eyes of one of Emperor Komnenos's victims, facing the 'choice of two pyres'.
Clayton nave, south wall

 Two female blessed souls, now safe within the walls of a new Jerusalem. 
They look across the nave towards the victims of Alexios's macabre theatre of terror.
Clayton nave, north wall
(restorer's sketch; see original painting reproduced above) 

6. Touched with crusading spirit to impale 'discomfited paynims'

The failure to recognise or appreciate the cultural achievements and experience of marginalised, unorthodox and refugee communities of Byzantium, and indeed elsewhere, is not just a result of historical distortion. Modern prejudice has also played a decisive role in breathing fresh life into historical misunderstandings and enmities.

From the outset, the interpretation of these newly-revealed paintings was coloured by attempts to present the Sussex fresco schemes in ways that confirmed the expectations of the restorers, and chimed with the aspirations of their late Victorian audience. P. M. Johnston claimed to find a ‘crusading spirit’ in the frescos at Hardham: ‘our national patron saint’ impaled the ‘struggling heathens’, as 'paynims' (an archaic term for non-Christians) were 'doubled up in attitudes of fear and discomfiture'. These cowering armed figures which Johnston claimed to have identified in the badly damaged paintwork have not since been corroborated. 

Johnston: 'The Christian Warrior Triumphing over his Enemies'
Hardham nave, north wall, lower frieze

Johnston initially gave the striking fresco of a charging horseman the title 'The Christian Warrior Triumphing over his Enemies'. Calling upon the imagination to fill the gaps, his descriptions seem to evoke press accounts of the celebrated but controversial suppression of Sudanese rebels outside Khartoum in 1898. Artists and printmakers had depicted the bravery of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman, a display of chivalry that what was to be the last full cavalry charge in the history of the British army. The defeat of the Mahdist army, however, was ultimately a win for British gunboats, and six of Hiram Maxim's new machine guns, a reality which was less reported by the press, nor was it commemorated in salon art. Johnston's colonial vision at Hardham attempted to establish a medieval precedent for the chivalrous British triumph over the 'paynims'. His imagination has set the tone for practically all subsequent literature regarding the frescos.

The Charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman
George Derville Rowlandson (1898) 

In spite of his evident care and passion for the paintings, Johnston's very mixed legacy for Hardham's frescos includes a misguided attempt at preservation using varnish, wax and resin, only contributing to their disintegration, and an origin story for the artist who, it was claimed, had travelled over forty kilometres from Lewes Priory in order to decorate an isolated church cut off by the Pulborough wetlands. Johnston's enduring 'Lewes Group' theory proposed that this was the work of a jobbing painter answering to a distant and authoritative man of learning, who planned the artwork from his seat of ecclesiastical power. 

The 'Lewes theory' is now discredited, largely thanks to the work of Audrey Baker. Throughout her long life, Audrey May Baker published several detailed articles attempting to account for the many 'difficult' and 'puzzling' features she saw in the paintings, but which Johnston had largely ignored. It seemed unlikely that the Order of Cluny at Lewes Priory could have paid someone to create such weird frescos. Baker was convinced there was more to these paintings than had been previously acknowledged. Being more wide-ranging and circumspect in her approach than Johnston, she saw her role not so much as to provide answers, but rather to open up the frescos to fresh thinking that would 'lead to discussion'. Baker's questioning approach, however, has not been not followed up: her work was subsequently ridiculed and dismissed in David Park's 1984 investigation. Cutting through the knotty problems which had occupied by Audrey Baker, Park claimed that previous work on the frescos had introduced 'serious misinterpretation'. 

Park didn't find in the paintings what he had expected to find, acknowledging many of the 'unique', 'strange' and 'unusual' features which Baker had observed in the artist's work. However, whereas Baker's curiosity placed a certain trust in the quality of the work and in the artist's creative integrity, Park saw a charming but muddled artist out of their depth, clearly working without education or adequate expert supervision, leading them to lapse into work which 'makes no sense iconographically'. For his analysis of the Clayton Apocalypse, Park imagines a more correct alternative to the ‘awkward’ scheme which he actually observed at Clayton, envisaging what the artist should have painted, if (as Park asserts) they hadn't run out of space because of bad planning. Supported by The Courtauld Institute, Park's work forms the basis of the current guide to the Hardham frescos on sale in the church. 

By repeatedly passing over the artist's originality, even putting it down to incompetence, Park defused the potential for significant disruption posed by artwork which he knew to be remarkable and unique in many ways, for the sake of a better fit with a traditional historical narrative of orthodox belief, expressed by male creativity and patronage, dispensed through wealthy and powerful institutions. Park officially shunted the frescos into the sidings once more, where they remain as a neglected oddity: move on, nothing to see here.

7. Rooting out the heretics

There has also been a tendency in Byzantine studies to diminish, even trivialise the activity of those groups who criticised or opposed Orthodoxy and its icons. We could be investigating the dehumanised and othered 'heretics' as an opportunity to understand the Byzantine Empire's often fraught interaction with its many marginal and migrant communities. Instead, historical hate-terms like 'Bogomil' (Slavic-speaking Christian) and 'Messalian' (Syriac-speaking Christian) proliferate in modern literature. 'Heretics' are cast as the annoying fly in Byzantium's rich ointment, rather than as an essential part of the cultural mix. Judith Herrin, a prominent modern writer on Byzantium, heralds the victory over the 'Bogomils… heretics whom Alexios had to root out’. For his part, Jonathan Harris also blows a horn for Alexios's campaign to cleanse Constantinople of its 'Bogomils': 'the hunt was on for these sowers of discord'.  Exactly why Alexios had to 'root out' this group and its female teachers Herrin doesn't explain, simply assuming our tacit approval of the Emperor’s mission to hunt down the 'Bogomils'. It seems parts of the historical discussion have still not come to terms with the presence of 'heretics': people who choose to do things differently.

Patriarch John the Grammarian is defamed as a spiky-haired iconoclastic punk,
preparing to whitewash an icon of Christ.
Khludov Psalter, c. 850

Much of the originality of the Hardham frescos can be directly ascribed to certain legitimate and deeply-held artistic and philosophical differences which set this eastern community apart from their Christian co-religionists. That ought not to be a position that is hard for a present-day observer to understand, and yet the creative process behind Hardham has been distorted and misrepresented in the modern literature. Modern trust in Anna Komnene's 'Bogomil' fantasy has led to a strange circular argument in which artistic innovators were godless ‘heretics’ who despised all art, and has lent credibility to the unsubstantiated claim that 'Bogomils didn't adorn churches'. The idea is so far from observable reality as almost to be psychological projection. Orthodoxy's litany of abuse and defamation aimed at art-hating 'Bogomils' could be seen as blame-shifting and shame-dumping for their own manifest hatred and aggression towards 'heretics'. Forget those wicked iconoclasts: icon-lovers were quite capable of the acts of destruction and censorship when it came to degenerate 'art', with the difference that their elimination of 'heretics' required no justification.

The failure to take seriously the artistic challenge to the Byzantine icon has also given rise to a hunt for the chimera of 'heretical art' (whatever that was supposed to look like). The modern elimination of unorthodox Christians from any substantial participation in art is founded on historical Orthodox tropes of heresy-hatred, and does not confront the uncomfortable truth that not everyone cherished icons. Even the court philosopher Michael Psellos, who had declared himself a 'most fastidious viewer of icons', was uneasy about the way Orthodoxy was so jealously possessive of its sacred art. Opposition to icons may have been portrayed as 'iconoclasm' and an existential threat to Orthodoxy, but this choice did not in itself make its practitioners de facto irrational art-hating demons. 

The search for 'heretical murals' or an 'iconoclast manifesto' makes about as much sense as inviting a diverse group of remarkable painters of the 1920's, including the likes of Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, Marc Chagall and Otto Dix, to put up a hand if they intend to make 'degenerate art'. One of the most exciting aspects of the Hardham murals is the affirmation that the creative output of Byzantium embraced a much broader spectrum of beliefs, styles and approaches than is conventionally recognised. For all that they might bicker and fight, and in spite of accusations and denials, 'Orthodox' and 'heretic' were nonetheless family. 

Breaking the image: a 12th-century Ai Weiwei?

The Fall

My previous posts have set the scene in the part of West Sussex where the Sussex muralist worked and taught. By now you should have a pretty good idea where the three painted churches are, and a picture of the ways in which the area's Roman legacy was still very present in the early 1100's, when the frescos were being made. 

We'll turn now to look in detail at the murals themselves. I'll begin with a sequence of posts focussing on a painting which is probably most emblematic of all the challenging images which survive from this artist's brush: Hardham's Deception of Eve and Adam. It was audacious when it was made: the artist's own Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, and every bit as much a slap in the face for traditional art lovers of its day as Ai Weiwei's 1995 provocative sequence of photos, which showcased the wilful destruction of a two-thousand-year-old vase. 

The Deception of Eve and Adam
Hardham chancel wall

Ai Weiwei's unsettling triptych still provokes discussion concerning the monetised value of art, authenticity, and respect for cultural heritage. It seems the Sussex muralist knew very well what they were doing with their own carefully judged swipe at convention in The Deception of Eve and Adam. Other of the Hardham murals suggest that the medieval painter was fully aware of the possible consequences for challenging the accepted idea of what a holy image must be. 

Art-martyrs

The north wall/lower frieze in the nave at Hardham shows a sequence of historical martyrs who challenged attitudes towards the sacred image, turning their agonised gaze towards us as they endure appalling torture. These were once the first eyes that would meet ours, upon entering the church. Saint George is scourged on a wheel for refusing to worship Emperor Datian's idols, calling on God to 'utterly destroy these miserable images, even as wax melts at a hot fire' (Aelfric, c. 996). Further along the wall, the hands of notorious ninth-century art dissident Lazaros Zographos are scorched to the bone by red-hot iron plates. 

St George is tortured on the wheel for disrespecting the idols
Hardham nave, north wall, lower frieze

Lazaros Zographos has his hands mutilated with red-hot iron plates:
in the foreground stands the bowl of the torturer's brazier.
Hardham nave, north wall, lower frieze

Lazaros had continued to paint in contravention of an imperial prohibition on representational art during the period 815-843: Byzantine Emperor Theophilos ordered the mutilation of the recalcitrant artist's hands, so he would never be able to paint again. In spite of the Emperor's assault Lazaros survived, and found enough strength and fine control in his left hand (shown being seared in the Hardham portrait) to continue his work. It was with great pride that the Hardham artist placed their own unstoppable creativity and refusal to moderate their work in the company of this stoical welcoming committee, dedicating their challenging new mural composition to the memory of these brave historical art-martyrs. The Sussex muralist walked in their footsteps, following the same treacherous path, acknowledging the art-martyrs' fate as possibly their own.

'The only way to build a new world is to destroy the old one'

Above this roll-call of art-heroes on the north wall is a small cartouche, a rare depiction of the apocryphal story of The Fall of the Idols of Sotinen told in The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Ch. 22-23. It shows two temple idols in a before-and-after scenario. In the first frame, the figures are shown in their pomp, arranged proudly on a shelf. This sets the scene for the chaos to come in the frame below, when the shelf collapses. The idols now come to life as animated homunculi, tumbling helplessly to the floor the moment the infant Christ entered the pagan temple. Like the second frame of Ai Weiwei's photographic freeze-frame of the doomed Han vase, the inverted, flailing figurines in the second frame remain tantalisingly suspended in the air, about to be smashed to shards. 

The Fall of the Idols of Sotinen
(Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew Ch. 22-23)
Hardham nave, north wall, upper frieze

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (first two frames)
Ai Weiwei, 1995

For both artists, their work was about breaking idols. Alarming for us, however, is the dissonant thought that their iconoclasm didn't stem from a simple hatred of images. On the contrary, the image destruction of Ai and the Hardham muralist expresses instead a profound love of art: Saint George, confronted with the Emperor's idols, repeatedly refused to kiss the cherished images, yearning instead something more spiritual, more enduring than a flippant endorsement of Datian's pride and esteem. Ai Weiwei was placed under surveillance and threat of arrest as a 'deviant' for Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Responding to furious criticism, Ai paraphrased Mao Zedong in words which echo George's condemnation: 'the only way to build a new world is to destroy the old one'. 

How would Hardham's innovatory paintings be received? Would the audacious frescos survive the critics, or was the Hardham artist about to become a 'deviant', earning their own place in the gallery of art-martyrs alongside Lazaros Zographos and Saint George? 

Why do you worship plaster and paint?

'I don't get it: what is so threatening about Hardham's Deception of Eve and Adam?' 

It's one of the best-preserved and most beautiful images of the whole composition, and seems to show just the usual figures: Eve, Adam, and the Serpent in the tree of knowledge of good and evil, offering forbidden fruit. Well, it's not the alluring central image that's the problem: it's those trompe l'oeil hooks, appearing to stick out from the wall, which will blow your mind. The scene has been painted to look like a cloth hanging, suspended by 'loops' which attach to those 'hooks' in the wall. 

What are we looking at? Is it Eve and Adam? or a painting of Eve and Adam? or a painting of a tapestry of Eve and Adam? The real presence of the saints in a holy icon recedes, fading until it vanishes, so all we are left with is plaster and paint: there's nothing behind that 'cloth' except the wall. Sometimes iconoclasts weren't necessarily trying to 'destroy icons'. This was something even more disturbing.

Detail from The Deception of Eve and Adam, showing the trompe l'oeil hooks and loops
Hardham chancel

Even as we think about the dilemma of biblical Eve and Adam and their gullibility in listening to the deceitful Serpent, we teeter on the edge of our own, new deception, about to make the same old mistake. We're in the world of Magritte's Treachery of Images (1929): are we going to carry on, falling for the allure of art, mistaking the treasured image for some sort of reality, or can we break out of the cycle? Like Banksy's Love is in the Bin (2018), the Hardham trompe l'oeil Deception draws attention to the fact we're looking at just paint on a wall: the image itself threatens to shred any sacred value, even as we look at it.

Love is in the Bin
The stencil by Banksy sold at Sotheby's London in 2018 for £1,042,000

This irreverent, often playful attitude to spirituality in art could drive orthodox believers round the bend. 'Why do you worship walls, and planks, and plaster, and pretty colours?' We can almost feel Patriarch Germanos II's spitting fury as, during his Lenten sermon in defence of the holy icons, he quoted the impudent words spoken to him by one these 'sons of destruction', an advocate of a twelfth-century artistic New Wave, before declaring anathema on them all as 'heretics'. Contemporary accounts can give a immediate sense of the simple head-spinning horror which an untethered painting like the Hardham trompe l'oeil could provoke among those invested in the traditional way of making sacred images imbued with the spirit of the saints, when faced with the disruptive work of a twelfth-century Ai Weiwei. Ask the martyrs on Hardham's north wall, like Lazaros Zographos, about their unwavering commitment to art as a powerful medium of change, and the very real threat facing the artist who used their work to question orthodox belief.

The Hardham fresco ensemble did indeed succumb to censorship, along with the artist's other work, when the challenging Sussex murals were all whitewashed within a few decades of being made. In doing so, the censor inadvertently conserved a unique record of this exceptional community, seen through the imagination of their remarkable spokesperson and artist. The revealed images can still be disturbing, even today: like the work of more recent disruptive artists, the Hardham muralist didn't paint to make you feel comfortable.

A detail from P. M. Johnston's tracing made from The Deception of Eve and Adam
showing the trompe l'oeil hooks and loops with greater clarity
V&A, 1900

Did we think there was anything behind a holy image, or special about a two-thousand year old utilitarian Han-era vase? The Deception of Eve and Adam pulls the plug on the sacredness of sacred art, so that a painting becomes a painting, nothing more, and nothing less. I'm going to devote a series of posts to unpacking the profound shockwave created by this exhilarating shift in artistic representation. 

Come and experience what all the fuss was about at these three churches in West Sussex, and follow the blog to get the updates which will show you around all the elements which make up these extraordinary and unique medieval art installations.

Coombes, where medieval paint still hangs in drips and swirls

Where is Coombes Church?

It’s on Coombes Road, adjacent to Lancing College on the River Adur, about a mile inland from the Shoreham flyover interchange on the A27. Although now a secluded hamlet, from the time before the arrival of the Romans until the time church was built Coombes and the River Adur remained at the heart of great activity. 

Coombes Church 

Shoreham Cement Works is in the distance, on the other side of the river

Decrescendo to pianissimo

The River Arun, which surrounds Hardham Church about 16 miles west of Coombes, today flows south to meet the sea at Littlehampton. Since Roman times until the period of our frescos, however, the Arun had turned east to join the River Adur (AY-DER) at Bramber, a town which the artist knew as a thriving sea port, and which had recently received a boost under the new Norman administration of William de Braose. Coombes Church was built next to a working river that was navigable by the larger boats of the day, even as far up as the town of Steyning. In the muralist’s mind map, their fresco cycles at Hardham and Coombes were, in effect, connected by the same busy tidal river. As early as the mid-1300’s, however, the Adur's sea window was starting to close. The upstream towns were beginning to see their fortune turn, going into decline as their population and activity were greatly reduced by drifting shingle, and the steady silting up of the estuary. The Arun changed its allegiance, shifting its course several times before establishing its modern outlet at Littlehampton around 1500. Coombes Church remained part of a small village into the late 1600’s. It now stands isolated on a hillside, next to Coombes Farm.

A picture of the Downs

The church is considerably shorter now than in it used to be in its heyday. It seems a tower had been added at some time to the west end, perhaps at the same time that alterations were being made to the church during the later middle ages. By this stage, our dramatic paintings were seen only in the collective memory, already long hidden by whitewash. A map with Coombes Church in 1677 shows a tower similar to one attached to the nearby church at Botolphs, known then as 'St Peter of Old Bridge' (i.e. not the Hardham church). This tower was added in the thirteenth century, and topped with a pyramid-shaped roof, like the one we see in the old drawing of Coombes. However the encroaching slope on which Coombes Church stands was gradually making its tower unstable. By 1602 the structure was found to be 'a little faltie', before in 1724 a surveyor was called in to assess the damage caused by the 'Tower and part of the church lately falln'. The reassuring and uplifting view these towers gave of activity on the river, observing the ships that sailed up the river with the tide from Pende harbour (somewhere near Lancing) towards the ports at Bramber, Botolphs and Steyning, would have been quite different to the quiet, constrained existence of the Adur today.

Coombes Church seen in a map of 1677, 

when its west tower was still standing

The modern, post-industrial vista from the church is dominated by the quarry, chimneys, silos and mills of The Shoreham Cement Works. Disused since 1991, this state-of-the-art postwar plant had its roots in early small-scale mineral excavations which burned chalk in brick kilns to produce fine lime plaster, a local industry probably since the Roman occupation. Inside the church, we’re surrounded by the same high-quality lime paste which had attracted The Portland Cement Company to Shoreham in the 1870’s, plaster which is the sine qua non for fresco painting. Deployed by the Sussex muralist as a bonding medium for their locally sourced paints, Sussex lime plaster combines with local earth pigments in murals which are, quite literally, a picture of the Downs.

A map of the area (1725) shows the Erlingham Chalkpits 

on the other side of the river to Coombes

The site is currently occupied by Shoreham Cement Works. 

The postcard looks across the river towards Coombes Church

Craters, drips and swirls

Coombes is the smallest and most damaged of the three surviving medieval art ensembles. Gothic windows and modern funerary monuments, smashed through what appeared at the time to be blank walls, made large craters in many of the fresco scenes while the paintings were still concealed. The pictorial narrative scheme also vanishes as it approaches the place at the west end where the wall was rebuilt, after the faulty tower was demolished. In compensation, you’ll be treated to a really close-up view of what remains of the medieval artwork which, unlike Hardham, is very well conserved. Some of the paint on the chancel arch still hangs in swirls and drips, as if the artist has dabbed the wall, put down their brush, and stepped outside for a break. To see this sort of thing in an art gallery would be wonderful, but to walk into such an art ensemble, finding yourself surrounded by pictorial narrative which still talks to us after nine hundred years, is truly transcendental.

A design on the chancel arch representing Heaven's starry canopy

showing the crispness of the preserved brush strokes

Don’t just visit for the wonderful paintings

Strolling down to the Adur, we can perhaps imagine the river’s more expansive presence at the time of the Domesday Book, when Coombes was a sizeable village, and hogs foraged in the woods. Steam rises gently from boiling hearths tended by the ecclesiastical slaves of Coombes Church, evaporating brine drawn from the river's tidal flats: some eighteen large saltern mounds, the accumulated waste heaps of medieval salt production, were found next to Coombes Church and farm alone. The village grew in importance as it played its part in a lucrative network which brought together local specialities, the production of food staples which were essential not just to villagers, but had a signifiant role in the area's development of maritime trade. Locally produced pork, freshly caught herring and mackerel from Shoreham boats, bream, mullet, pike and eels from weirs and fish traps would have more than satisfied local demand, allowing a surplus to be prepared, brined or smoked, and packed into casks brimming with salt to be sold in Bramber and Steyning. Barrels of the Adur's salt and preserved foods might be taken on board, stowed as ship's meat on freshly-victualled vessels which sailed by the church, on their way back out to the English Channel. The prosperous, international years of Coombes and its river were good, while they lasted.

Back in the church, look out for the holes and grooves in the wooden floor slat under the arch where a screen once separated the nave from the sanctuary. While you’re down there, notice that you’ve been walking on original terracotta floor tiles. Look out too for the incised Nestorian cross, its four equal-arms flaring towards the tip and mounted on a pedestal, carved in the stone of the chancel arch. Side lighting from the flashlight on your mobile also reveals many small graffitoed crosses, scratched and gouged around the entrance door. The simple oak door itself, with its speculatorium (peephole with a sliding cover), is original. Did the muralist close this same door, casting a backwards glance through the hatch, as they left for the last time nearly nine hundred years ago? 

Crosses scratched around the entrance door

The original 12th-century oak door still has its slatted 
speculatorium, or peep hole