Wake up, Neo...The Matrix, AI, and the Ancient Athenian Paint-Off

 The Ancient Athenian Paint-Off

Technical skill at imitating reality seems to have been a yardstick by which the best ancient Greek and Roman artists were judged. Turning once more to Pliny’s Historia naturalis, we hear of the two most celebrated painters of early decades of the fourth century BCE. Real-life creative kolossoi of their day, old master Zeuxis of Heraclea and hotshot Parrhasios of Athens locked horns in an artistic rivalry that could be resolved only in a public duel of the paintbrushes. The Award for Most Lifelike Artwork was not be decided, however, by appeal to a fickle public vote, but by more discerning and unimpeachable arbiters:

Matthäus Merian: The Contest of Zeuxis and Parrhasios (Frankfurt, 1619)

They say that Parrhasios was drawn into a contest with Zeuxis, who produced a picture of grapes so real, even the birds flapped their wings about his scena. For his part, Parrhasios made a picture of a curtain so lifelike that Zeuxis, puffed up with the approval of the birds, called for the curtain to be drawn back to reveal the painting. Realising he’d been duped, Zeuxis accepted defeat fair and square, saying that while he had tricked the birds, Parrhasios had tricked an artist.

Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, Book 35, Chapter 36

The Deception of Eve and Adam

(Hardham, chancel arch west) 

Pliny's story of Parrhasios's curtain is the earliest recorded example of an intentionally deceptive painting. Placing their own work within this venerable Greek tradition of wily artists, the Hardham muralist is happy to borrow the famous curtain trick from one of the great figures of early Greek art as a way of bringing to life The Deception of Eve and Adam for a modern audience. Are you going to be a foolish Zeuxis, putting out a hand out to take the ‘apple’ from the Serpent? Once again, illusion pulls us in, not just visually, but physically drawing us into the drama. We’re the hungry mouse in Sosus's famous mosaic in ancient Pergamon who can’t resist nibbling at the forbidden feast of trompe l'oeil. After so many centuries these visual mind-mechanisms are still whirring, dragging us out of the torpor of artistic complacency to gnaw on deceptive artwork that makes us reflect upon the very nature and limits of perception.

Asàratos òikos: 'The Unswept Floor'
Rome, Villa Hadriana c. 135 CE,
after Sosus of Pergamon, 2nd century BCE

Ceci n'est pas un rideau: 'This is not a curtain'

Parrhasios's deceptive curtain teases the viewer. Like proud Zeuxis, we want to pull back the cloth to uncover the ‘truth’ it conceals, only to graze our hand on the wall. Perhaps we came expecting to be spiritually fulfilled, nourished, even healed by holy icons, those windows to the divine, like birds flocking to peck at seemingly delicious grapes. Instead, the Hardham artist bumps our beak, adopting Parrhasios’s ruse to show us that there are no saints here. Just some plastered walls smeared with paint. The value of art isn't about possessing an object made with pigments and dust, but our personal enrichment by detached engagement with the imagery.

We’ve been attracted by the artist’s playful illusion into a rematch of Pliny’s great Athenian art duel, only to find that Zeuxis has quit the table, leaving you to play his hand. In this Christian recasting of the legendary paint-off we’re in the hot seat, and rolling for high stakes. Old Zeuxis damaged his personal dignity and reputation through his hubristic error when he mistook a painting for something real. If we now get this wrong and reach out for the apple, doomed ever to repeat the mistake of Eve and Adam, then mankind will remain locked in spiritual death, living the miserable fallen life of our ancient mother and father, weeping bitter tears of regret as we stand at the gates, shut out from Christian paradise and communion with God... no pressure then. 

'...the grapes were so real, even the birds flapped their wings around the scena'
Matthäus Merian: The Contest of Zeuxis and Parrhasios (Frankfurt, 1619), detail

Eve, the Serpent, and the Apple
Hardham, chancel wall west

‘The wretchedness of visible things’

If the painting is the trap, our engagement with art can also be our the get-out-of-jail card. The deceptive fresco, like ancient Sosus's messy mosaic floor, can help train us to develop what the Byzantine mystic Symeon the New Theologian calls pneumatikōs blépontes, or 'spiritual vision', setting us free us from the problematic and sentimental relationship with the visual which threatens to holds us prisoner. 

No more grasping at painted fruit: a liberal approach to art, where paintings aren’t endowed with value, or given a fixed ‘meaning’, or filled with the promise of a window to saintly presence, can open our eyes to an imaginative world beyond the 'wretchedness of visible things' to emerge filled with 'the light which transcends word and thought and every created light' (Symeon the New Theologian, 'The Allegory of the Prisoner', Constantinople, late 10th century). Symeon's 'spiritual vision' (as Charles Barber writes) put the sacred icon on trial, opening the door to a fresh approach to the image and enlightened artistic experimentation. The untethered painting opens itself up to a variety of interpretation, and to allegory. Look into that window now: who knows what you might see?

If you thought that Symeon's prisoner, who breaks out of the illusion which holds him captive, is beginning to sound rather like 'The Matrix', you're not wrong: the screenplay of the Wachowskis' film drew inspiration from Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave', the same story of mystical revelation which had inspired Symeon the New Theologian's 'spiritual vision'. In Plato's Republic book vii, a cave-dwelling prisoner, contented with experiencing only shadows, is unchained and dragged blinking out of the dark cavern of illusion into the sunlight, to discover things as they really are. In our scenario, the trompe l'oeil painting plays the part of Morpheus, offering Neo the choice of either remaining captive in art's comforting illusion, or using art as a chance to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, in search of  'truth, nothing more'. But that needs its own new blogpost.

Icons and idols

The Hardham artist's work challenged the contemporary orthodoxy of the holy icon in the twelfth century, but we continue to face our own icon challenges today. Our fondness for CGI avatars allows production companies to prolong the creative lives of much-loved musicians and actors. Idols of pop and screen like ABBA and Harrison Ford have recently been rejuvenated in images which offer a willing audience the desired impression that we are still blessed by the presence of never-ageing greats, the saints of our day. 

Our naive and susceptible affection for the image can also lead to problems. Credible AI impersonations can make public figures and politicians do and say unexpected things, acting out implausible and sometimes compromising scenarios. The Hardham artist asks us: just how comfortable are we about allowing ourselves to slump into this cosy relationship with the image, and with our senses? If we hope to move on from Eve and Adam we must recognise and nurture our spiritual hunger for the unseen, assuming a more responsible place in a sensory world than simply pecking at artistic realism, grazing habitually on painted fruit, accepting the fateful apple and taking the testimony of our eyes and ears at face value. 

Birds peck at Zeuxis's painted grapes.
Unknown artist, Amsterdam 1613

Wake up

So here we are, nine hundred years later, and Hardham’s trompe l’oeil is still there, prodding the viewer, telling us to WAKE UP and adopt a more sophisticated and active approach in how we relate to what we see, and to the art we create. The Hardham artist, ever-conscious of their role in a long and distinguished artistic tradition, has secured themselves a place in the pantheon alongside Pliny's artistic greats of ancient Athens.

In this twelfth-century remix of the playful and confrontational artwork enjoyed in ancient Greece, the Hardham artist explores a radical, innovatory approach to visual representation, a direct challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy which encouraged believers to venerate the holy icon as a 'window to the saints'. Sure, people may still find the Hardham painting ‘most unusual and unique’ to quote David Park (1988), but like those ancient Greek tricksters, the mosaicist Sosus and the painter Parrhasios, the Hardham artist is still having a laugh.

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.