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