ARTS
Exhibitions
Invasions of Italy
Roderick Conway Morris
I Normanni (Palazzo Venezia, Rome, till 30 April; Doge's Palace, Venice, 27 May — 18 Sept) I Goti (Palazzo Reale, Milan, till 8 May) The Normans were the wrong people in the right place at the right time. Until the end of the 9th century they were indistin- guishable from numerous other bands of pagan nordic marauders, which for decades had been carrying murder and mayhem deep into the heartlands of Christian Europe — 'From the fury of the North- men, good Lord deliver us' becoming, at that time, a component of the Litany.
In the process of trying to reduce the civilised world to a stone-age wilderness, one particular group of Northmen, whose name was to evolve into the form 'Nor- mans', possessed themselves of a large part of northern France. Moved perhaps by nascent stirrings of that desire for respectability that later manifested itself in their obsessive pursuit of noble titles, they embraced Christianity when Charles the Simple formally ceded Rouen to them in 911.
From the outset the Normans were few in number. Hardly any of them were women (a fact attested by the almost total absence of Scandinavian female names among them), so they were obliged to interbreed with their subjects. Before the 10th century was out, they had lost their language and were speaking French. Among the only residual customs they maintained was a kind of legalised concubi- nage — the most prominent product of which was William the Bastard (later called the Conqueror).
Transformed in so many other ways, the Normans none-the-less kept alive their warlike traditions, and their development of heavy cavalry made them more or less unstoppable. Their thirst for booty remained unassuaged — and for land, which was treated as essentially a form of booty to be divided up along with the other spoils of war. But land in Normandy was limited (and banishment the common fate of contumacious nobles who dared chal- lenge the Duke's authority). Thus, from the beginning of the 11th century, wandering bands of Norman freebooters, mercenaries and crusaders started turning up in Italy, Spain, Dalmatia, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and North Africa, carving out for them- selves new fiefdoms and kingdoms if the opportunity arose. As the French historian, Lucien Musset, points out in one of his sev- 'St Michael and the Dragon, c. 1120, bass-relief Ipswich eral enjoyable essays in the hefty, colourful and informative exhibition catalogue (to which a wide range of scholars and art his- torians have contributed), over the two centuries of this haphazard process of Nor- man expansion, only a few hundred Nor- mans left the homeland every year — save at exceptional times, such as during their annexation of Britain and the First Cru- sade.
Norman castles and churches were the primary, distinctive products of their cul- ture. Both were consciously constructed as overwhelming emblems of power and con- trol — a point not lost on Bishop Wulfstan who, deploring the destruction of Worces- ter's ancient cathedral to make way for a Norman one, declared: 'We unworthy beings have destroyed the works of saints, solely to win praise for ourselves. That era of holy men did not know how to build magnificent edifices, yet knew how to devote themselves to God under any kind of roof .... Unlike us who, betraying our souls, busy ourselves with heaping up piles of stones.'
Norman tastes and ambitions saw to it that military and monumental buildings maintained a broad consistency of style from Scotland to Sicily, but in the decora- tive and applied arts they embraced a kalei- doscopic range of contemporary forms and traditions — from the Bayeux 'tapestry' (an Anglo-Saxon embroidery, made in Canter- bury), to the sumptuous Byzantine mosaics of their palaces and churches in Sicily, to luxurious moveable goods such as Islamic textiles and carved ivory coffers.
It was a laudable idea to hold this show ID Italy, but a pity that Rome and Venice were chosen over, say, Palermo, Monreale or Cefalu, which would have offered the architectural background the exhibition so much craves. Equally, whilst there is plenty here on which to feast one's eyes, the factu- al and interpretative presentation of this treasure-trove of nearly 400 pieces — from metalwork and ivories to sculpture and stained glass belonging to collections all over Europe — is so superficial and lacking In the kind of imagination and clarity of Purpose of the admirable Romanesque Art show at the Hayward Gallery a decade ago, that the end result is sometimes scarcely more illuminating than a display of booty after the Norman sack of some hapless city.
While Norman expansion was charac- terised by expeditions mounted by free- lance adventurers, the Goths, in contrast, were in the habit of moving en masse. They originated on the shores of the Baltic, and having entered recorded history in the 1st century AD, they spread in a series of migrations into what are now Poland, Hun- gary, Rumania, Ukraine, Crimea, and eventually occupied Italy, Spain and large Parts of France. These warrior-agricultural- ists defeated the Romans at Adrianople in 378, in a battle in which the Emperor Valens himself was killed, and thereafter the civilised world was encouraged to cohabit with them, and frequently to con- cede large areas of the former empire to their rule.
When the Emperor Zeno decided in 488 to topple the unruly barbarian King Odoac- er (who, having been granted the title of Patrician by Constantinople, commanded northern Italy and Dalmatia), he did so by calling in Theodoric and his Ostrogoth fol- lowers from their then homeland on the southern banks of the Danube in Bulgaria. `With Theodoric,' wrote Procopius, 'went the people of the Goths, putting their wives and children and as much of their furniture as they could take with them in their wag- ons.' It was, as an Italian bishop recorded, `a world that migrated'. Theodoric's over- throw of Odoacer ushered in a brilliant period of revival for Roman civilisation in Italy, during which not only Ravenna (where some of the astounding mosaics commissioned by Theodoric can still be seen today), but also cities such as Milan, Verona and Pavia rose again as beautiful and prosperous urban centres. The Goths exhibition in Milan traces the whole sweep of Gothic history from their emergence in the primeval forests of north- eastern Europe to the golden years of their rule in 6th-century Italy and 7th-century Spain. The opening sections, which benefit from extensive loans from Eastern Europe, are necessarily strongly archaeological in content, but give a vivid and suggestive pic- ture of Gothic material culture. The motifs of the gold cloison jewellery, found every- where the Goths settled from Russia to Spain, reveals a strongly conservative streak in these wandering barbarians. The later parts of the show focusing on Theodoric's Italy and Gothic Spain deftly illustrate the progressive blending of Goth- ic and Roman cultures.
The Goths succeeded in mastering and colonising far larger tracts of Europe than the Normans, who were always very thin on the ground, could have dreamed of, but by the Middle Ages they and their language had vanished, as they were absorbed into the local cultures of the lands they had invaded (though in the mid-16th century a western ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, had a tantalising meeting with a Goth from the Crimea, where isolated communities of them still existed, hundreds of years after the last of their race had disappeared in Europe).
The Normans' initial failure to integrate with the local population produced in Britain a remarkable phenomenon; the often absentee invaders, near enough to their new estates to shuttle back and forth, failed to learn Anglo-Saxon, and few of the natives ever got beyond basic French. The upshot was that strange hybrid, English the Normans' most unintentional, richest and most enduring legacy of all.
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