BOOKS AND WRITERS
DONS and others have long desired a reasonably short survey of mediaeval art. It is a desire that will never be fully satisfied. Mediaeval art, like mediaeval thought and mediaeval religion and, indeed, any other broad topic qualified by the adjective mediaeval, is a Proteus that changes shape before it can be grasped, a Hydra that grows two new heads for every one that has become a museum specimen. Mediaeval art is not a particular school or type of art : it is simply all the art that came into being between 312 and 1492 or whatever other arbitrary limits are chosen. There is no bracket that can include Celtic, Saxon, Romanesque, Hellenesque, Arabesque, neo-Byzantine, Gothic, Quattrocento and Flemish, and nothing in the cultural history of Europe causes so many surprises to the alert student of history as does the migration of art-forms across the Mediterranean, across Europe and across the narrow seas that divide the British Isles from each other and from all else. It is, therefore, with chastened hopes that we approach three books that have appeared or re-appeared recently, one presenting itself as a handbook of mediaeval art, another pro- fessing by its title to set out the sequence of English mediaival art and the third claiming still more inclusively to be a study of mediaeval life, art and thought.*
W. R. Lethaby's well-known handbook first appeared nearly fifty years ago, and established itself at once as the standard introduction to the subject. Yet it had serious defects from the start, and in the course of years had become a snare ; it was, in fact, quite out of date. Lethaby's book, indeed, never was in any true sense an account of mediaeval art. It was almost exclusively an account of the transmission of the arts of building and large-scale decoration from the Greco-Roman and Byzantine worlds to Italy and north- western Europe, together with a sketch of the subsequent develop- ment of architecture, particularly in France. Other branches of art received a selective or perftinctory treatment, or were neglected altogether, while tributaries to the main stream, even such affluent ones as Celtic and Saxon art, received little notice. Worst of all, manuscript illumination, now rightly recognised as supremely important, both on purely aesthetic grounds and as the " carrier " of new and alien art-forms and motifs, might never have existed.
To these original faults time has added others. When Lethaby wrote, the thirteenth was the century and the Ile de France the scene of its glory. To achieve the French cathedrals and the spiritual and social setting of which they were the ultimate expres- sion, all the vast creations of earlier centuries had moved. Fifty years has seen a great shift of interest, due partly to the slow turning of the unresting wheel of taste, partly to a real quickening of perception, with a consequent desire to turn away from the mature, the flawless and the serene either backwards to the primitive, or forwards to the time of transition. In addition, a succession of historians and critics of art have drawn our attention to centres of artistic life and to beauties hitherto unsuspected or at least unappreciated. The archaeologists, helped by such uncovenanted mercies as Sutton Hoo, have established the claims of Scandinavian and early Saxon art both in isolation and in combination with other forms ; others have shown the riches of Celtic and early Romanesque art in England. On the Continent M. Edouard Male, moving backwards from the thirteenth century, was one of the first to throw a searchlight upon the origins of Romanesque sculpture and Cluniac art—a field since then so brilliantly illuminated by the excavations of 'Dr. Conant, and the writings and photographs of Miss Joan Evans and Mr. A. Gardner. In consequence, for many nowadays mediaeval sculpture begins at Moissac and ends with the west portal of Chartres. They regard the cathedral of Amiens and its fellows, to borrow Mr. Sitwell's vivid simile, as just one more, if the largest, of the derelict and sooty locomotives that
* Medieval Art. By W. R. Lethaby: revised by D. Talbot Rice. (Nelson. 30s.) The Sequence of English Medieval Art. By Walter Oakeshott. (Faber.
35s.)
The Gothick North. By Sacheverell Sitwell. (John Lehmann. 12s. 6d.)
one passes in the railway yards on the way south to better things. At the other end of the period an equally strong revulsion of taste has taken place, at least among Englishmen. Lethaby lost interest after Westminster Abbey, or at latest after the Angel Choir at Lincoln. Since then, largely owing to the insistence and brilliant photography of Francis Bond, the so-called Perpendicular style of 1350-1430 has had full justice done to it. Finally, in a field wholly neglected by Lethaby, that of illumination, scholars and critics have published and discussed many of the incomparable treasures of painted books that lie, too often unvisited, in so many collections, both public and private.
What, then, does the new Lethaby do to meet the demands of this new world ? Too little, we are half disposed to say, grateful as we are for the eighty new and excellently chosen illustrations. Lethaby was never fully a classic ; his judgements, his ipsissima verba, are not sacred. Consequently, the editorial technique adopted by Professor Talbot Rice, that of printing a fairly integral text accompanied by dialectical or contrapuntal footnotes, appears too reverential. But the main criticism will be that the great lacunae remain. There is still nothing adequate in the text on early French Romanesque, nothing on illumination, little on the Italian primitives, nothing on English Perpendicular, or on the Indian summer of Gothic in the Iberian peninsula. Professor Talbot Rice is, of course, fully aware of this, and we could have wished. that he had been less modest and had frankly re-written Lethaby. There are certain types of classic, such as Ueberweg's History of Philosophy or Baedeker's Guides that can be re-written again and again, re-appearing like an old friend not seen for twenty years, full of memories of the past enriched by the experience of today.
If a principal fault of Lethaby was his neglect of manuscript painting, Mr. Oakeshott, at least in his title, goes to the other extreme by implying that mediaeval art and illumination are con- vertible terms. He would not, of course, maintain this for a moment, and his book is, in fact, an admirably modest and objective study of a single restricted field. If it has a fault, it is that in its brevity it fails to do justice to marginal schools and finer shades of design and technique. In his narrative he uses and reflects the more specialised work of the experts at the British Museum and the connoisseurs of the Roxburghe Club, but he has some valuable appendices and notes which embody his own researches. j-Iis choice of illustrations is particularly good, even if the colour plates, which have a strange beauty of their own, give yet one more proof of the impossibility of reproducing even a hint of the dazzling and lavish variety of mediaeval colouring.
Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell's book is a simple reprint from the editioit of twenty years ago, and gives no indication that some of the precious things described, at Naples or Rimini or elsewhere, have since been destroyed or marred. It is neither a handbook nor a monograph, but an imaginative pilgrimage of an extremely sensitive and independent mind to a number of the less familiar remains of the art and society of the latest centuries of the Middle Ages. French and Flemish tapestries and illuminations, and Italian, Catalonian and Portuguese architecture are the principal themes, and every page provokes and defies criticism. If certain passages, such as those describing the river-washing of the tapestries of Pastrana or the delicacies of the unfinished chapel of Batalha, are of an arresting and unforgettable beauty, as an interpretation of mediaeval life it cannot stand. The knights and the castles and the monasteries are in their way as romantic as those of Keats and Scott. Keen appreciation of beauty, of whatever kind and wherever found, is there, but it is not informed by that intuitive sympathy and under- standing of the artist and his society that gave such a memorable quality to Mr. Sitwell's more recent study of Inigo Jones, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, of the superb assurance of Castle Howard and the sombre splendours of Seaton Delaval. Yet this book, too, serves to show how much there is yet to be discovered in the art of the
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