It should not work. It should not even exist. Nothing about the Bayeux tapestry makes sense according to any norms of art: its creators couldn’t do proper portraits or pictorial depth or landscapes or any of the sophisticated things we associate with timeless masterpieces. When they depict a church, they have to write what it is: Ecclesia. But these artists – or who knows, perhaps she was a single artist – created something so stupefying and delightful, so abundant in visual thrills, horrors and humour, it beats almost everything else ever painted or carved – let alone embroidered on a strip of linen.
And now here it is, in front of my eyes, close enough to touch if it wasn’t behind a glass screen of such high quality you never catch a reflection. The British Museum’s display of this wonder is perfect. It’s laid out in its case, the length of a gallery, which you reach after some archaeological foreplay involving armour, quotes from chronicles and info screens. Then you see the colours of the tapestry below you from a parapet – russets, greens, yellows – after which you simply start at the beginning and follow the story rightwards. Surrounded by darkness and picked out by finely adjusted lighting, the Bayeux tapestry shines. My only quibble is the ethereal soundtrack – shouldn’t there be drums, oliphants, troubadours?
I managed a pretty satisfying eyeful in under an hour, although more than the allotted 40 minutes. This is pacy art: it hurtles along. In fact, that’s how it embraces you. Your heart pounds with a sense of doom and destiny. This is, you realise, the greatest battle in art.
It has plenty of competition. Battles and war have engrossed artists down the millennia, from Trajan’s Column to Picasso’s Guernica, usually in scenes of hopeless chaos. So one thing that’s unique about the Bayeux tapestry, and key to its dramatic zip, is the clear and definitive nature of the battle it depicts.
On 14 October 1066, Harold, recently crowned king of Anglo-Saxon England, and his army faced the newly landed forces of William, Duke of Normandy, near Hastings. By the end of the day, Harold was dead, along with devastating numbers of his soldiers and nobles – and the Normans had conquered England. They never left. This battle changed a nation and William succeeded where those later would-be cross-Channel invaders – Philip II of Spain, Napoleon and Hitler – would all fail.
So a big battle with a very clear conclusion. As you pad along the British Museum display, savouring lovely details like a servant eavesdropping on a conversation, or one of Harold’s people carrying his hunting dog to a ship so it doesn’t get its paws wet, you are led through the buildup to the big fight with mounting excitement.
When hell is finally unleashed, the Norman cavalry pound with such force you can almost hear hooves shake the earth. Norman archers fire continuous volleys that send arrow shafts straight into Saxon bodies. Meanwhile, the Saxons stand manfully in hauberks with their axes and take it. They give it, too, to the point that William seems for a moment to be losing the day, horses tipping over, knights falling.
It’s in such images that the Bayeux tapestry transcends everything you could reasonably expect of a medieval artwork. The scene where the Norman cavalry seems to falter is simultaneously realistic and nightmarish. One horse is completely upended, its face to the earth, rear legs in the sky. Another tips over as its rider slides forward, his armoured body suddenly a helpless rag.
As you move along the strip, what hits you is its brilliant sense of momentum. Early on, two messengers race across the French countryside, their hair flying out behind them in straight black threads: it’s a thrilling way to convey speed. Such bone-shaking velocity is shown again and again in superbly simple ways. At Hastings, you see the Norman knights gradually gather pace. Their horses calmly prance, riders bolt upright with lances aloft, then one rider tilts forward as his horse lowers its head and bends its front legs in a run. Soon the legs of all the horses are flying in rhythm as the knights hold their lances ready to throw, adding to the sense of forward thrust.
It’s the 11th-century answer to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion photograph sequences. We follow the change in speed as if it was happening to a single figure. The Normans are so disciplined they seem be to one single, lethal horseman – and that is why they will win.
While you are dragged forward, you are also led up and down, to meander in a marginal world of monsters and myths. Bizarre goings-on in the borders above and below the action constantly interrupt the drive of the story. The gryphons, dragons and square-winged, hieratic birds of prey seem much bigger and bolder in life than reproduction and harder to ignore.
I thought I’d detected some structure to it all: the top margin is more ordered and sublime, suggesting the heavenly sphere (Halley’s Comet speeds through it like a rocket), while the creatures below look earthy and sinful. Then I saw two bare-chested female centaurs at the top spreading their arms out as if to say: “Lo and behold!” So much for logic.
The great thing about a border is that you can break it. When William’s ships speed across the Channel, their bulging, wind-filled, multicoloured sails fill the upper space. As the Battle of Hastings gets bloodier, bodies and body parts pile up in the lower one.
In both the borders and central strip, the Bayeux tapestry always set its action in a wider world, and even, when it shows the comet, a larger cosmos. As the armoured elite go to war, peasants plough and sow the fields. They are portrayed in distracting, vibrant detail and this workaday scene as the battle approaches is pointed and poignant: whoever wins, whoever rules England, country people will still work the soil. That same sudden cutaway from the rulers’ perspective happens when a woman and her child watch the Normans set their house on fire. But what you can see here, close to the stitches in such good light, is that one of the men torching the house also seems sad and conflicted.
It’s that honesty that makes this not just a fascinating medieval relic but a universal depiction of the madness that is war. If the violence is stunningly real, so are its consequences. The dead bodies pile up in mounds as Saxon after Saxon falls. King Harold didn’t really get killed by an arrow in his eye we are told, but seeing the tapestry so close, it sure looks like it. Anyway, his royal body just joins the rest. In the final scenes, the peasants, the churls, get their revenge. Little shabby figures pull the mailed hauberks off dead knights, leaving them naked.
It’s a final flourish of the precocious artistic brilliance of these 11th-century artists and craftspeople. Naked bodies emerge from their armour, pale and oddly beautiful – the complete ones, at least – as these medieval geniuses show they can depict, through embroidery, incredibly gentle, intimate nudes whose dead flesh fills the battlefield with pathos.
It ends there. But, although there’s a lost later section, this anticlimax looks perfect to me. By then, I had been drained by this epic in all its tragedy and comedy. Bodies and body parts. That’s where the war talk was headed all along.
