Word: englishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hardly visit the great exhibition of English Gothic art, "The Age of Chivalry," which opened this month at the Royal Academy in London, without mixed feelings of delight, surfeit and loss. The first, obviously, because this is the first show to trace so large a part of England's cultural inheritance. It starts in 1216 with the enthronement of Henry III and ends with the death of the last Plantagenet, Richard II, in 1399, a span of nearly 200 years that brought Gothic art to England from France...
Sturdy and reflective, unwilling to accept imported style wholesale, English artists and craftsmen took French Gothic and, once it had been imposed on them by the Norman hierarchy in the major arts like architecture, transformed it in their minor arts. The image of the cathedral as the castle of God, its porches guarded by twin impregnable towers, was inspired by the donjons that the feudal barons built along the Seine and the Loire at the end of the 11th century, but in English cathedrals like Wells (constructed between 1186 and 1300) it acquired a definitive grandeur as the sign...
...also connected to a pervasive sense of cultural loss, for large as this show is, it is the merest fragment of the vanished whole it attempts to describe. No people in the history of Europe turned on their own traditional art with a more consuming fury than the English did on their medieval heritage. The destruction began in a small way with the random acts of zealots like the Lollards. They were enraged by the apparent contradiction between the Second Commandment ("Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image") and the "idolatrous" cult of statues of the Holy Family...
...martyr Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, eight men were needed to carry all the gold out to the King's wagons.) Henry VIII - mainly wanted to raise money, but with Oliver Cromwell the vandalism turned ideological. The Roundheads were determined to erase every last trace of the image in English religious life, leaving only the abstract purity of the Word, the uncompromised Logos. Ordinary plunder, which spares wood and stone, became iconoclasm, which in the name of God spares nothing...
Today, for instance, not a single English 13th century wooden crucifix figure survives in England; to find a probable example, the organizers of this show had to borrow an exquisite polychrome Christ from Norway, where it had been made by a traveling English artist for a church in Bergen around 1230-45. Just as in the greatest monuments of English Gothic today -- the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral, say -- one sees only the bare background of a decorative and sculptural scheme whose figural richness can never be restored or even reimagined, so the remains of medieval sculpture that have been...