Mediterranean Heritage (Routledge Revivals)

David Fox

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138017528
• eBook ISBN: 9781317702481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Mediterranean Heritage, first published in 1978, offers a wide-ranging and perceptive discussion of the often concealed links between English culture and the common heritage of Western Europe: the Graeco-Roman legacy of the Mediterranean.

There seems to have been no time when England has not been in touch with the civilisations of Greece and Italy: even Stonehenge, the most dramatic survivor of our remotest past, has a carved dagger of Mycenaean pattern among its ornaments. The pioneers of a distinctly English creative vision – Shakespeare, Sidney, Milton – clearly looked to Italy. Throughout the eighteenth century 'grand tourists' found southern Europe irresistible. The Romantics all became enraptured by the Mediterranean, and passed on their fascination in some of the most passionate poetry in English.

Appearing at a time which England is more obviously a part of Europe than she has been for sixteen hundred years, Mediterranean Heritage provides valuable insights into the origins of our culture's greatest achievements.

CHAPTER 1

MEDITERRANEAN APPROACHES

One aspect of history is the progressive expansion of the human horizon. In the beginning, every man must have been what John Donne called ‘an island, entire of itself’, a lonely isolated figure in a hostile world. He can have had no knowledge of anything beyond the limits of his little group, his tribe. Increasingly, over many thousands of years, the individual has been able to enlarge his awareness, and ultimately his human faculties and creative powers. In the end, man’s world has become commensurate with the universe itself, so that today men are able to feel themselves involved in the fate of peoples in far distant countries and watched with breathless excitement when the astronauts revealed the secrets of outer space.

This has, however, been the culmination of an exceedingly gradual and arduous process of development. In this remote island on the marches of Europe, it proceeded at first far more slowly than for the peoples of the Mediterranean, who had created complex societies at a period when the British themselves were still a very primitive people. It was from these civilizations that our own was at last to come. But before considering what British culture has in more recent times owed to Greece and Italy, it will help put the picture in perspective to sketch the bare outlines of its earlier connections with them.

It may still be uncertain whether or not the original inhabitants of Britain formed part of a Mediterranean race, which brought with them the rudiments of civilization, including a knowledge of agriculture, weaving and pottery. In any event, the island’s earliest contacts with the Mediterranean world go back to near the beginnings of its history. Already Stonehenge appears to contain traces of what may be Mediterranean refinements, including a carved dagger of Mycenaean pattern. Herodotus refers to Britain, which he calls the ‘Tin Islands’, and it was the repute of the Cornish tin mines that first attracted Mediterranean traders to British shores. From at least as early as the fifth century BC, moreover, at the time when Herodotus was writing, successive waves of Celtic infiltrations were bringing the British into contact with a culture which stretched across Europe as far as the Aegean. With the La Tène Celts there came not only the iron swords which made them invincible against the Bronze Age islanders, but also art of extraordinary sophistication by the standards of that remote period. We now find the native art of Britain containing motifs derived from Italy and even decorations, like the honeysuckle ornament, which can ultimately be traced back to classical Greece itself. During the centuries which followed, the Nordic strain in British art often remained predominant, and was indeed responsible for many of its highest achievements; but more southerly influences were rarely entirely absent.

Until the Roman invasion such civilizing influences touched Britain comparatively lightly however. Then came a dramatic change: suddenly the Roman occupation in the first century of the Christian era merged the island into the greatest Mediterranean empire which the world has ever known. The existing British society of warring tribes was transformed by Roman laws and customs, institutions and organization. The British were able to share in the benefits of the most highly developed civilization in Europe. Compared with what had preceded and what was to follow, this seems a golden age in this country’s history.

The Romans brought not only law and order, but new religions and at least a veneer of learning and culture as well. The refined and literate Latin language became adopted by the Romanized Celtic upper class, even though the majority of the population no doubt contented themselves with a far less sophisticated form of speech. British art received a new direction too, classical naturalism and realism gradually replacing the more poetic curvilinear abstractions of the Celtic style.

Rome was also responsible for the country’s first proper architecture. In pre-Roman times, towns had been unknown here. Now, cities and luxurious villas similar to those in Italy sprang up in the English countryside, and the capital city of London itself was founded by the Romans. Each city was modelled on the Roman pattern, containing a forum or town centre, a basilica, and amenities like public baths, theatres, schools, inns and restaurants. The houses were substantial and elaborate constructions, with decorated walls and mosaic floors whose designs were derived from Italy, and ultimately from Greece and the Hellenistic world from which Roman culture had borrowed so lavishly.

Although the Roman civilization was essentially urban, it is not only their first towns that the British owed to the Romans, but also their first country houses. Agriculture had already been flourishing before the Roman occupation, and many Britons continued with their traditional way of life, whilst taking advantage of the wide variety of new fruits and domestic animals introduced by the Romans. However, recent excavations, such as those at Fishbourne and Lullingstone, have shown that the Roman-style villas now built by the richer farmers were on an ambitious scale, with much the same amenities and decorations as the town houses. It is evident that the Mediterranean style of gracious living was eagerly adopted by such Britons as could afford it.

For nearly four centuries, almost one-fifth of our whole recorded history, Britain remained a Roman province. It would be too little merely to say that she was influenced by the Mediterranean world throughout that long period: for all practical purposes, she was absorbed in it. Britain formed an integral part of a great empire based on Rome, where travel and trade were free. To call himself a citizen of Rome was the proudest title to which a Briton could aspire, and he would have been able to feel at home anywhere in Roman Europe.

As so often, however, civilization proved a very fragile thing, and it seems likely that the civilization imposed by our conquerors had touched mainly the élite and never penetrated very deeply. Already in the fourth century the Imperial administration started to disintegrate under the pressure of barbarian raids. The Roman interlude in Britain’s history finally came to an end when the legions were withdrawn in AD 410 and the Emperor Honorius told the British ‘civitates’ that they must see to their own defence. The achievements of centuries of Roman occupation were obliterated with frightening rapidity. The towns lay abandoned; the villas in ruins; and soon few vestiges of Rome remained, apart from her imperishable roads. Desolation and anarchy reigned in place of civilization and order. The Mediterranean light had been extinguished, although an after-glow may perhaps have been palely reflected in the Arthurian legends. The Dark Ages had begun.

None the less, not quite everything was lost. Fortunately for European civilization, the Church of Rome survived the fall of the Empire, becoming in many respects its successor; and its spiritual dominion over the minds and hearts of men was more profound and broadly based than that of the Caesars. Nearly a hundred years before the end of the Roman occupation, Christianity had been recognized by Constantine and had soon afterwards become the official Imperial religion, so that this faith, born and developed on the shores of the Mediterranean, had had time to take root in Britain. It was never totally destroyed here even in the chaos which followed the departure of the legions.

The Papacy was not indifferent to the survival of British Christianity in its hour of need, and Pope Gregory the Great sent St Augustine and Paulinus to spread the gospel. Superficial though their immediate success proved to be, the Christian faith slowly extended its hold in Britain. In the year 664, the Synod of Whitby finally decided against the rival Irish faction and in favour of Rome, thus wholeheartedly embracing the wider world of the Mediterranean; and by the end of the seventh century, when Hadrian and Theodore, two other emissaries from Italy, had completed the first organization of the English Church, many of the pagan Anglo-Saxons had been converted and Christianity had become firmly established.

Thus England came to form part of a Christian world which still breathed something of the spirit of the vanished Empire. Her membership of the universal and indivisible Church, with its international institutions and language, created a permanent connection between this island and the rest of Europe, so that England would never find herself entirely isolated in the future. Once again she was merged in an international organization based on Rome, and with a link with Italy which ensured that the continuity between her civilization and the ancient world should never be wholly severed.

In a sense, this might be described as the second, and more lasting, Mediterranean conquest of Britain. From that time until the end of the Middle Ages, a major role in English history was played by the Church of Rome and by the Latin civilization which it represented. The greatest power on the whole continent of Europe, the Church was often more than a match for the State, and the King himself would hesitate to challenge the authority of the Pope, who was his Father in God. The Church, moreover, provided a refuge for what little remained of culture and scholarship after the collapse of Roman civilization, and it can even be claimed that it was on England and Ireland that the first span of the bridge was built which would ultimately connect the medieval culture of Europe with the classical.

In order to spread the faith it was essential to spread the language of the gospel. So the Church found itself obliged to enter the educational field in a systematic fashion. Scholars were sent from Rome to set up schools where the newly converted Anglo-Saxon clergy were taught not only the Latin script and language, which became the basis of Anglo-Saxon education, but also the rudiments of classical as well as Christian literature. Thanks to this diffusion of Latin through the Church and the monasteries, some international learning and culture was able to survive even in the darkest times, and when early English literature began to develop, it was largely founded on Latin precedents.

The Church thus brought Mediterranean learning and ideas to the unlettered barbarians. It was also soon to be the main vehicle for reviving Roman influences in the arts. Even the rough Anglo-Saxon invaders could hardly fail to be impressed by the magnificent Roman buildings which they found in Britain; derelict though these were, enough was left to influence and inspire. From as early as the seventh century, when the Church and its Benedictine missionaries began to take the cultural lead, there are examples of primitive Anglo-Saxon churches modelled on Roman lines, built in stone instead of wood and sometimes with their ground-plan conforming to Italian prototypes. Masons from Rome worked on the great ecclesiastical buildings in Northumbria, and the first of the English churches in the basilican manner were built at Hexham, Ripon and York.

The barbarian invaders of the Empire had brought with them new art forms of their own, however; and after Rome’s final collapse, it had seemed for a time that Roman artistic influence in western Europe might also succumb. The art of England herself was dominated by the so-called ‘Celtic’ style, which had been developed in the monasteries of Ireland. With its emphasis on line rather than form, and on mysticism instead of realism, this was in many ways the antithesis of the Roman tradition, and is believed to have owed more to Germany and Coptic Egypt, or even to Syria, than it did to Rome. Its intricate interlaced designs and brilliantly abstract patterns (which sometimes include fabulous beasts, reminiscent of German or Scandinavian art) were often of great technical skill, with a lyrical power and a peculiar beauty of their own.

But it was not very long before Rome’s artistic influence began to revive in England as elsewhere in the West. There was a gradual return to the older and more humanistic Mediterranean styles. The latter had no monopoly, however, for Celtic and other influences did not altogether relinquish their hold. So there were often curious compromises, as when the borders of a painting are in the Celtic manner, but an almost classical figure forms its centrepiece. It was to be several centuries before the synthesis of these very different styles, which is known as the ‘Romanesque’, was finally achieved.

Meanwhile, already in the early Middle Ages, English monks and pilgrims had begun to visit Italy and to bring back not only manuscripts, which were industriously copied in the English monasteries, but sometimes also pictures and works of art to adorn the English churches. The clergy needed representations of Christ and the saints to illustrate the Bible story; and a revolutionary change occurred after the Synod of Whitby when the Roman Church introduced the human figure, the essential Mediterranean art form, into Anglo-Saxon sacred art.

It has been suggested, too, that Roman sculptural remains may have inspired the sculptors who worked in seventh- and eighth-century England at a time when sculpture in the round was hardly being produced anywhere else in Europe; and the great stone crosses like that at Ruthwell, which are amongst the finest relics of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, were sometimes decorated with motifs evidently derived from Rome and Byzantium. The influence of Mediterranean naturalism can also be seen in the illuminated manuscripts which were in time to acquire a European reputation; and the famous Lindisfarne Gospels themselves show Italian inspiration. Although the style of painting developed in the monasteries shows the strong Celtic influence and might even be characterized as in many ways typically English, its sources were generally continental manuscripts which carried on the Mediterranean traditions.

With the Roman faith, therefore, ultimately came Roman-derived art. Much in the history of English art between AD 800 and 1200 might be summarized by saying that our artists (like those in the rest of western Europe) were working out how to reconcile their native ways of creating things with the methods and ideals of Mediterranean and Byzantine art. Frequently, classical forms would be used in a very unclassical manner, in order to express Nordic ideas far removed from those of Rome. But whereas in architecture, sculpture and painting, Roman influences were assimilated to local styles, in music, on the other hand, the Roman inspiration was practically exclusive. The Romanization of Anglo-Celtic music is described in some detail by the Venerable Bede, the eighth-century Northumbrian monk and scholar. The Roman chant, codified by Gregory the Great, stands at the beginning of the history of English music, and for a long time church music provided the only organized form of musical culture. This was music in the Roman manner, the new music introduced from Rome in the seventh century.

Thus, under the protection of the Church, some legacies of ancient Rome survived. Within the framework provided by ecclesiastical institutions, civilization could gradually revive. Finally, there came a period during the Dark Ages when the light of learning burnt more brightly in our island than anywhere on the continent of Europe. By the eighth century a new tradition of scholarship had grown up around the Benedictine monasteries which owed so much to Rome. Although the Latin language and the scriptures naturally held pride of place, increasing attention was paid to pagan as well as Christian literature. English churchmen like Aldhelm, Boniface and Bede became famous throughout Europe for their learning and their missionary zeal. Their missionary activities had lasting consequences for northern Europe, particularly those of St Wilfrid, who proselytized the heathen Frisians in 678–9, and of Boniface, who worked on the continent for twenty years in the middle of the eighth century under the direction of Rome, helping King Pepin the Short to reorganize the West German and Frankish Churches.

Scholars such as these were now to bring the erudition derived from their study of classical literature to the court of the great Frankish empire at the very heart of western Christendom. So high was their prestige that it was to England that Charlemagne looked for a model when he undertook the radical reformation of the educational system in his own dominions in order to revive classical learning in continental Europe. He persuaded Alcuin, the master of the great cathedral school at York, then the centre of English scholarship, to become head of the palace academy at his Frankish court at Aachen and undertake the direction of his reforms, with the result that the pattern established at York had been adopted in the new schools of Carolingian Europe by the end of the eighth century.

The Carolingian period saw a further cross-fertilization between English and Mediterranean culture. The native love of decoration had once again been gaining ground at the expense of classical realism, but Carolingian influences brought a return to greater naturalism, so that British art now became a branch of the European art which was based on the classical heritage. Although the development of this Mediterranean-oriented civilization was soon to be brutally interrupted by the beginning of the Viking raids, a revival took place in the time of Alfred the Great. He re-established English ties with Rome, which he had twice visited as a boy, and his love of art and literature led him to invite Italian craftsmen to England and to commission a number of new translations of Latin manuscripts, including the philosophical works of Boethius, in the hope that they would contribute to the instruction and edification of his people.

Any respite from the Vikings was usually short-lived, however, and the preconditions for a genuine renaissance were lacking in that troubled age. None the less, learning was never completely extinguished; and during the tenth century, when there was again a rather more tranquil and prosperous period for England, St Dunstan’s monastic reforms, bringing stricter observance of the Benedictine rule and renewed emphasis on education and the arts, stimulated fresh contacts with the Mediterranean world.

But it was not until after the Norman conquest that England at last became safe from the Viking pressure which had threatened to separate her from the Roman world and submerge her in a Scandinavian empire. Although the Normans themselves originated in Scandinavia, they had long been converted to Latin culture. The year 1066 was a watershed in the history of our island, for William the Conqueror then finally put it beyond doubt that England’s destiny would lie with western and not northern Europe and that she would remain one of the heirs of Rome.

In Norman times, Christianity and the spiritual authority of Rome welded Europe together even more strongly than in the days of Charlemagne. The Norman nobility belonged to the Romanesque world which believe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Mediterranean Approaches
• 2 The Renaissance
• 3 The Age of the Grand Tour
• 4 Architecture
• 5 Painting
• 6 Art Into Landscape
• 7 Romantic Yearnings
• 8 Victoriana
• 9 In the Present Declension
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• General Index