Visual Arts: This modestly produced book is not a coffee-table book, its few colour illustrations bundled in halfway through the text, indicating the wide range of contextual allusions dug up by Carola Hicks to chronicle what she terms "an old friend".
Even the smudgy black-and-white images which support the author's indefatigable quest for the biography of "a work of art with a life story that has transcended centuries and national boundaries" are only there to serve her ambitious narrative. Inspection of the book's collaged cover offers further clues as to the nature of her study. Amidst embroidered images of galloping horses bearing William the Conqueror's chain-mailed Norman soldiers, archers shooting arrows such as killed the English king, Harold, at the Battle of Hastings, and Norse sailing boats, pose four men who each passionately admired the Bayeux Tapestry: Napoleon Bonaparte; Napoleon's "arts supremo" and director-general of museums, Baron Denon; Adolf Hitler; and William Morris.
Like Hicks, Morris was an undergraduate when he first became besotted by the tapestry (which is actually a 70-metre-long, narrow, wool-embroidered length of linen) and, in the steps of Ruskin, had travelled to Bayeux to see the 800-year-old masterpiece he described as "very quaint and rude, and very interesting". While Morris became intrigued by its extraordinarily accomplished technical needlework and subtle dyes, Hicks's ongoing research centred on animal decorations in medieval art. But she always wanted to "contribute something new . . . to seek out what others have ignored" on a seemingly exhaustively documented subject.
Speculations on it ranged from its origins, date, purpose, patronage, place of manufacture and authorship, to its subject matter, symbolism, and historical and iconographic implications. This presented no mean challenge when Hicks reckoned that from "its 18th-century rediscovery down to 1939, [ the tapestry] had inspired at least 235 books and articles" and that, by 1999, its "definitive bibliography . . . listed more than 530 titles". Furthermore, a major history and bibliography had been published in England in 1988 and an authoritative anthology, subtitled Embroidering the Facts of History, was published in Normandy in 2004.
Hicks decided to track the miraculous survival of this enigmatic "narrative tour de force", to read "the honourable scars of its survival" by tracing how it has been perceived by ensuing generations, notably French, English and German men and women, each with specific cultural, nationalist, political or literary agendas, and to tell their stories. She has also managed to squeeze in a great deal else, peppering her detailed accounts with lively observations and sometimes over-plentiful asides, sustaining the momentum as she unfolds a succession of dramatic adventures and subterfuges, until she descends into a concluding barrel-scraping catalogue of more recent "spin-offs".
The book begins with a well-informed revisionist section, analysing the sources, context and material construction of this panoramic "epic frieze" with its tiny gesturing figures and deliberate design. By 1476, it had somehow reached the cathedral at Bayeux in Normandy, where it escaped Calvinist desecrations in 1562 and was aired annually, if indifferently, until 17th-century antiquarian scholarship led to its rediscovery, despite "unease at 'the gross and barbarous style' of the original". Hicks warms to the first English scholar to write about the tapestry in the 18th century, the eccentric "Arch-Druid", William Stukeley, and, even more, to its first accurate copyist early in the next century, medievalist painter/scholar Charles Stothard and his spirited wife, Eliza (the first woman to write about it), unfairly accused of snipping off two fragments from the original, by then in poor condition. Folded in a trunk, its simple materials, length and non-ecclesiastical subject had enabled it to narrowly avoid destruction during the revolution, only to be appropriated for exposure and exhibition in Paris by Napoleon, who was bent on invading England like his illustrious Norman forbear. Its consequent fame led to Tapestry-inspired plays, fresh interpretations and curious visitors to Bayeux; its declaration as a National Historical Monument in 1840 was mainly for its own protection.
The popular identification of William's Queen Matilda as an early role model for her brilliant needlework, patronage and domestic virtues leads Hicks to her central discussions on Victorian women and embroidery. These are focused around Elizabeth Stone, the first author to "tackle the history of needlework", the unconventional biographers of queens, Agnes and Eliza Strickland, and Elizabeth Wardle's full-sized replica of the tapestry, copied exactly by her team of 40 women.
Although Hicks's research has obviously been extensive, she wears her scholarship lightly, adopting a documentary approach and minimising endnotes. Her greatest coup has been to chronicle the zealous attempts of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, to smuggle the tapestry out of its French safe- keeping during the second World War, so that he could use it to project himself as "a medieval warlord presiding over the brotherhood of the SS" while conquering England for the first time since William, Duke of the Normans, in 1066. For Hicks, the greatness of what may be considered as "history's first cartoon strip" lies in "its ability to adapt to so many different interpretations without losing its own integrity".
Nicola Gordon Bowe is a lecturer and director of the MA course in the history of design and the applied arts at NCAD, Dublin. Recent publications include Portrait of a Collector: Lord Dunsany 1878-1957 (2005). She also launched the Ros Tapestry project in New Ross
The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life of a Masterpiece By Carola Hicks. Faber & Faber, 358pp. £25