Forgotten wonders

Byzantium 330-1454
Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009

In his excellent book Portrait Painters, written more than half-a-century ago but still full of wisdom and stimulating observations, Allan Gwynne-Jones includes a note on the character of English art. He has been discussing the great glories of the medieval school of manuscript illumination in Britain, often forgotten when an assessment is made of our contribution to the visual arts. Yet between 1000 and 1300 the English school was the finest in Europe without a doubt.

Gwynne-Jones writes: ‘In order to understand English art one must study its source. English art is Byzantine in root, the Byzantine tradition having found its way to Durham and thence to Winchester by way of Ireland. It is a very austere tradition. But the English genius is exuberant rather than austere, intimate rather than generalised; and so, when the noble tree of Byzantine art is transplanted to England, it not only bursts into a richer and more varied leaf but is soon twined round with honeysuckle, and haunted by many birds and beasts; and the hieratic quality we find persisting right through this greatest period of English art is always combined with an intense naturalism — one that not only extends to birds and beasts and flowers, but in which angels and, still more, devils and monsters, are rendered with an equal intensity of conviction.’

For anyone interested in the art of this country, no other justification is necessary for a trip to the Royal Academy to see its current blockbuster. Of course, Byzantine art deserves to be studied for its own sake, extensively and in depth, though I’m not sure that an exhibition of this sort is the way to achieve it. There is so much essential art that cannot be transported — the architecture, the murals, the mosaics — that a museum show can only ever tell part of the story.