Review : Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic (II)

Welcome back to the concluding part of my review-summary of Chantry Westwell's Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic. Last time I looked at some of the themes that emerged from the stories contained in this highly illustrated selection of retellings. But being a hugely visual work, I think it's also important to look at at least some of the art on offer : that too can tell us something about the medieval mind. This being a mainly text-based blog, I've tried to link to the images (the same as I found in the book, wherever possible) rather than embedding them in the post.

2) The Images

Keith Thomas noted that the medieval conception of time shaped their art. Few technological developments had yet occurred that had caused any really radical societal changes, and thus the view of history was largely one of constancy. Hence they had no issue with depicting scenes of Troy as a medieval castle populated with knights in plate steel armour and princesses wearing wimples, or even (in at least one image) the city being bombarded with cannons. This idea is transformative for examining the images : immediately one realises that just because a painting looks like yet another a medieval battle, it might very well be depicting something entirely different.

I rather doubt if this explains all such images, however. There are occasional exceptions in which different times and (especially) places are depicted more realistically, and clearly scholars of the time had studied ancient literature in detail. It seems surprising that they wouldn't have been aware that architectural and clothing styles had changed over time... after all, you don't need to reshape your entire conception of reality to figure out that people sometimes like to wear different sorts of hats.

Another possibility is the intended audience. Written for the elite, both the stories chosen and the way they were illustrated almost always contained an agenda. There were radically different attitudes to cultural appropriation, with Henry VIII deliberately having himself depicted (rather ludicrously) as the Israelite King David*. I would guess also that making the images familiar to the audience would have made the stories more accessible : people could understand a castle well enough, but a Babylonian-style fortified city might have left them more confused than anything else.

* Perhaps not that radically different though, given the whole A.I. Trump-Pope fiasco... and I've seen a lot of incredibly cringe-worthy left-wing American art depicting Bernie Sanders et al. as improbable superheroes too. Insulting visual imagery of politicians is common enough in Britain but vainglorious promotional material like this would be shot down in flames.

Certainly the accuracy of the images was hardly the artist's main concern. To an extent this is understandable given the fantastic nature of the tales they preferred to illustrate, of which virtually all (in this book at least) are replete with magic and monsters. In fact I think there's not a single example in the book not having at least some supernatural or other-worldly aspects. I suppose if you really do believe that dragons and enchanted swords are real enough – and they routinely used magic in their own everyday lives – then omitting this from fiction wouldn't have made any sense. So the stories may seem fantastical and escapist to us today, but they wouldn't have been received in quite the same way by the original audience. Some of them were definitely written and understood purely as entertainment, but there seems to have been no bias whatever against monsters and magic as serious literary devices

Even so, the artistic style is usually just that : stylised, not naturalistic. As this nice little article points out, there are many reasons for this, and it doesn't necessarily imply the artists were unskilled... especially given that much of the art here is from marginalia rather than full-sized paintings. What's strange to modern eyes is that the level of detail varies tremendously. Often the decorative borders are bursting with intricate, immaculate, highly abstract patterns, whereas the main piece is simple and plain in comparison (when combined with the the delicate calligraphy, the overall effect is usually one of striking beauty even when the main image is very silly). These are often quite literally iconic, with their subjects immediately clear to the eye. Perspective is totally ignored in favour of making the content instantly clear and comprehendible in a brief glance. Function over form, I suppose.

But there are some choices where you still just have to wonder why the hell they did that. Stylistic choices don't explain, for example, seven-headed dragons which very clearly have eight heads*, or supposed giants being depicted as normal-sized people. Or vice-versa, those cases where George's famous dragon is barely large enough to eat a pair of socks, much less devour a virgin (admittedly this is more forgivable when it comes to statues, as long as George himself is made to a respectable size). Or why Guy of Warwick has a noticeable but quite typical hunch, or why so many medieval faces are absolutely passive and expressionless – which is especially strange considering there are no small number of incredibly derpy-looking animals**.

* If the one on the tail doesn't count, then I'd like to know why.
** I note in that one the derpy stag but also that one of those horses is clearly planning something. 

To some extent this can only be pure silliness. My favourite example included here is the man with a rooster up his backside who's blowing a rabbit out of a trumpet; of course there are many more famous examples of knights fighting snails and the like. More subversively there's a case in which in the illuminated letter, monks are singing at a lectern, but the illustration below – in a direct and unmistakable comparison – has a rooster at a podium singing to a fox ! Once again any idea of the medieval world being one of perpetual religious triumphalism and seriousness is shown as false, presumably arising from the stricter sort of monks (history after all being written by, ultimately, the writers). And yes, there are also medieval dick picks, although these seem to be more designed to horrify or amuse rather than tantalise the ladies*.  

* I imagine no small number of female readers immediately sympathising with medieval writers.

Not everything can be silliness though. It seems unlikely that medieval authors would deliberately try and make the apocalypse look amusing*, leaving the extra-headed dragon something of a mystery (along with giant locusts that look like horses with human heads**). Some stylistic choices are easy enough to understand, like combining multiple parts of a story in a single image*** due to limited space – this also helps explain why they didn't care about perspective much. Even in more naturalistic images, colour was used to draw associations, such as in the case of George's red cross and the red of a damsel's dress. Clearly the artists generally knew what they were doing. Often, skin is depicted as unnaturally pale, including the Moors – even when they're understood to be, well, not Caucasian. 

* At the very least, I never heard of any humorous Crucifixion imagery, which would surely be the equivalent of Holocaust jokes today.
** This is not the same image in the book, so apparently this interpretation of locusts was common.
*** My favourite is the example of St Margaret shown in the lower-left corner of an image from the Huth Psalter. Here she emerges from the dragon's carcass and simultaneously punches his reincarnated demon-form, making her look ultra bad-ass.

So many strange-looking aspects are definitely not due to lack of skill; skill levels could vary, of course, but surely not to this extent. And artists certainly could do realistic horses and naturalistic lighting when they wanted to. Given that books and art were largely for the elite, presumably most of those tasked with illustration must have known what they were doing... although in the case of elephants and other exotic animals, certain misunderstandings are inevitable. Which leaves the routinely passive expressions, pale skin, strange poses, and bizarre proportions all the weirder. Sure, they're "stylistic choices", but what does that mean ? Why do things this way in particular ?

Quite honestly I've no idea. Depictions of giants as just large, well-dressed people (rather than loincloth-clad ogres) makes sense, and a sense of fun might partly explain devils with flamethrowers and a monstrous sea-going goose (sadly I could find neither of these images online). A deliberate sense of the weird – the humorously creepy – might fit for devils and giants with faces on the knees and groin... but again all this surely only gets us so far. I can only shrug and say "but that's what makes it interesting".

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This enormous diversity of styles and mixed messaging is part of the appeal of books like this. Some of it is as shallow as a puddle, some of it – both the visual art and the stories depicted – has dangerously hidden depths. Some aspects are timeless, some are lost to history : parts of European culture which now feel alien and strange. There are endless visual details I haven't covered and doubtless ones which I haven't even noticed.

After writing the first part of this post, I had my doubts about whether I really wanted to conclude that the medieval world was such a cosmopolitan melting-pot of diversity. Did I actually want to claim the existence of a sort of woke medievalism ? 

Not really. Certainly, again picking up a point from Keith Thomas, it would be easy to go too far with this. The era was hardly one a typical Guardian reader would approve of. A multitude of pagan imagery and mythological retellings certainly doesn't mean that every aspect of non-Christian teachings were widely approved of, or that medieval readers took away the same messages that we do. They did burn heretics, denounce witches, and wage religious war, after all.

Perhaps a better lesson is that it's important not to paint the era with too broad a brush. Yes, they had a distinctly Christian culture that was a very much more important aspect of their daily lives than it is now. But did not make most of them religious fanatics and it certainly didn't make them homogenous. Within their own societal norms they were every bit as diverse and human as we are. They could be cruel and crude, vain and vulgar, but also tolerant, playful, and extremely silly. They could dedicate enormous amounts of work to the tiniest and most irrelevant of details or make bold and unjustified sweeping statements at the drop of a hat.

To answer the classic question, "why does medieval art look like that ?", then, surely has to begin with acknowledging that there is no single "that". If art imitates life, then the array of styles and subjects of the medieval era surely show one which was both intriguingly similar to our own but also captivatingly different. Theirs was not the same world as ours, a realm of miracles and monsters, but also of a subtle complexity that's barely comprehensible today. The safest conclusion I can make is that if you're into medieval history, this book is a worthwhile treat for your collection.