The Opus Anglicanum exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum opens a window on to medieval English Catholicism and the splendour of Pre-Tridentine liturgy in this country.
Opus Anglicanum is the name given to a school of rich embroidery which flourished mainly in the 13th and 14th centuries and was principally used in the adornment of ecclesiastical vestments and furnishings. Its artisans were based in the City of London in an area near St Paul’s Cathedral, but so beautiful was its craft and colour that it was exported all over Europe. Most such work that remained in England was destroyed during the Reformation. (It’s ironic that a heresy which claimed the Bible as its only source could claim that the worship of God precludes finely adorned vestments.)
Many of the exhibits are loaned from abroad, but among the oldest items are an embroidered bag which contained the great seal of Westminster Abbey and a magnificent pair of buskins (padded knee-length socks) belonging to a 13th-century Archbishop of Canterbury.
It is, however, the vestments that steal the show. They are of a beauty and intricacy which speaks of amazing skill but also of a different vision of liturgy, a much less horizontal one. That such technos and effort would be harnessed to the celebration of sacred rites tells you quite how sacred they must have thought them. Sadly, the “blurb” tends towards the usual price-of-everything-value-of-nothing socio-political approach to these liturgical phenomenon: that people only endowed them out of a desire to assert prestige. This thesis doesn’t hold good.
One of the most beautiful vestments is a black chasuble with a crimson orphrey which is embroidered in gold with images of the Resurrection, the Last Judgment and angels blowing trumpets. This was commissioned by a Cistercian abbey. It is hard to imagine the congregation rushing out after funerals fired with the conviction that anyone who was anyone just had to have such a vestment if their obsequies were to be de rigueur. By the same logic Bill and Melinda Gates are giving money to charity merely to assert their social superiority. Could it be, however, that wealthy people, like poor ones, throw money at things which in some way accord with their values? Is the music in Carnegie Hall all tuneless and suspect by virtue of being played there?
The vestments themselves drown such cavils because they are so ravishingly beautiful. The use of a technique called nué, in which shaded gold thread is couched (secured) with coloured thread of varying shades, means that some of the pieces look every bit as full of colour and beauty as when they were first made centuries ago.
Even the origins of the pieces are like a homage to a vanished church: Jervaulx, Syon, Byland. Most striking is a set of a chasuble and two dalmatics from Whalley Abbey of gold background decorated with foliage and pomegranates. The chasuble is embroidered with scenes of Christ’s Passion and the two dalmatics have scenes from the life of Our Lady. In one of these St Joachim and St Anne watch solicitously as the infant Mary learns to walk using a wooden kind of baby walker. In true medieval style, St Anne’s arms and hands are depicted as unusually large and long – not a failure of proportion on the part of the artist, but a way of emphasising the psychology and behaviour of a parent watching over a child’s first steps. The faces of the figures are so gentle and serene, but also realistic: there is nothing abstract or symbolic about them. The artists want Our Lord and the saints and angels to look human and beautiful.
Images of angels adorn all the vestments. On the so-called Madrid Cope (1300), their wings of peacock blues, gold and reds look as fresh and realistic as the plumage of a bird. The Toledo Cope is a vast panoply of saints and Apostles, each set in his or her architectural niche against a background of gold and silver, demonstrating that these vestments also served an important catechetical function; though of course, beauty always does.
Like the Sacred Made Real exhibition of a few years ago, this one is not just a feast for the eyes, it is a reminder of the faith of our fathers and the quality and depth of their devotion.
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