Romanesque Royal Feasts at Bayeux: An Original System of Theological-Political Representations between Self-celebration and Propaganda

Narrative tissues, embroideries and mural tapestries were an integrant part of the Romanesque building decoration, composed by sculptures, paintings, mosaics and different objects. I aim to focus this seminar on a monumental artwork which probably embellished a civil residence: the Bayeux Embroidery (Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux, France), which is the most important medieval narrative cycle of its kind currently preserved. It measures over 70 meters long and 59 centimeters wide, and portrays the invasion of England by William the Conqueror, who defeated Harold’s English army at the battle of Hastings in 1066.

Throughout the Romanesque period visual representations of history (painted, sculpted, embroidered) employed narration as a literary technique, due to its communication and propaganda advantages. Monumental artworks depicting historical narrative cycles came to be one of the Middle-Ages major creations, based and inspired on famous Late Antique models. Artworks created a parallel universe to literature using images, which visually expressed the relationship among events, legends, and historical truths.

The meal scenes in the Bayeux embroidery contribute to narrate a story and slot into a kind of quotidian justification of the power, the social hierarchies, laic and religious, with the gestures and movements codifications, with the character’s staging. The means implemented to tell a story use the composition’s monumentalisation, the perspective effects, the proportions, the colours, the relations between the characters, and particularly various symbols. Thus, for example, the meal can be, at the same time, Eucharistic and richness sign, with the use of apparently anecdotic details that allow the imposition of big ideas, a certain morality, the history and the politics. 

Xavier Barral i Altet, currently Affiliated Fellow at the IAS CEU, is professor of Medieval art history at the University of Rennes (France) and Venice, Ca’Foscari (Italy). His books on Medieval Art History have been translated into numerous languages. He is currently writing a book on Bayeux Embroidery and Antiquity and, with his Hungarian colleagues, he is editing a collective book on Hungarian Medieval Art to be published by the Hungarian Academy at Rome.