The Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum

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For a long time I only knew the Visigoth crowns from a poem by Elinor Wylie, which a friend recently quoted to me:

I cannot give you the Metropolitan Tower;
I cannot give you heaven;
Nor the nine Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum;
Nor happiness, even.

When Partner and I were in Paris last October, I noticed that the Cluny Museum was very close to our hotel. We went there on our last full day in Paris. It’s an old building with a Roman foundation; there are lots of old relics from the days when Paris was called Lutetia. As you ascend through the building, you find all manner of other works of art: later Roman, Dark Ages, Holy Roman Empire, medieval France.

And among those works of art are the Visigoth crowns.

They are not big chunky Burger-King style crowns in the Halloween-costume sense. They are delicate circlets encrusted with sapphires and pearls and other polished stones, festooned with slender strands of gold. (I counted only eight of them, and was a little disappointed. Then I learned that the ninth, the crown of King Suinthila, was stolen in 1921 and has never been found again.)

They were never meant to be worn; they were to be hung above a church's altar, as a symbol of royalty. With a little modification, however, they would look like something an Elf might have worn in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

I want lots of things from museums the world over. I want Suzanne Valadon’s portrait of Erik Satie, which hangs in the Modern Art Museum in Paris (though I’ve never seen it in person). I want the Salomon Ruysdael waterscape that hangs in the RISD Museum only a few blocks from our apartment here. I want Ilya Repin’s gorily tragic “Ivan the Terrible and His Son” from the Tretyakov in Moscow, which would look nice over the sofa. I want a Rembrandt here and a Koons there, and a couple of the Monets from the Metropolitan in New York. Also I might throw in a couple of the Unicorn tapestries from the Cloisters, and I wouldn’t mind the Bayeux Tapestry (if only I had a room big enough to display it in).

But I think I would trade all of the above for one – just one! – of the Visigoth crowns from the Cluny Museum.

Is that so much to ask?

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The Bayeux Tapestry

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We went from Caen to Bayeux on a sunny Sunday afternoon in October. It took less than half an hour by train.

 

 

Bayeux is smaller than Caen, and perfectly beautiful. The medieval church towered over the city – we could see it from the train station – but we didn’t want to waste time, so we took a cab directly to the Tapestry Museum.

 

 

The Bayeux Tapestry is a miracle. It is a piece of linen seventy-five yards long and maybe a yard high, which (maybe, but probably not, but it’s charming to think so) Queen Matilda and her ladies stitched as a memorial to Matilda’s husband William the Conqueror’s triumph over Harold II of England.

 

 

Partner and I were very lucky; very few people were in the museum that day. We were given an audioguide, which normally I hate, but which in this case was invaluable: it narrated the entire tapestry, and kept us moving from panel to panel.

 

 

The story is very absorbing: Harold knows that his brother-in-law Edward the Confessor wants William of Normandy to be his successor, and agrees to carry the news to him in France. William is delighted, but suspicious, and makes Harold swear in Caen Cathedral that he’ll recognize William as the successor. Edward dies, and – guess what? – Harold takes the crown. William takes arms and sails across the channel and meets Harold at Hastings. Harold is killed, with an arrow in the eye. William is victorious.

 

 

The whole thing is there on the tapestry. But you really have to see it.

 

 

The tapestry is gorgeous. The people are beautifully depicted, and there are even captions, and even footnotes: small pictures tucked away under the main story. There’s a naked man about halfway through, and I’m not sure what he’s supposed to be all about, but he’s very amusing.

 

 

Later, in the gift shop, I picked up a cute book called “Le tapisserie de Bayeux en bande dessinée”: “The Bayeux Tapestry as a comic strip.”

 

 

It’s already a comic strip.

 

 

It’s just a very serious comic strip.

 

 

The French expression, “bande dessinée,” is better than our “comic strip.” Our expression implies that the content is funny or at least amusing. The French expression just means “drawn strip.”

 

 

The story told by the Bayeux Tapestry is wonderful and beautiful, but it’s not one bit funny. It’s a terrible story of a terrible time when people died.

 

 

But then again: every time is a terrible time.

 

 

Look at our own time: war, strife, death. Now think of making a “comic strip” out of it.

 

 

But could you make a bande dessinée of it?

 

 

Bien sur.

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