The Bayeux Tapestry

Abstract

As far as the overall development of Western pictorial art is concerned, the Bayeux tapestry is a work of very great importance. It is certainly one of the most important works of pictorial narrative art, clearly related to the origins of cinema narrative techniques. Although it is nearly nine hundred years old, it is unique, not only as an individual work but as a kind or category of work that is completely sui generis. There is no other work comparable to it, directly known to us, or likely to be discovered. A few facts about the physical nature of the tapestry must be mentioned before it can be analyzed in some detail. First, it is not really a tapestry at all, because the images are not woven into the base material on a loom. It is actually a long band of images embroidered with a variety of stitches, in colored woollen threads, on a linen base. It measures somewhat over two hundred feet in length and averages about two feet in width or height. Eight basic colors of threads are used. At the time when this massive work was undertaken the art of embroidery, particular with silk and golden threads had reached a state of high perfection in Northwestern Europe. There were not only permanently established embroidery workshops maintained by royalty and church authorities, but also nomadic bands of workers, skilled in all kinds of fine needlework, who wandered in teams through Europe, to secure commissions wherever they could find them. The Bayeux tapestry may well have been the work of one or more of such teams, executing the manual work under the direction of an artist and according to his master drawings. The artist would in turn have worked in collaboration with an official historian, acting, as it were, in the capacity of a producer and as such representing the sponsors of the work. The overall size of the work seems to have been one reason for the choice of