Bog Myrtle & Peat

There’s plenty to see in the cloisters of l’Eglise de St Trophime in Arles. The first phase of this courtyard was completed in 1220, carved in rounded arches of chalky, golden-grey stone. Specialists call this work High-Romanesque, so you and I are free to concentrate on the fun decorations – the sudden shapes of people and saints in the sunlight. It’s a wild menagerie of scenes and symbols, and the level of detail and resolution in the chiselwork is genuinely breathtaking. In places, it really seems like the craftsmen have just paused or finished their work last week. Eight Centuries collapse in the face of such freshness and vitality.

In one extraordinary carving of a knight being mauled by a bear, you can actually make out individual hairs on the knight’s moustache – and to an idiot like me, the impact is far clearer and more compelling than anything produced in the UK at that time. Not only do we lack super-fine qualities of stone required to produce top-notch work like this, but even where we did our best with what we had, our carvings have had to endure centuries of corrosive rain and frost. Perhaps there were some similar Romanesque carvings in Britain, but it’s that much harder to make them out nowadays – and what survives has often broken up or overlaid by more recent trends. 

It follows that I’m not used to seeing this kind of work up close. It all feels very exotic; the faces of saints bulge in unexpected places – their eyes are concentric almond shapes with hard-points in their middles; demons and monsters are frighteningly ambiguous and bizarre. Scenes from Old Testament stories nestle beside representations of hell which would even startle Heironymus Bosch – lions and donkeys and angels are interwoven in ways which seem to celebrate the simple fun of being alive – it’s vivid and fun, but always underpinned by a slight shiver of strangeness and solemnity. I can enjoy these carvings, but they belong to a tradition that I don’t fully understand. 

British historians usually describe this kind of decoration as “Norman” – a reminder that we were pulled into this world against our will by William the Conqueror. We were poor and peripheral relations at a time when places like Arles were deeply plugged into networks of wealth and prosperity. By the time money did start to pour northwards, our tastes had changed. We only wanted Gothic work, and that’s why the best of our architecture is decked out with women with beady eyes and men with their hair in natty little bobs. Just as Latin manuscript cultures make medieval Europe feel oddly international, that Gothic tradition is a strangely unifying force. You can find the same kinds of symbolism and iconography from Carlisle to Córdoba – it’s all recognisable stuff, and maybe that’s why Gothic feels normal to me. By contrast, Romanesque carvings feel unnervingly distant.

St Trophime is a good place to compare and contrast the earlier and later traditions because the second phase of these cloisters was completed two centuries after the first. One half is Romanesque and the other is Gothic – and the aesthetic shift is strikingly obvious. On the Gothic half, all the usual medieval symbolisms prevail – the mermaid with her mirror, the “green man” and the dragon slain.

As a nod to local folklore, there is even a carving of the local monster “le Tarasque” being smashed up by a man with an axe. That Tarasque was said to be a six-legged hybrid between a lion and a tortoise who lived in the Rhône and chewed up human beings like it was going out of fashion – his roots reach far back into ancient Gallic mythology, but he was killed with the help of St Martha when Christianity arrived in the South of France. Now he’s commemorated on a capital in the cloisters, roaring glibly at his persecutors as if he had no idea how it always ends for pre-Christian monsters. But I didn’t look for long, because while these carvings are fantastic, they’re just better versions of what you’d find in Carlisle or Norwich. I glanced across them, then I went back to the Romanesque end to gape things that I can’t see at home.

When I got back from Arles, I wanted to find out more about these extraordinary carvings – the best of their kind that I had ever seen. I picked through a book I have called Paradise: the World of Romanesque Sculpture, which I bought for £2.99 because it has a couple of chattering monsters on the cover. Arles isn’t mentioned. Saint Trophime doesn’t even get a footnote – because there’s so much more and better to see in the world – and I see that there are stone carvings in France, Italy and the Balkans which warrant my urgent attention.

By my memory still goes back to those carvings at St Trophime, and the swifts which rushed overhead in the warm sunlight of early evening. As I smiled into the sun and sat with my eyes closed like a cat, a little black bird sprang along the lintels and edges, ducking his head to bounce and shiver on the barcode brightness of light and shadow. I’d seen these birds before; and immediately the pattern becomes obvious – because they tremble on the battlements of Spanish Alcazars; on Sicilian ruins and the massive arches of a roman aqueduct in the heart of Istanbul – they’re birds of ancient masonry from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, but it’s an anticlimax to name them here because they are called “black redstarts” – and it’s a failure of human imagination to draw such clumsy lines around a species. Yes, they’re indisputably related to the old familiar redstart, but it’s shockingly unfair to know them only as a variant of that connection. 

Black redstarts are vanishingly uncommon in Britain, so you could argue that it’s reasonable that they should accept a name which relates to their more common cousins – but the same trick is also played upon them in France, where the two species are called rougequeue and rougequeue noir. In Spain, it’s colirrojo and colirrojo negra. In Turkey redstarts are kızılkuyruk and black redstarts are siyah kızılkuyruk (siyah = black). Across the full span of their range, they’re universally treated as players of a second-fiddle – merely the black variation of the main event. The Italians redeem a sense of possibility by calling black redstarts spazzacamino – the chimneysweep – but this is just a local nickname against the more formal (and inevitable) differentiation between codirosso… and codirosso nero.

And yet in the cloister of St Trophime in the sunlight with a beer beckoning from the restaurants which spill into the streets of Arles towards dusk, the old carvings and the calm shade were utterly blessed by that black bird – at the very least, he deserved a name of his own.