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Artwork · 1077 · History painting

Bayeux Tapestry

Artist unknown
1077 · Embroidery on Wool and linen
Musee de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, Bayeux
★ 7.9 editorial score

Seventy meters of wool embroidered on linen tell, like a strip cartoon, how William of Normandy conquered England in 1066. Latin captions run above the action as the story unrolls; here 'WILLELM VENIT BAGIAS,' William comes to Bayeux, over riders whose horses stride in flat blocks of terracotta and blue-green. Fabled beasts fill the borders, and later a slaughtered army. Not a woven tapestry at all but embroidery, and probably stitched in England, it is the great surviving narrative of the medieval North.

Movement
Romanesque

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Other media onSubject·Soldiers
Quote · 1986

“They come from the end of the line, most of 'em—small towns you never heard of: Pulaski, Tennessee; Brandon, Mississippi; Pork Bend, Utah; Wampum, Pennsylvania. Two years' high school's about it. Maybe if they're lucky, a job waiting for them back in a factory. But most of 'em got nothing. They're poor. They're the unwanted. Yet they're fighting for our society and our freedom. It's weird, isn't it? At the bottom of the barrel, they know it. Maybe that's why they call themselves "grunts", 'cause a grunt can take it—can take anything.”

Chris