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About one month ago, I spent a Sunday on the South Side of Chicago, with my girlfriend and my father, attending Mass at the Shrine of Christ the King, and then picnicking and exploring the campus of the University of Chicago. My father told stories from his undergraduate days at the university, as I admired some of the finest Gothic architecture in the city. Countless gargoyles and hunkypunks motionlessly lollygagged on the dormitories and academic halls, just as they did on the great cathedrals of mediaeval France.
We then visited the Oriental Institute, a campus museum displaying artifacts from various cultures of the Middle and Near East collected over the last century by archaeologists sponsored by the university. Most impressive of these are the reliefs and great Sphinx excavated from the royal court of Sargon II at Dur Sharrukin, almost perfectly preserved in the Mesopotamian sands since the apex of Assyrian civilization in the eighth century before Christ. The photograph below, scanned from a postcard, shows one of the monumental winged-bull statues that once stood at the palace gates; on the right side of the picture, closest to the Sphinx, is a contemporary likeness of Sennacherib, he who came down like the wolf on the fold in the Fourth Book of Kings (chapters 18 and 19), then crown-prince. He relocated the Assyrian capital to Nineveh only a few years after the palace at Dur Sharrukin was completed.
Seeing Gothic gargoyles and Assyrian sphinxes within a few hours of each other reminded me of a fascinating hypothesis that Émile Mâle presented in his book on 12th century religious art in France, one that suggests a familiarity between the two.
A century before the advent of Gothic architecture, carvings of fanciful, chimerical animals began to proliferate in the monastic churches and cloisters of Europe. Some of them are easily explained as references to the fables of Aesop or to the Bestiary, that marvellous book that, however zoologically naïve, reflects the magnanimity of the mediaeval mind that saw allegory, tropology and anagogy in all of creation. Others, however, make reference to long forgotten folk stories or vestigial pagan mythology, and others are purely decorative, copied from imported textiles whose symbolism was unknown even to the sculptors.
Trying to find allegory in these is futile; even St. Bernard, the wisest of 12th century monks, who lived and prayed under such architecture when it was new, was baffled. In a far-too-often remembered fit of grouchiness, he complained: What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these savage lions, and monstrous centaurs? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half-beast, half-man, or these spotted tigers? I see several bodies with one head and several heads with one body. Here is a quadruped with a serpent's head, there a fish with a quadruped's head, there again an animal half-horse, half-goat... Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities we should at least regret what we have spent on them! And Cistercian architecture has been boring ever since.
The figures copied from imported fabrics are most intriguing. Early mediaeval Europe did not have established centers of production for fine textiles, so they relied on trade with the master weavers and dyers of Byzantium, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Oriental textiles were used for the vestments, altar frontals, curtains, funeral palls, tapestries and rugs in the greatest churches of Europe, all through the Middle Ages. They were among the prized possessions of every ecclesiastical treasury. A friend of mine has seen a painting of the Blessed Virgin, wearing a robe embroidered with Mohammedan prayers; the painter had presumed the Arabic script on the vestment he copied to be merely decorative.
The Persians, more than any other people, were masters of the textile crafts, and their influence was felt in all the other centers of production, as far west as Moorish Spain and as far east as China. In the sixth century of Our Lord, the Sassanids of Persia, intensely nationalistic and devoutly Zoroastrian, encouraged a cultural renascence. They studied ruins from the great civilizations of Chaldea and Assyria, and reintroduced their conventions into contemporary art. The great chimerical monsters of ancient Chaldean and Assyrian mythology, then already three millennia old in their imagination, were reborn, and woven into fabrics that were traded all across Asia, Africa, and Europe.
The Arab conquest of Persia had little effect on textile art; the traditions were continued in the Caliphate of Baghdad without rupture, as well as in the Byzantine Empire, and in Mohammedan Syria, Egypt and Sicily. Every master weaver wanted to imitate the finest fabrics yet produced - those of the Sassanids. And the Sassanids employed a decorative vocabulary as ancient as recorded history.
The best preserved of the fabrics imported into mediaeval Europe, those most likely to have survived the reformations, revolutions, and wars, are those that were kept inside reliquaries, and thus protected from the elements and easily hidden from the enemies of the Church. The most colorful and fancifully decorated Oriental textiles were used to wrap the bones of saints, including St. Bernard. Émile Mâle wrote with relish: Thus, this meaningless decor of animals and monsters, which the great Church Doctor had so eloquently condemned, accompanied him even to the grave. To honor him in this way was to proclaim the defeat of his ideas, and art was revenged. (I am reminded of Savonarolan motets, among other things.) The art historians unwrapping the relics and studying the fabrics were at times startled by their imagery. A relic of St. Victor, preserved in the treasury of the cathedral at Sens, had been swaddled for centuries by a woven image of Gilgamesh!
Émile Mâle suggests that the influence of these textiles on mediaeval European art was enormous; that the brightly colored window dressings inspired the development of stained glaziery, that the intricate rugs inspired mosaicists. Whether this is true or not, many figures on Romanesque capitals can indeed be explained by the copying of figures from Oriental fabrics, whose precedents can be found in extant art from ancient Chaldea and Assyria. Affronted lions with a tree between them, two-headed eagles (later common in European heraldry), peacocks with entwined necks, double-bodied monsters, and raptors hunting antelopes are all of ancient oriental origin. And the crowned, anthropocephalous winged bull, the same beast as that standing in the Oriental Institute tattooed with cuneiform writing, also reappears in the 12th century; not guarding the palace of an Assyrian king, but supporting the cloister of a Benedictine monastery.
This evidence is more than enough to establish an indirect influence of ancient Assyria on Romanesque art. That being established, it is not difficult to imagine that the beasts, chimerae, and monsters carved on the capitals of Romanesque monasteries evolved into the gargoyles and hunkypunks perched on the Gothic cathedrals in the next century. Émile Mâle did not himself make the connection - he imagined that those terrible spectres, partly wolf, partly caterpillar, partly bat, yet with a strange and horrible appearance of reality were of essentially popular origin. The gargoyles like churchyard vampires, or the dragons subdued by ancient bishops, came from the depths of the people's consciousness, and had grown out of their ancient fireside tales. The powerful and sombre side of mediaeval genius found expression in these memories of their forefathers, echoes of a vanished world.
But the same popular medieval genius that produced the gargoyles thrived among the great sacred art of both the 12th and 13th centuries, always marginal but always present; satirical figures hide on the undersides of misericords and drolleries play in the corners of illuminated breviaries. The exotic beasts of Romanesque capitals and Gothic drainspouts are part of the same genius, profane creatures admitted into holy space, awaiting an Hieronymus Bosch to grant them liberty to frolic wherever they please. And that popular genius was broad enough, and forgiving enough, to absorb influences from pagan Assyria as easily as from pagan Europe.
I believe that the Gothic artists, in their satire and nonsense as much as in their iconography, sought not to innovate but to give definitive expression to earlier art; that the gargoyles and hunkpunks are the fully evolved descendents of primitive Romanesque monsters, themselves the descendents of Mesopotamian mythological beasts. And in them, an ancient genius, frightful and funny, survives.