Breaking the image: a 12th-century Ai Weiwei? (opens in new tab)

Thanks for your interest in the post! Hardham is definitely worth a visit if you're out and about near Arundel, Chichester, the wonderful Roman villas of Fishbourne and Bignor, etc. The Hardham frescos c. 1100 are some of the oldest in Britain. Their whitewashing happened within decades of their creation, so about 400 years before the Tudor reformation. The blog looks at the circumstances that may have caused this obliteration. Do come back for find out more about the murals and their artist.

Religions like to do that :( Early Christians (catholics) did the same to Greco-Roman temples all across the ancient world.

Hi, thanks for your interest in my blogpost! It's great how much this forum seems to have warmed to the theme of my project. It's like giving a paper, and then the questions seem to anticipate where the research will go next This is my first piece looking at the actual paintings. The Courtauld Institute puts a conservative estimate of thirty-nine on the number of individual scenes at Hardham: if you include the images which have been lost to architectural alterations it's in fact well over fifty. Plus there are two more ensembles at Coombes and Clayton from the same artist. So there's a wealth of material waiting to be reassessed. I'm not intentionally holding back, just going with the sequential blogpost format. Eventually it will, I hope, come together as a guide book to the three churches. atm it will build as an open access resource to help folk enjoy the frescos. In the end it's religion, so not always easy to put your finger on why a someone might find something so repulsive, although poor Germanos II's meltdown is typical. That's why I'm going to use a few posts to unpick what's going on with the trompe l'oeil 'Deception' scene, starting with Greco-Roman antecedents, before looking at how these same ancient ideas were taken up by the Wachowski Sisters in their screenplay for The Matrix (1999). Do come back to find out where what the Hardham artist was up to!

Getting art is in a large part being overly impressible and seeing things. One guy may create a joke under some influence and thousands will interpret it through time as something daring mind-blowing meta-deepness. Humans just tend to do that. You swap water with wine, tell a couple of very cool stories and millenia later like wat??

OK, I'll bite. Did Weiwei assault anyone? I am not aware of such instance. Somali is just a hooligan, not controversial artist.

Isn't Ai Weiwei the Ai Weiwei of our times?

I had the same question! For other readers, Ai Weiwei is an artist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei

Fixed now, and I've added Ai Weiwei to the title caser so he should not be replaced by AI in the future. Thanks!

Or it's written by AI whose name is Weiwei.

Woops - an auto-correct error, I’m afraid

If anything can cross such large barriers of time and culture, it's artists' drive to create.