Cloisters at Gloucester Cathedral

Europe is written in stone

The European Union has entered its darkest days, to the Eurosceptics' delight. But our shared history will keep us together, argues a Guardian columnist.

Published on 4 January 2011 at 17:29
Cloisters at Gloucester Cathedral

If you want to know why Europeans belong in a single community, visit any one of Britain's great medieval cathedrals. Walk in the cloisters at Gloucester or pay homage to William of Sens, the Norman architect of Canterbury. Or just tap the stones of this masterpiece – they come from Caen, France.

The modern dream of European political union is entering its darkest days. Eurosceptics say they are vindicated, and are realists – but nothing is less real than the illusion that any European nation, least of all ours, can lay claim to some inward-turned, singular story outside the larger narrative of the continent. For at least 1,000 years, Europe has been building a common culture.

The first European union called itself "Christendom", and in the 11th century created a shared style of art, architecture and philosophy that transcended the borders of infant states. Gothic architecture radiated like a rose window from its source in Paris and fanned out across Europe. What is more real to us today – the doings of medieval British kings, or the elegance of the gothic flying buttresses of York Minster? The petty histories of national politics that Eurosceptics see as our true island story are dull compared with the still-living glories of our European cultural history.

Europe's next cultural revolution, the Renaissance, was even more cosmopolitan. European intellectuals discovered, in the 15th and 16th centuries, a lost common classical Greco-Roman inheritance. The Renaissance spread like wildfire across the entire region. In Westminster Abbey a Florentine sculptor, Pietro Torrigiano, put golden infants on the tomb of Henry VII while, on the far side of Europe, the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus received, as a gift from Florence, a bust of Alexander the Great. A traveller such as Erasmus could ride from Rome to Basel to London and everywhere meet friends who understood his jokes. The painting that sums it all up is Titian's Renaissance masterpiece, The Rape of Europa – a vision of the myth that gave Europe its name, painted in Venice for the king of Spain. Read full article in the Guardian...

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