Chivalry is dead?

Mediaeval revivalism, courtly love and faerie dust from the State Art Collection 1516-2023

In contemporary culture, mediaeval imagery and rhetoric is highly popular: from the camp costumes of pop-star Chappell Roan, the gritty realist version of the mediaeval seen in television adaptations, to the grandiose and heroic rhetoric in the manifestos of venture capitalists and CEOs in the tech’ world. Mediaeval revival, or Mediaevalism, has frequently occurred in major moments of technological transition, with contemporary scholars positing that visions of the mediaeval are a stand-in for the ‘not now’, an escape from the conditions of a developing modernity in particular.

Chivalry is dead? explores mediaeval revivalism, courtly love and faerie tales in material from the State Art Collection, reflecting on several significant moments of Mediaevalism, with an emphasis on art from the nineteenth century. In that period, visions of mediaeval life and a supposed golden age of chivalry, largely drawn from the literary genre of Chivalric Romances, such as the tales of King Arthur or Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, proliferated as a response to the industrial era, espousing a return to artistic and moral purity.

This imagery is highly romanticised, interpreted through values distinctly nineteenth-century in origin. In this moment of mediaeval revival we can see the way that the ideals of chivalry have always been nebulous, and adapted to purposes such as propaganda and Empire building. Chivalry is dead? highlights the fact that whether in the sixteenth century, the nineteenth century or the twentieth century, mediaeval revival and the concept of chivalry has always been a retro-historicist fantasy, and effective political apparatus.

Selected artists include G.F.Watts, Hans Burgkmair, Käthe Kollwitz, Aubrey Beardsley, Frederick Sandys and the Dalziel Brothers, Colin Lanceley and John Dollman.