One reason young people are so glum as they trudge the sloppy Advent streets is that they are forced to wear trainers. Their footwear is expensive, hideous and soon grows soiled and smelly. Yet they are forced to wear it by fashion. The iron law of fashion is harder than any other, and needs no breathalyser or security camera. Nothing is too ridiculous for it to enforce. At the moment, fashion is in the mood for humiliation, so youths wear flaccid jeans about their thighs and dumpy girls expose builders' clefts on chilly nights out.
Yesterday, I saw something to redeem them from their adopted misery. It was a beautiful pair of women's shoes - small, shapely, of soft blue leather with a tab fashioned at the heel. On the front, above the pointy toes, gold leaf traced a simple design: a circle embracing eight hollow circlets. Nothing could be prettier.
Those shoes were made in the fifth century, in Christian Egypt. They are on show at the astonishing new Medieval and Renaissance galleries (AD 300-1600) at the V&A in London. It's not all shoes. In fact, I didn't see another pair. But the enamels, silver, statuary, textiles, ivories, carved wood, brooches, furniture, mirrors and paintings are works of art in the conventions of their day. And each is beautifully made.
Samuel Johnson once refuted the insidious claim of Bishop Berkeley - that things only exist because you think they do - by kicking a stone. Half an hour in these galleries refutes what might be called the Monty Python view of the Middle Ages: that everyone wallowed in filth and stupidity. It is a view that rubs off on intelligent people. Someone replica clothing on Radio 4 last week claimed that the Enlightenment (around 1700) was a great leap forward because it established universal laws for physical things, in place of a supposed medieval notion of a universe dependent on unpredictable supernatural interference.
This is bang wrong. Seven hundred years ago Dante observed, in his great poem the Divine Comedy, not only that the world was round (everyone knew that), but also that if you could climb down to the centre, you would then have to start climbing up to reach the Antipodes. This was because of the law of attraction of physical bodies: what we call gravity. Being a poet, he called it "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle" - "the love that moves the Sun and other stars" - but he knew the science was immutable anywhere in the cosmos.
Material pieces of culture survive from Dante's age, and before, as evidence of the way people thought. The V&A galleries, so the admirable Andrew Graham-Dixon complained in these pages a couple of weeks ago, have set the Middle Ages too early by exhibiting objects such as a sixth-century mosaic from Ravenna. But another object near it shows the sense in starting so early - and proves something bigger about the whole period.
The object is a hinged panel of ivory, 12 inches high, carved in relief with six miracles from the life of Christ. The style is classical. In one scene Jesus, in a sort of toga, points towards his dead friend Lazarus (whom he is bringing back to life), wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy. The odd thing is that no one can agree whether the panel was made in the fifth century, or 400 years later in the days of Charlemagne.
Charlemagne wanted to be like a Christian Emperor of ancient Rome. replica rolex He got the Pope to crown him in St Peter's on Christmas Day, 800 - a kindness to anyone trying to remember historical dates. Writers and craftsmen at his court emulated the works of classical days. What with Vikings on one side and Muslim invaders on the other, it was hard enough to find leisure for
