Early Medieval Art

In my previous post, I explained how I would use VoiceThread to accompany the students’ preparation for class through closely looking at the Altar of Duke Ratchis.  It is rather clumsy, but so are most first attempts at something new, so please do not judge me too harshly.

Nevertheless, I will not neglect to post on the altar in my usual manner.

I can offer two of my own photos. First, you see the entire altar from the front,

and then the altar, including its fenestella, from the back:

The best images come from Europe of the Invasions, but the Honors Program at the University of Alabama, Birmingham has some almost usable images on a webpage devoted to the Lombard Renaissance.  The Italian Wikipedia has fuzzy images of the front and sides, but I cannot link to them directly.  You can find them in the entry on the altar by searching for “Altare del duca Rachis”.

I have translated, roughly, the inscription:

[M]AXIMA DONA XPI ADCLARIT SUB(L)EIMI CONCESSA PEMMONI UBIQUE D(E)I REFO/RMARENTUR UT TEMPLA NAM ET INTER RELIQUAS/DOMUM BEATI IOHANNIS ORNABIT PENDOLA TEGURO PULCHRO ALT/ARE DITABIT MARMORIS COLORE RATCHIS HIDEBORHOHLRIT

RATCHIS HIDEBOHOHLRIT MADE KNOWN THE GREATEST GIFTS OF CHRIST GIVEN TO THE EXALTED PEMMO [HIS FATHER] WHEREEVER THE TEMPLES OF GOD WERE RESTORED SO THAT, AMONG OTHERS, HE ORNAMENTED THE HOUSE OF BLESSED JOHN WITH OBJECTS HANGING FROM THE BEAUTIFUL CANOPY AND ENRICHED THE MARBLE ALTAR WITH COLOR.

The reference to Ratchis’s father, Pemmo, becomes more meaningful when one reads what Paul the Deacon has to say about him in his History of the Longobards, in book 6, chapters 26 and 51.

Please feel free to comment. Also, please be forgiving of my commentary. I am a bit shy and am trying not to feel too self-conscious. If I waited until it was perfect, I would never post this!

I have not posted course content for quite some time. As a reminder, we were last in the duchy of Bavaria.

After some time north of the Alps, at last we return to Italy and to Rome, and yet again, to Santa Maria Antiqua, not to the palimpsest wall, but to the Chapel of Theodotus. In contrast to print resources, which abound, digital resources for the Chapel of Theodotus, more or less, do not exist. The Soprintendenza offers two smallish photos, of the Crucifixion in the niche of the main south wall and of the interior with an angle toward the west wall. Wikimedia Commons offers a larger image of the Crucifixion.

Other than these images, the internet turns up little else. Needless to say, I am eagerly awaiting the digital reconstruction of Santa Maria Antiqua. In the meantime, the next time I go to the library, I will take my own scans from Wilpert’s corpus and will make them available here.

The Chapel of Theodotus presents a complex assemblage of images. The Crucifixion in the niche references traditional imagery from the Holy Land, while a cycle of the martyrdoms of Quiricus and Julitta running along the east and then the west wall offers one of the earliest surviving exemplars of this type. The threefold appearance of Theodotus then makes the decoration of the chapel highly personal. In a general survey of early medieval art, one probably does not have the time to delve into the various interpretations of precisely what the chapel meant to Theodotus, but questions of context and placement would stimulate a fruitful discussion of the function of images in early medieval churches.

On a side note, a search of Flickr turns up a new photo of Santa Maria Antique, uploaded on the 14th of June: a view into the presbytery with the panel of the Maccabees partially visible.

The Genoels-Elderen Ivories were a favored object among my students last semester; a majority wrote about them for their writing assignment.

Unfortunately, the Musées Royaux de l’Art et d’Histoire in Brussels does not provide any images of these ivories online.   In fact, I have found no images online at all!  An article in Gesta, for those of you with the necessary library privileges, by Carol Neuman de Vegvar expressly on these ivories has images, of course.  Otherwise, The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture Ad 600-900 has nice images.

The first panel shows Christ Triumphant. Its inscription reads

UBI DNS AMBULAVIT SUPER ASPIDEM ET BASILICU ET CONCULABIT LEONE ET DRACONEM
WHERE THE LORD WALKED UPON THE ASP AND THE BASILISK AND TRAMPLED THE LION AND DRAGON

and clearly refers to Psalm 90, verse 13.  This image has many comparanda:  from the Archbisop’s Chapel in Ravenna, to the Ruthwell Cross and the Durham Cassiodorus. 

The second panel shows the Annunciation above the Visitation.  Their respective inscriptions read

UBI GABRIHEL VENIT AD MARIAM
WHERE GABRIEL COMES TO MARY

UBI MARIAM SALUTAVIT ELIZABETH
WHERE MARY SALUTES ELIZABETH

The captivating details in these ivories make them the ideal subject of a careful description (the secondary figures, likely Zacharias and Gabriel in the Visitation, the deliberate gestures, the curtains opened to reveal, the architecture, and so on).  The pairing of the Annunciation and the Visitation will become popular in the Carolingian period, but at this moment we may look back, again, to the Ruthwell Cross.  One may easily observe the subtle variations in the representation of these two moments from the Gospel of Luke and relate them to their diverging contexts and functions in order to make a compelling comparison.

The wall painting in the Church of Saint Proculus in Naturno deserves much broader familiarity, but it, like most wall painting, proves challenging to teach.  Scholars generally date the structure to the seventh century; Marese Sennhauser-Girard refers to new research dating it to tenth or eleventh, but I do not know to what research she refers.  The paintings, in turn, most likely date to the eighth century, but other possibilities certain exist.

The church and its museum (opened in 2006) have a website, which includes a select bibliography on the church.  You may find some photos on Flickr (search Naturns and Naturno), but I have taken a complete set of the wall paintings, which I now make available here.  Just click through for very large images.

The west wall shows cattle, a cowherd, and the owner in something of a procession.

The north wall, of which only the upper register survives, shows five seated figures and at the east end, an angel. 

The facing south wall has one solitary remaining in its lowest register.

The upper register begins at the far left, adjacent to the east wall, a group of five veiled women.

Behind the five veiled women appears the most curious aspect of the entire program – the scene with the Swinging Saint, who has been variously identified as Paul and Proculus, and the structure above him as a city wall and a boat.

We then come to the east wall.  In the upper zone of the triumphal arch hover two angels.

Below the angle to the right sits a figure holding a cornucopia.

At the center of the east wall, one may see within the interlace, from left to right: the dove of the Holy Spirit, the hand of God, and the Lamb of Christ.

The figure at the center faces with its head toward the choir.

As scholars have yet to make sense of these frescoes, I can only let them speak for themselves.

For any other period, I would probably leave manuscripts such as the Cutbercht Gospels (Vienna, Österreichisches Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1224) and the Codex Millenarius (Kremsmünster, Stiftsbibliothek, Cim. 1) to the side.  

There is a facsimile of the Codex Millenarius, but you may find most of the in the following three books: the exhibition catalogue, Die Bajuwaren. Von Severin bis Tassilo 488-788, the French-language survey of early medieval art, L’art du haut Moyen Age, and Des Barbares a l’an mil (L’Art et les grandes civilisations).  The website of the Stiftsbibliothek of Kremsmünster presents one folio, but, otherwise, the web only has thumbnails of one or two images from each manuscript. 

If you can find images of the miniatures of the Evangelists and their symbols from these two manuscripts, they compare well with one another.  They clearly share a model, but diverge in multiple, interesting ways.  And portraits of the Evangelists and their symbols always provide an opportunity for an investigation of their iconographic tradition, something that should be done at least once in any survey of early medieval art.  So, I cannot yet ignore these two manuscripts.

The catalogue for the 799 exhibition publishes photographs of the two painted pages in the Montpellier Psalter (Montpellier, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Medecin, MS H409): Folio 1v of David as Prophet; and Folio 2v of Christ.  Unfortunately, I cannot find any images of these folios on-line, except for a small image of Folio 1v at the library website (scroll to the bottom).

Although a minor and obscure manuscript, it belongs to the important tradition of psalter illustration.  The portrait of David compares well with the Standing David as Warrior in the Durham Cassiodorus (his commentary on the Psalms), and of course, the pairing of David and Christ as a preface to the text of the Psalter (although the current placement of the folios is not their original placement) exemplifies the positing of David as an antetype of Christ.  For the purpose of skill development, the two miniatures together make an interesting comparison.  Basic similarities in form indicate that someone clearly intended their viewing as a pair.  But subtle differences in execution reveal that two separate illuminators created these miniatures.

The Montpellier Psalter originated in Bavaria, but annotations reveal a Frankish destination soon after its creation, this movement likely the result of the Carolingian conquest of Bavaria.

On a side note – I have not yet figured out what David and Christ stand on.  Any ideas?

The lower cover of the LIndau Gospels at the Morgan Library serves as a useful milestone in the class.  It makes a wonderful comparison with the book covers of Theodolinda, from the first class on the  world of Gregory the Great(and will make an equally compelling comparison in a future class with its upper cover, which dates to the reign of Charles the Bald).  The post-Antique book covers of Theodolinda and the pre-Carolingian lower Lindau cover share the same layout, but display different techniques, patterns, and sensibilities.

(As an aside, I actually cannot find an image of either of Theodolinda’s covers on the internet.  The Treasury of the Monza Cathedral has a limited website with two pages showing beautiful but fleeting images, but not one of the book covers.)

With relative ease, the students can discern modern from medieval in the cover, and the various sources of its form/at and its ornament demonstrate yet again the spread of ideas in the early Middle Ages.

Planning an entire class on the art of Bavaria proved itself a bit optimistic.  In general, I gave each sub-period equal space – one class - regardless of the number of classes any one sub-period’s material could have filled.  I wanted the students to see through the amount of material covered in – and moreso, prepared for - each class a reflection of the actual amount of material produced in any given sub-period.  Whether this worked, I do not know.  I must concede, however, that the Bavarian material, problematic on many counts, would be the first that I would append to another sub-period.

So, we began the art of Bavaria with the Tassilo Chalice.  Wikimedia Commons has only the photo of a reproduction, but the site of the Stift Kremsmuenster itself displays one medium-sized photo. 

Around the rim of the base runs an inscription:

TASSILO DUX FORTIS  LIUTPRIC VIRGA REGALIS

MIGHTY DUKE TASSILO LIUTPERGA THE ROYAL BRANCH

Above the inscription, the base presents four medallions, each containing one figure.  Labels flank Mary (MT, Latin transliteration of the Greek meaning ‘Mother of God’) and John the Baptist (JB). TM may identify Theodore Martyr in a third medallion. The fourth label PT proves less revealing.

The cup itself displays five medallions.  The front/center medallion contains Christ flanked by the alpha and omega and an I and an S (of JeSus).  The other medallions contain the the four Evangelists with their symbols. 

The variety of the chalice’s ornament – ribbon, animal, plant, geometric – and the charm of each Evangelist crammed with his symbol within a medallion would capture the beholder’s attention, if only we could find photographs of the chalice from angles other than the front!  One may find line drawings and black-and-white photos in various publications, but they do not compel.  So, I felt that the Tassilo Chalice, although a stunning object and the essential product of eighth-century Bavaria, remained just out of pedagogical reach.

To conclude the class on Merovingian and Early Carolingian Art, we looked at the Gellone Sacramentary (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ms. Lat. 12048), although as you may surmise, all the material that I have up until now described so filled the class that we had time to look at only one page of this fantastic manuscript. 

Mandragore, the database of illuminated manuscripts at the National Library of France, does not yet include photographs of all the images in this book, but I would keep checking (from the Search Screen, enter “Latin 12048″ in the box for “Cote”, then click on “Chercher, then on the upper “Images”).  The National Library does, however, as part of its exhibit, Tresors carolingiens, offer the Gellone Sacramentary as one of the manuscripts that you can virtually leaf through in the section Livres a feuilleter.  Click in the upper right and left corners to turn the pages and click on the pages themselves for details.  The Livres a feuilleter well simulates examination of the actual manuscript, but disappoints as a source of images, for you cannot right click and copy or save.  On a PC you can press “Control” and “Prt Sc” and then paste the image of your screen directly into Powerpoint, or wherever you edit your images, but the resulting image is rather small.

If you meander through the exhibit you will find pages from the Gellone Sacramentary that you can save.  I found Folio 1r, Folios 17v-18r, Folio 39v, Folio 42r, and Folio 143v.  The print catalogue for the exhibit contains little more, just some photographs of some of the smaller decorated initials. 

The Gellone Sacramentary defies precise dating, although the various means of dating seem to converge at the midpoint of the second half of the eighth century.  Folio 1r shows Mary wearing what has been described as Jewish priestly garb and carrying a censer in her right hand and a cross in her left.  The alpha and omega hang from the serifs at the top of the cross.  The titulus labels her SCA MARIA.  Mary animates the letter I of the prayer for the night before Christmas, In nomine domini.  Folio 17v shows Saint Agatha holding a palm branch.  You may find her name written in her dress, running vertically below her waist.  Folio 39v shows an eagle with a lamb in its talons.  Folio 42r shows the evangelist symbols for Matthew and Mark.

In class, however, we only had time to discuss Folio 143v, on which you see Christ crucified.  The text above his head, highlighted in red, begins:

SCS SCS SCS DNS DS CABAWTH

or in unabbreviated, standard Latin:

SANCTUS SANCTUS SANCTUS DOMINUS DEUS SABAOTH

which, as you may have guessed, commences the Sanctus, the prayer which prefaces the Eucharist and which imitates the seraphim of Isaiah 6 and the four living creatures of Revelation 4.  Above the cross and below the prayer, we see angels as attendants at the Crucifixion, such as on the apsidal wall at Santa Maria Antiqua.  The Sanctus above becomes then their words.

Christ on the cross, in turn, forms the T of Te igitur, the prayer which asks for Gods blessing of the bread and the wine of the Eucharist, described in the prayer as haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrificia illibata.  You may see these words at the bottom of the page, at the level of Christ’s knees.

This historiated initial belongs to both prayers and visually transitions from the preface to the Eucharist to the prayers of the Eucharist itself.   The prayer of the Sanctus is the speech of the angels, and Christ on the cross offers the ultimate referent for the Te igitur.  It is masterful.