Approaches to early-medieval art 9780915651092

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APPROACHES TO EARLY-MEDIEVAL ART

A SPECULUM BOOK

APPROACHES TO

EARLY-MEDIEVAL ART

edited by

Lawrence Nees

The Medieval Academy of America Cambridge, Massachusetts 1998

Copyright © 1998 ,

By The Medieval Academy of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-76173

ISBN 0-915651-09-2 |

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

for Ernst Kitzinger on his eighty-fifth birthday

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Contents

Foreword ix

Acknowledgments xl

Introduction 1 Lawrence Nees

The Right Hand’s Cunning: Craftsmanship and the Demand for Art in Late Antiquity

and the Early Middle Ages 13

Anthony Cutler

The Derrynaflan Hoard and Early Irish Art 37 Michael Ryan

The Truth in Painting: Iconoclasm and

Identity in Early-Medieval Art 61 Charles Barber

Magic and Money in the Early Middle Ages 79 Henry Maguire Archbishops Ebo and Hincmar of Reims

and the Utrecht Psalter 97 Celia Chazelle

Seeing and Believing: The Construction of

Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines 121 Cynthia Hahn

Saints’ Tombs in Frankish Church Architecture 149 Werner Jacobsen

, vil

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Foreword Approaches to Early-Medieval Art, edited by Lawrence Nees, was first published as a special issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies (October 1997 issue). The book version incorporates a few minor corrections and adds acknowledgments by the editor. It is otherwise unchanged, but for new pagination. In his introduction, Lawrence Nees asks us to question certain tenacious habits of mind that have conditioned (and bedeviled) our understanding of peoples and

cultures in the period beginning in the fourth century, when the Roman Empire ceased to be the dominant political institution in the territory we now call Europe. Specialists have long since found the old narratives wanting. The authors who contributed to this issue were not asked to produce a new master narrative, but their work on a variety of particular topics illustrates by example some of the ways in which art historians are reconsidering many of the basic presumptions that would have prevailed had a group of their predecessors turned their attention to the same objects and the same questions several decades ago. The changes in conception and approach that are evident here do not emanate exclusively from art history, nor do they apply only to the interpretation of images and objects. If there is any period in which art historians and scholars in other disciplines find compelling reason to talk to each other, it is this one. I hope that readers of Speculum whose interests are focused chiefly on the later medieval centuries will turn to this collection not least to learn something about the collaborations that are occurring in early-medieval studies and about the benefits of using every tool whose proficient application is able to advance the scholar’s work. I am most grateful to the editor and the contributors who produced this special

issue. In the end, after many discussions and the laying of plans, it is their work that matters. A succession of Editorial Boards has helped me to develop the issue. I am grateful especially to Stephen A. Barney, Walter Goffart, Katherine O’Brien

O’Keeffe, and Lucy Freeman Sandler, the members of the board who read the entire manuscript before publication. Their criticisms and suggestions were invaluable. LUKE WENGER

Editor of Speculum

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Acknowledgments Just over two weeks ago Ernst Kitzinger celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday, and although he will receive the collection of studies dedicated in honor of that happy event only after the fact, I hope that he will take pleasure in the slightly belated

tribute to a giant upon whose shoulders all of us who study early-medieval art seek to raise ourselves in hopes of seeing yet more clearly. For me as for many others he has been a teacher, and no title is higher than that. As Luke Wenger states in his foreword, the articles that follow are essentially unchanged from the versions that appeared in the October 1997 issue of Speculum. I would, however, like to take the opportunity afforded by the conventions of a different format to express sincere gratitude for the many debts incurred during my work as guest editor. First I thank Luke Wenger, whose invitation prompted me to submit a proposal for an issue of Speculum devoted to earlymedieval art. Only rarely have articles dealing with that special area within medieval studies been published by the journal, so I welcomed the invitation, little imagining that the final product would be nearly five years in the making. It would never have resulted at all without the extraordinary patience and unfailing good humor of Jacqueline Brown, who saw the articles through the editorial process in spite of many unforeseen and sometimes beyond-last-minute obstacles. I am especially grateful that when choices needed to be made, she always opted for what seemed the best rather than the easiest course. I join Luke in thanking the members of the Editorial Board of Speculum, and among the members of the Editorial Board who read, commented upon, and approved the original proposal for the issue, I remember with special pleasure the suggestions and encouragement of Eugene Kleinbauer. All the articles were sent for review to two, and sometimes more than two, distinguished specialists in earlymedieval studies. These reviewers, museum curators and independent scholars as

well as academics, included scholars concerned particularly with texts, artistic works, architecture, archaeology, and numismatics. They uniformly read the draft articles promptly, with care and sympathy, and the editor and authors benefited greatly from their generous efforts. William Diebold provided a fine translation

into English of one article, and I am grateful for his thoughtful assistance. My greatest debt is, of course, to the authors, who accepted the challenge of providing

studies that would address the range of issues I wanted to emphasize and who found time within already busy lives to complete their contributions and to make substantial revisions. They have been remarkably patient, and I can only hope that they share some of my own great pleasure in having worked together. LAWRENCE NEES

January 13, 1998

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Introduction By Lawrence Nees The last decades have seen a revolution in early-medieval studies generally, not least in regard to basic nomenclature. The period from roughly the fourth to the eighth, or even tenth, century used to be called commonly “the Dark Ages” and is still only too often said to have begun with the “Age of Migrations.” The strongly pejorative note struck by the former term was associated with the barbarism of “new peoples,” and indeed the historical understanding of the period was constructed as having ethnic changes as its hallmark, as indicated by the stillpopular latter term. More recent studies, subjecting the assumptions of earlier scholarship to careful research and criticism, have pulled out the rug from under the notion that fundamental ethnic change either happened in the early-medieval period or could serve as the key to understanding the enormous changes that did occur. One such study opens with the sentence “It is a commonplace today that western Europe was not overrun by barbarians in the fifth century, that the barbarian states were freely installed by the Roman government, and that the barbarian groups were not peoples or tribes, but motley collections of soldiers under

the military leadership of a king.”! | If only this “commonplace” had reached the textbooks offered to myriad students even today! The recent ninth edition of Gardner’s Art through the Ages, the most widely used introductory art history text, opens its chapter on the Middle Ages (whose first heading is “The Migration Period”) with this vivid statement: “For thousands of years, waves of migrating people moved slowly across the great Eurasian steppes and down into the Mediterranean world.” The text then informs 1 Patrick Amory, “The Meaning and Purpose of Ethnic Terminology in the Burgundian Laws,” Early Medieval Europe 2 (1993), 1-28, at-_p. 1, with extensive earlier bibliography, of which the fundamental

study by Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton, N.J., 1980), must be given separate mention here. Amory has argued elsewhere that the traditional use of Germanic or Roman names as reliable indices to a given individual’s “ethnic” identity, and as signs indicating a sense of community and otherness in the experience of late-antique and earlymedieval people, is at best problematic, at least in the case of fifth-sixth-century Burgundy. See Patrick Amory, “Names, Ethnic Identity, and Community in Fifth—Sixth-Century Burgundy,” Viator 25 (1994),

1-30, with bibliography. | For the fundamental scientific study of human population genetics, with an important introduction treating such matters as the fact that all humans belong to a single species (sometimes contested in the past), see L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of

Human Genes (Princeton, N.J., 1994). I am hardly a specialist in this matter, and the statistical apparatus deployed in this study along with immense data resources makes it very difficult to challenge, but there are some aspects of the book that are troubling to a humanist and historian. “Populations” studied are varying orders of abstractions. Genes are studied in selected individuals, who are grouped into “populations” using geographic, anthropological, linguistic, and ethnographic factors in a manner

that is unavoidably self-referential; in other words, populations are defined on other grounds, and their genetic components then characterized, the assumption being that these are breeding populations.

Genetic traits are not used, presumably because they cannot be, or have not been, used to identify populations. 1

2 Introduction us that “the imagination of these wandering groups teemed with fantastic creatures of all sort. Their belief that the deep, dark forests of the north virtually swarmed

with zoomorphic and demonic populations was shared widely by the nomadic hunters of all tribes.”2 Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is presumably the source for such statements, which not only apply the designation “nomad” to groups that

were nothing of the sort in order to mark their Otherness from the civilized but which also ignore the importance of contact with Rome in the creation of the large confederations of diverse peoples that are enshrined in historiographical tradition as the Germanic “tribes.”* That such essentialist constructions continue to be not

2 Gardner's Art through the Ages, ed. Horst de la Croix, Richard G. Tansey, and Diane Kirkpatrick,

9th ed. (San Diego, 1991), pp. 320 and 321 for the two quotations. Rather than being a holdover from the much earlier editions of this textbook, these sections occur for the first time in the fifth edition of 1970, the first edited by de la Croix and Tansey, and were deleted only in the tenth edition of 1996 (for which see below, n. 18). The first edition of the book, published by Helen Gardner herself (Art through the Ages [New York, 1926]), is almost wholly innocent of barbarianizing, simply ignoring the art between a.D. 500 and 1000, no example of which is illustrated save a redrawing of the Plan of St. Gall as a “typical” example of the kind of monasticism through which the Christian church preserved civilization in western Europe. The “new peoples” merit in her view but two breathtaking sentences (p. 190): “In swept the barbarians, illiterate but of the fresh, vigorous blood of the North. In their new environment they continued to govern by tribal methods instead of accepting Roman law; and when this law ceased, and with it order, for the kings were usually powerless, a natural outcome was feudalism; for people of necessity bound themselves to any one who could provide some measure of safety from the dangers and outrages of the times.” One might well today quibble about the details, but it is

hard not to admire the sweep of such a statement. In the fourth edition, edited by Sumner McK. Crosby (Helen Gardner’s Art through the Ages [New York, 1959]), the barbarians first are given their own, albeit very short, presentation (pp. 217-20), which yet lacks the Wagnerian accents of the de la Croix and Tansey version. In other words, rather than being itself a heritage from the misty past of the early-twentieth-century archetype of Gardner’s textbook, the romanticized picture of the early Germanic artistic tradition appeared for the first time only after the Second World War. The history of the Gardner textbook should not, of course, be taken solely on its own as evidence of a late discovery of the “barbarians of the North” in art-historical textbooks as a class. I owe to Robert Nelson, who presented an interesting paper on the change and stability of textbook wisdom at a meeting of the College Art Association of America, the observation that one of the earliest examples of the genre opens the story with the arts of northwestern Europe from the most distant past up to the “Vélkerwanderungszeit” as witness of “die ersten Entwicklungsmomente der Kunst”; see Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1842), esp. pp. 10-14. 3 See Lotte Hedeager, “Empire, Frontier and the Barbarian Hinterland: Rome and Northern Europe from AD 1-400,” in Michael Rowlands, Mogens Larsen, and Kristian Kristianen, eds., Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), pp. 125-40; and Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (Oxford, 1988), esp. pp. 39-116. For a powerful argument that Roman influence in Scandinavia profoundly affected even the distinctive archaeological class of bracteates, see Morten Axboe and Anne Kromann, “DN ODINN P F AUC? Germanic ‘Imperial Portraits’ on Scandinavian Gold Bracteates,” Acta Hyperborea 4 (1992), 271-305. At least insofar as art-historical literature is concerned, what I have termed the romantic view of wandering tribes is no convenient straw man but a position still stoutly maintained in scholarly literature. In her publication of material from the collection in the Metropolitan Museum (Migration Art, A.D. 300-800 [New York, 1995]), Katharine Reynolds Brown maintains the dominant ethnic association and explanation of the metalwork (presented along with a typical “spaghetti map” of migration routes) inscribed in her title. In discussing one iconographic feature of the luxury metalwork in the Sutton Hoo ship burial (“The Birds on the Sutton Hoo Purse,” Anglo-Saxon England 15 [1986], 153-65), Carola Hicks writes, “The symbol of the bird of prey in Germanic art has two possible sources of origin: the use of an eagle as a solar symbol in the art of the ancient Near East,

Introduction 3 only published but assigned to students indicates that those of us who study earlymedieval art have either not done a very good job of bringing a newer and different

picture to the attention of a wider public or that we have not yet developed a different picture of sufficient interest and conviction to drive from the field the Wagnerian image of the mystic darkness of the north and its people.* We are probably guilty on both counts, and it is my hope that this special issue of Speculum devoted to the art of the early-medieval period, roughly from the sixth to the tenth century, will be at least a step in the right direction, and even a stimulus to more. The discussion of early-medieval art has been for much of the last century dominated by two issues, one cultural with some ethnic implications, the heritage of Rome and the development of Christianity, and the other ethnic with cultural implications, the migrations of “new peoples” and especially of Germanic groups. The notion of the revival of Rome as the central creative drive, indeed as the engine for cultural and artistic development during the early Middle Ages has been subjected to much criticism in recent years. Recent research has certainly not denied the obvious fact that early-medieval artists used materials, techniques, forms, and subjects that were the heritage of antiquity and especially of late antiquity, as in the building of columned basilicas for churches and the carving of figural reliefs in ivory. The relationship is perhaps most intense in the area of book illumination, where scribes used almost exclusively the ancient languages, Greek and Latin,° and wrote in a form of book, the parchment codex, developed in late antiquity.® Sometimes, albeit it now seems only rarely, they copied ancient manuscripts more or less wholesale—for example, the illustrated plays of Terence and an imperial

and the role of a bird head with prominent hooked beak in eurasiatic art,” thereby excluding from the realm of possible relevance the Roman tradition, with whose imperial and military iconography (which prominently included eagles) Germanic peoples were closely in contact. 4 It should be noted that recent scholarship has by no means uniformly discarded ethnicity as a key

to historical understanding. A recent book can discuss the transformation of the Christian religion during the early Middle Ages as a process of “germanization” without ever defining what is meant by “the German peoples,” “the Germanic ethos,” or “Germanic folk religion,” apparently taking these conceptions as in some manner self-evident and unproblematic; see James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (New York and Oxford, 1994). So that I might not be thought to single out romanticized Teutonicism for exclusive criticism, the enormous popular success of Thomas Cahill’s Celtic-revivalist How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York, 1995) must remind those of us who spend our lives trying to enrich our understanding of the early-medieval tradition that we must compete with a potent popular predilection for the comforting genre of history-as-self-congratulatory-fantasy.

5 Of course early-medieval Latin was not the same as ancient Latin, a fact that was not lost on medieval writers themselves. On this issue, and the related historiographical tradition of late Latin as a barbaric deviation from a superior and mythically uniform classical standard, see Mark Amsler, “History of Linguistics, ‘Standard Latin,’ and Pedagogy,” Historiographia linguistica 20 (1993), 4966, with earlier literature, especially Roger Wright, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool, 1982). 6 See Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1995), pp. 49-66; Alain Blanchard, ed., Les débuts du codex: Actes de la journée d’étude organisée a Paris les 3 et 4 juillet 1985 (Turnhout, 1989); and Colin Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London, 1983).

4 Introduction calendar are known only through Carolingian copies’—and clearly sometimes they used ancient manuscripts as a source for style and composition. Thus an artist at Tours in the ninth century, in providing illustrations for a Bible, apparently

copied two figures from the fifth-century illustrated manuscript known as the Vatican Vergil and employed the figure types to represent two soldiers listening to St. Paul preaching.’ Yet the search for such connections has tended to produce a distorted view of early-medieval art as a whole, canonizing works that seem to have some classical connections while ignoring the many others that seem free of such associations, emphasizing possible classical connections or explanations in preference to others that might be offered, or assuming that medieval artists and their patrons and audiences had a simple and entirely positive attitude toward a past before whose towering grandeur they felt small and unworthy.’ Here it is not my purpose to review an issue that I have addressed elsewhere at some length’ but to note the significance of the fact that “Renaissance” is not a centrally significant issue in any of the various articles submitted for this special volume. Such a relative de-emphasis of the ancient heritage would have been inconceivable only

a decade or two ago. Interest has very largely shifted from regarding medieval works of art primarily as a window shedding light upon an ancient past to seeing them as products elucidating their own time and place. In so doing it runs parallel to the shift in philological studies!! and has permitted sensitive and fascinating studies of works whose evident status as “copies” had previously made them of little independent interest.‘ The second long-dominant historiographical treatment of the early-medieval period, with its spaghetti-like lines on maps to denote the “Wandering Peoples” seeking to escape the, evidently, extraordinarily dense overpopulation of Scandi-

7 For the former the standard work remains Leslie Webber Jones and Charles Rufus Morey, The Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence (Princeton, N.J., 1932), and for the latter Henri Stern, Le calendrier de 354: Etude sur son texte et sur ses illustrations (Paris, 1953). 8 See David Wright, Der Vergilius Vaticanus: Ein Meisterwerk spdtantiker Kunst (Graz, 1993), p. 106, figs. on pp. 46 and 107. On this image see now Herbert Kessler, “An Apostle in Armor and the Mission of Carolingian Art,” Arte medievale, 2nd ser., 4 (1990), 17-39. ° For a fascinating example of the complex, sophisticated, and largely negative response of a Carolingian author to a work of ancient sculpture set up in Aachen, see Michael Herren, “The ‘De imagine

| Tetrici’ of Walahfrid Strabo: Edition and Translation,” Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (1991), 118-39, and idem, “Walahfrid Strabo’s De Imagine Tetrici: An Interpretation,” in Richard North and Tette Hofstra, eds., Latin Culture and Medieval Germanic Europe, Germania Latina 1 (Groningen, 1992),

pp. 25-41. 10 Lawrence Nees, A Tainted Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court (Philadelphia, 1991), esp. chap. 1 with extensive bibliography. 11 See Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, Wis., 1987), and the special issue of this journal edited by Stephen G. Nichols, “The New Philology,” Speculum 65 (1990), 1-108. 12 William Noel, The Harley Psalter (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), and idem, “The Utrecht Psalter in England: Continuity and Experiment,” in Koert van der Horst, William Noel, and Wilhelmina C. M. Wistefeld, eds., The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David (Westrenen, 1996), pp. 120-65. On a related question see Lawrence Nees, “The Originality of Early Medieval Artists,” in Celia M. Chazelle, ed., Literacy, Politics, and Artistic Innovation in the Early Medieval West (Lan-

ham, Md.; New York; and London, 1992), pp. 77-109.

Introduction 5 navia and northernmost Germany at the beginning of the Christian era,!* might be funny if it were not so frustrating to scholars teaching in the field and so sinister in its associations still today. The common presentation of current warfare and butchery as “ethnic” conflicts complete with “ethnic cleansing” is fundamentally misleading as well as destructive in an important way. The parties to such conflicts are difficult or impossible to separate genetically or “racially” and may even speak the same language. As in the early-medieval Germanic world, and for that matter in early Islam, genealogical ties and tribal links are posterior phenomena, attempts to explain and reinforce associations founded on other grounds.'* Ethnicity is constructed rather than inherited, and it is transmitted through culture and society, not through blood and nature. No one would deny the reality, or the tragedy, of the ethnic divide, which was constructed centuries ago, but treating it as if a matter of blood descent makes it seem not only tragic but unavoidable. Whether in the early Middle Ages or the late twentieth century, recognizing the cultural construction of ethnicity means that individuals are responsible for their actions and in- |

actions.!> ,

: Note that the picture of the “Migrations” is based, as has long been recognized, upon Roman sources. Romans were prone to see gentes and especially to see barbarians as essentially “Other” and having appropriately barbaric, if sometimes noble, customs. The Roman literary sources are indeed important and often the only written sources, which has heightened the impact of their presuppositions

, and prejudices. However, even the Roman sources do not seem to have imagined that the movements of barbarians were wholesale movements of peoples that accomplished root-and-branch ethnic change in the areas abandoned or newly settled. The Romans knew better: they knew that there was a Vandal kingdom in North Africa, but not very many Vandals, and an Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, not a suddenly Ostrogothic (and shortly thereafter Lombard) Italy but a country populated almost entirely by Latin-speaking inhabitants who were not recent arrivals. There is another source, however, which as far as I have seen has never been cited as having played a formative role in the nineteenth-century picture of the “Vélkerwanderungszeit,” despite the virtual certainty that it would have been universally known and highly respected by those who constructed that picture. I refer to the Bible, and especially to the Old Testament. 13 Gardner’s Art through the Ages, 9th ed., has a nice example on p. 318. For a recent overview of the rather neglected historiographical role of maps see Jeremy Black, “Historical Atlases,” Historical Journal 37 (1994), 643-67, and for a discussion of the “barbarian invasion” maps in particular see Walter Goffart, “The Map of the Barbarian Invasions: A Preliminary Report,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 32 (1988), 49-64. 14 See Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphs (London and New York, 1986), p. 18. I do not mean to suggest that the early Middle Ages were some sort of politically correct paradise; see Paul Meyvaert, “‘Rainaldus est malus scriptor Francigenus’— Voicing National Antipathy in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 66 (1991), 743-63. 15 See two recent publications that bear upon this issue, one dealing with the medieval period, the other with the medieval heritage in recent times: the stimulating collection of papers in G. Ausenda,

ed., After Empire: Towards an Ethnology of Europe’s Barbarians (Woodbridge, Eng., 1995), and Bratislav Pantelié, “Nationalism and Architecture: The Creation of a National Style in Serbian Architecture and Its Political Implications,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56 (1997),

16-41.

6 Introduction The Old Testament also tells the story of a people, one who indeed claimed to be a tribal group in the sense of a single kinship group, literally a single family, the family of Jacob/Israel. The destruction of, rather than amalgamation with, the city of Shechem (Gen. 34) is only one vivid example of the insistent Old Testament theme of maintaining that separate identity; and whether or not it can be thought to in any manner describe what actually happened, the story of the Israelite occupation of Canaan is presented as a story of wholesale displacement of prior inhabitants, while the settlement of the land is presented so strongly as a matter of kinship groups that the twelve tribes taking their names from Jacob’s twelve sons are also linked with distinct regions: Dan and Judah are places as well as tribes, and the two concepts of blood relationship and physical location are assumed to be the same. Surely the privileged position of the biblical narrative must be thought to have played some role in the mental equipment of the scholars who constructed an Age of Migrations that looks like the Israelite settlement of Canaan as narrated in the Bible. The treatment of early-medieval art has been part of the broader historiographical tradition, and it has given enormous attention to distinguishing between Roman and Germanic (and other, such as Celtic or Coptic) traditions, often by asserting a special aesthetic Formgeftihl or some ancient autochthonous heritage. The notion of regional styles, fundamental to early-twentieth-century art historiography, is closely linked to alleged or implicit ethnicity. In a famous, or now infamous, article of 1924 Charles Rufus Morey reduced the essential lines of artistic development in the early-medieval period to a convenient genealogical chart

tracing interactions among locally and (at least implicitly) ethnically based traditions.'° The idea had great influence in all areas of art historiography, un-

ence.”

dergirding the genealogical chart of the development of modern art, which has recently become virtually an anti-icon of critical consideration.’” The master task of art-historical research was, then, to understand the evidently cosmopolitan or pan-Christendom character of certain artistic styles, devices, or other trends through the movement either of artists (Copts fleeing the attack on Monophysitism, Copts fleeing the Arab invasion, iconodule Greeks fleeing Iconoclasm, Insular monks missionizing on the Continent) or of works of art that could have “influAnother effect of the romanticized historiographical emphasis on the “wandering peoples” in the discussion of early-medieval culture in general and art in particular has been to separate the world of the eastern Mediterranean, the Byzantine world, from the development of the Middle Ages. In Gardner’s Art through the Ages, for example, the entire course of Byzantine art from the fifth down to the 16 Charles Rufus Morey, “The Sources of Medieval Style,” Art Bulletin 7 (1924), 35-50, with the chart as the conclusion to the article, on p. 50. 17 Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (New York, 1936). I reproduced and discussed this chart in “The Originality of Early Medieval Artists,” in Chazelle, ed., Literacy, Politics, and Artistic Innovation, pp. 80-81, figs. 1 and 2. To the references given there should now be added the appearance of the chart on the cover of a special issue of Critical Inquiry 15/2 (Winter, 1989), edited by W. J. T.

, Mitchell and entitled “Essays toward a New Art History.” The Barr drawing was also used a few years ago for the cover of a brochure announcing Duke University’s establishment of a doctoral program in ) art history.

3 Introduction 7 fifteenth century is discussed in a single chapter, followed by a chapter on Islamic art from its beginning down to the sixteenth century. Those two chapters bring the large section “The Ancient World” to a conclusion, and only following them is the beginning of the large section devoted to the Middle Ages, opening with the “barbarian migrations” and the astonishing treatment of “the dark forests of the north” already mentioned. Here the historiographical premises show themselves to be not only long-lived but perversely able to maintain a confusingly nonchronological arrangement within an overall text dominated by diachronic sequencing."

Of course, the East also had experience with “barbarian” troops and invasions during late antiquity, and in fact Byzantine society and Byzantine art were transformed during late antiquity; but the explanation for dramatic change has not been found in the presence or absence of “migrations” per se.!? Because the Roman

state did not dissolve, the story of Byzantine art is generally told almost totally without reference to any “new peoples” whatsoever. Since the role of “new peoples” is deemed essential to the creation of medieval art, it follows logically, if preposterously, that Byzantine art is not in fact medieval at all, but a prolongation of antiquity. The notion of the Byzantine East as a reservoir of perennial classicism is then associated with the sense that when the Latin West, well into the medieval period, wished to revive antique cultural and artistic forms, it borrowed them from the warehouse of Byzantium, where antiquity had “survived.”?° Obviously this treatment reflects one aspect of the “Renaissance” paradigm previously discussed. In this historiographical tradition Byzantine and medieval (in this tradition meaning exclusively western European) art have separate identities, and separate histories, being linked only by episodes of contact and influence. Starting from such a point of view makes it impossible to see the eastern and western parts of a Christendom whose perceived unity vis-a-vis the non-Christian past and present, internal and external, was far more important to contemporaries than the undoubted rivalries within Christendom. Michael McCormick has revealed something of the manner

18 After writing this material, I received the tenth edition of Gardner’s Art through the Ages, now edited by Richard G. Tansey and Fred S. Kleiner (Fort Worth, Tex., 1996). The new edition is a small step in the right direction, having eliminated the Wagnerian passages of its predecessor in favor of a more sensible emphasis on social conditions in the later Roman period. Byzantium and Islam have finally been freed from being mere prolongations of antiquity and now begin the section on the Middle Ages. Those two chapters remain isolated from the main lines of the argument, however, and as before carry the narrative far into the second millennium, so that one still must jump back to the “barbarians” for the strictly chronological treatment of the postantique period. Surely this arrangement cannot be seen as driven by pedagogical necessity, as it remains confusing to most students, but rather inscribes the old tradition that both Byzantium and Islam are “the Other” in a classically Orientalist sense. See here the controversial essay by Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). 19 Roger Collins, Early Medieval Europe, 300-1000 (London, 1991). 20 The classic treatment covering the entire medieval period is Otto Demus, Byzantine Art and the West (New York, 1970). For a more recent view and some important cautionary ideas, see Anthony Cutler, “Misapprehensions and Misgivings: Byzantine Art and the West in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Mediaevalia 7 (1984), 41-77. No comparable overview for the early-medieval period yet exists. Some years ago I gathered some of the bibliographical material upon which such a study might

be based in From Justinian to Charlemagne: European Art, AD 565-787 (Boston, 1985), pp. 12237.

8 Introduction in which shared ritual traditions can belie an arbitrary East/West historiographical

division.2! Judith Herrin has written a broadly focused narrative history of the early-medieval period seeking to encompass East and West, and even adumbrated some of the common issues and strategies that linked as well as divided Christendom and Islam.?2 Unfortunately, there is as yet no comprehensive art-historical overview that can be set beside such works, following in the footsteps of Ernst Kitzinger’s inclusion of both Western and Eastern traditions in his concise survey of 1940 and his more recent example of how the two might be related in a manner that goes beyond tracing “influence.”?? Although it is not by any means the pur-

pose of this collection of articles to provide such an overview, the studies as a whole and often singly take steps in that direction, for example, the discussions by Cynthia Hahn on the forms of saints’ cults in East and West, Anthony Cutler on the circumstances of production, and Henry Maguire on the peculiar magical

treatment of money. , :

The discourse of early-medieval art history has shifted dramatically, at least in specialist literature. If a shift in paradigms is desirable, which ought not to be taken for granted, and if the erection of a substitute for the no longer persuasive master narrative of antiquity recovered on new ground and fundamentally transformed by ethnic change in western Europe might provide a stimulating new target for critical attack, thereby dialectically advancing our understanding, it was not the aim of this collection either to launch or to defend any such new paradigm. The fact is, whether it is thought sad or otherwise, no one has yet offered a sweep-

ing new paradigm capable of giving coherence to the notably varied art of the early-medieval period. Such a failure, if such it is, may reflect the conditions of contemporary scholarly life in a terminally ironized critical discourse, but it may also reflect the early-medieval reality. It may be that the leading characteristic of the period is its lack of coherence, its pattern of odd experiments sans progeny, its shifting and even contradictory directions as difficult to grasp for us today as for those living at the time. Robert Markus’s articulation of Augustine’s deep sense

of a new age dawning combined with uncertainty as to its end, the mysterious opacity of the age after scriptural revelation, might serve as an effective warning against even with the benefit of hindsight sketching too rigidly the shape of the early-medieval period and its artistic character.4 Although I suggested broad themes and areas to the contributors to this special issue of Speculum, they were given and exercised considerable freedom in both matter and method. The collection reveals a wide range of approaches to the artistic tradition of the early Middle Ages, including formal, contextual, functional, and archaeological lines of inquiry. Some of the approaches cannot be 21 Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, Eng., 1986). 22 Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, N.J., 1987). 23 Ernst Kitzinger, Early Medieval Art with Illustrations from the British Museum Collection (London, 1940; rev. ed., 1983), and idem, “Interlace and Icons: Form and Function in Early Insular Art,” in R. Michael Spearman and John Higgitt, eds., The Age of Migrating Ideas: Early Medieval Art in

Northern Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 3-15. 24 Robert A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge, Eng., 1970).

Introduction 9 termed new, and I quite deliberately refrained from burdening this collection with the albatross of self-proclaimed novelty. For example, descriptive analyses of form, particularly associated with the concept of style and often linked with the concept of development, long dominated art-historical writing but remain essential for its continued practice. The great majority of early-medieval works of art are not dated by inscription or archaeological context, and analysis of their style remains the

most reliable means of assessing their place and date of production, data still regarded as important starting points for most other avenues of approach by many scholars. The overall validity of style criticism has been amply demonstrated, and in the hands of many practitioners it has led to enriched consideration of contextual issues of many kinds.** Werner Jacobsen’s article in this collection focuses on

the forms of saints’ shrines, yet this traditional point of departure yields many new insights into the functions of the structures and the liturgies performed there; indeed, it leads to a recognition of the simultaneous existence of different arrangements (the absence of “development” in the usual art-historical sense) and of the

adoption of formal arrangements, not because of their formal associations, but because of political and functional decisions. In a closely related sense the detailed analytical description of art objects, considering not only their style but their materials, condition, and workmanship, has always been an essential part of cataloguing, but this process has become only more important in addressing broader issues of the organization of production and the social function and reception of works of art. Thus Michael Ryan’s finding through exhaustive description that the Derrynaflan liturgical metalwork was not and probably could not have been used in any regular service sheds important light on the issues of intent and use of luxury art, with broad implications for other sumptuary arts. Other recent work in a similar vein includes the impressive conference papers and essays on artistic production edited by Xavier Barral i Altet,2° and important recent books devoted to ivory carving in Byzantium and gemstone engraving in Carolingian Francia have devoted great attention to detailed study of the objects and their manufacture.?” Newly intensified attention has also been focused recently on the production of illuminated manuscripts, notably by

Jonathan Alexander.?8 ,

Art historians have long used literary sources, and there is an ancient tradition of compiling florilegia of these sources, ironically mirroring an aspect of medieval literary culture that has commonly been condemned as a sign of intellectual decline. Julius von Schlosser’s 1892 Schriftquellen, selections lifted from a wide range of written sources according to new categories and designed to be not so mucha guide to as a substitute for the original texts, is not only similar to something like *5 Ernst Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making: Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean Art, 3rd—7th Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). 6 Xavier Barral i Altet, ed., Artistes, artisans et production artistique au moyen age, 3 vols. (Paris,

1986-90). 27 Anthony Cutler, The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory, and Society in Byzantium (9th—11th Centuries) (Princeton, N.J., 1994), and Genevra Kornbluth, Engraved Gems of the Carolingian Empire (University Park, Pa., 1995).

28 Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval IIluminators and Their Methods of Work (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992), pp. 72-94, dealing specifically with the early-medieval period.

10 Introduction Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae on formal grounds but also stands as a heroic attempt to save what one observer conceived according to his own interests as the best and most useful portions of an important cultural resource increasingly un-

familiar to contemporaries.2? Several contributions to this volume use literary sources in an extended manner. Celia Chazelle reads one miniature of the Utrecht Psalter in relation to historical and ecclesiastical issues current in Carolingian Francia in the mid-ninth century, and Charles Barber uses a range of primary sources, especially writings of Leontios of Neapolis, to address the construction of cultural identity in reference to religious imagery in the Christian and Jewish traditions of the period. These studies seek to present early-medieval art history not so much as a separate and segregated discipline but as an aspect of visual culture that can be integrated within a broader historical discourse. This collection is inevitably arbitrary, and it makes no attempt to be comprehensive. It notably lacks a study focused upon “barbarian” art. That oversight

might well be seen as a reflection of my own reservations about the traditional , segregation of this material. The articles by Ryan and Maguire clearly draw upon some “barbarian” material but within a broader context of Christian and Romano-Mediterranean traditions. Another major omission is an account of the transformation of study in the area of manuscript illumination, my own special area of interest and arguably the most distinctive, novel, and characteristic art form of the early-medieval period. Although my primary responsibilities as editor of this collection rather than as potential contributor have regrettably resulted in that omission, I can at least note here that, in line with the historiographical tendency away from broad and inevitably reductive conceptions, focus has shifted from definition of schools and evaluation of antique revivals to contextual and functional studies of individual manuscripts. In particular I should single out the work of the late Robert Deshman, who played a major role in promoting contextual studies of individual manuscripts and their sometimes idiosyncratic peculiarities;>° a number of younger scholars have also 2° Julius von Schlosser, Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der karolingischen Kunst (Vienna, 1896). In the same tradition, and also of great value, is Elsmarie Knégel-Anrich, Schriftquellen zur Kunstgeschichte der Merowingerzeit (Darmstadt, 1936; repr. Hildesheim, 1992). The most familiar Englishlanguage collections of sources in translation, and the most convenient, for this area are Caecilia Davis-

Weyer, Early Medieval Art, 300-1150: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971; repr. Toronto, 1993), and Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972; repr. Toronto, 1993). 30 In my own mind, and certainly for my own work, of greatest impact was Deshman’s wonderful “The Exalted Servant: The Ruler Ideology of the Prayerbook of Charles the Bald,” Viator 11 (1980), 385-417. Most recently see his Benedictional of A:thelwold (Princeton, N.J., 1995). Published in the distinguished series Studies in Manuscript Illumination long edited by Kurt Weitzmann, and subsequently by his student Herbert Kessler, this study began as a doctoral dissertation written for Weitzmann and continues to very effectively employ the renowned “Weitzmann method” of picture criticism,

yet its concluding chapters on the royal and monastic programs present a rich interpretation deeply grounded in a reading of both primary and secondary historical literature. An important study along some of the same rich contextual lines set in the Byzantine world is Kathleen Corrigan, Visual Polemics

in the Ninth-Century Byzantine Psalters (Cambridge, Eng., 1992). For a treatment of recent methodological developments related to the study of medieval illuminated manuscripts see Mary-Lyon Dolezal, “The Elusive Quest for the ‘Real Thing’: The Chicago Lectionary Project Thirty Years On,” Gesta 35 (1996), 128-41, with extensive bibliography.

Introduction 11 emphasized the importance of codicological study and the role of function and audience in conditioning the production and reception of illuminated manuscripts.3! While this collection cannot, therefore, be viewed as a definitive study of early-medieval art, I hope that these tightly focused articles will, through the presentation of their topics and their scholarly apparatus, open up questions and point out avenues of approach.*2 31 See for examples from Western and Eastern material Nancy Netzer, Cultural Interplay in the Eighth Century: The Trier Gospels and the Making of a Scriptorium at Echternach (Cambridge, Eng., 1994); and John Lowden, “Observations on Illustrated Byzantine Psalters,” Art Bulletin 70 (1988), 242-60, and idem, The Octateuchs: A Study in Byzantine Manuscript Illustration (University Park, Pa., 1992). 32 As this volume’s final proofs were being checked, I received Jan Wood, “Report: The European Science Foundation’s Programme on the Transformation of the Roman World and Emergence of Early

Medieval Europe,” Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997), 217-27. This is more than a useful report on the organization of a multidisciplinary international project that currently envisages publication in seventeen volumes; it also offers a stimulating overview of some central historical and historigraphical issues. The first volume in the series was published in June 1997, edited by Walter Pohl, Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 1997).

Lawrence Nees is Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 (e-mail: [email protected]).

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The Right Hand’s Cunning: Craftsmanship and the Demand for Art in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages By Anthony Cutler Si oblitus fuero tui, Jerusalem, oblivioni detur dextera mea.” When Jerome commented on Ps. 136(137).5, he interpreted the passage allegorically. Sitting in exile by the waters of Babylon, the Israelites had hung their harps on the willows and, in a foreign land, would not sing the songs of Zion. Yet they refused to forget their origin, preferring, as King James’s translators put it, that “my right hand forget her cunning.” Jerome observes that this is always the hand whose work remembers the Lord.! Yet clearly, by the early fifth century, the idea of manual dexterity had become a trope, a figure in some higher argument. Augustine compares the “lower gods,” reduced to performing menial tasks in the administration of the universe, to workers in the silversmiths’ quarter through whose many hands a vessel passes before it is finished, even if it could have been perfected by any skilled member of their team.” Slightly more pragmatically, Justinian’s Digest

mentions a piece of silver plate, brought on approval to a client’s house by a uascularius but then inadvertently destroyed, as an instance actionable under the laws of contract.? It is the shadow cast by such translations to a higher plane that is my topic: artifacts in their own right and diversity, the way that they were made, and their significance for the cultures of which they were a part tend to be obscured when they are treated either as similes in their own time or as the undifferentiated output of artisans whose social situation, rather than whose production, is the object of modern scrutiny. The legal and economic status of craftsmen‘ has been investigated in a body of literature so vast that there is no need to rehearse its conclusions here.’ But it is worth remarking that the results of otherwise invaluable inquiry 1 Breviarium in Psalmos (PL 26:1305B). 2 De civitate Dei 7.4: “opifices in vico argentario ubi unum uasculum ut perfectum exeat per multos artifices transit, cum ab uno perfecto perfici posset.” On this passage see further below, p. 30. 3.19.5.20, ed. Theodor Mommsen and Paul Krueger, Corpus iuris civilis, 1/2 (Berlin, 1854), p. 294; trans. Alan Watson, The Digest of Justinian, 2 (Philadelphia, 1985), p. 579. 4 Obviously not explicit in the artifacts themselves, the gendered term is used or implied in virtually

every document that refers to their makers. On this question, see Anthony Cutler, The Hand of the Master: Craftsmanship, Ivory, and Society in Byzantium (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 2-3. ‘ For late antiquity the most useful surveys remain Jean-Paul Sodini, “Lartisanat urbain a |’époque paléochrétienne ([Ve—VIle siécle),” Ktéma 4 (1979), 71-119, and L. Cracco Ruggini, “Le associazioni professionali nel mondo romano-bizantino,” Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto _ Medioevo 18 (1971), 59-227. For the early-medieval West see Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1980), esp. pp. 70-87, with huge bibliography best consulted in the original French edition, Pour un autre moyen 4ge: Temps, travail et culture (Paris, 1977), pp. 125-30. Valuable studies of particular crafts are accessible in Xavier Barral i Altet, ed., Artistes, artisans et production artistique au moyen age, 2 (Paris, 1987). By design, 13

14 The Right Hand’s Cunning into the words used for specialized craftsmen* may be misleading if, from this language, we infer a one-to-one correspondence between a particular term and a particular occupation or that particular skills were no longer practiced when their linguistic denominators disappeared. Such terms may be region-specific,’ even archaisms perpetuated beyond the period of their currency on pretentious monuments, or a sign of erudition (or of a desire to appear erudite). Conversely, when classical designations disappeared, archaeology sometimes contradicts the silence that philology alone might suggest. Thus the casting of large-scale bronzes continued after the term statuarius vanished, while, despite the absence of references to sacomarii, the bronze bust-form weights that they produced persisted in Byzantium.? The commonsensical supposition that a specialized vocabulary would survive longer for craftsmen creating objects for everyday use is borne out by the use of such words as kleiropoios (locksmith), machairopoios (cutler), and katenaras (chainmaker) in Theodore of Stoudios.'!° Yet even these practical labels recur ever more rarely in post-ninth-century sources, and Jacques Le Goff’s pardonable exaggeration that, as mere appendages to the figures of saints and heroes, craftsmen were invisible to the early-medieval West'! might usefully be applied to the medieval Greek world. In addition to the problem-strewn lexicon for the makers of things, the ambig-

I exempt from discussion spolia, the questions raised by which often transcend the purpose of this article. These problems have most recently and insightfully been treated by Dale Kinney, “Rape or Restitution of the Past? Interpreting Spolia,” in The Art of Interpreting, ed. Susan C. Scott (University

Park, Pa., 1996), pp. 52-68. 6 The pioneer in this field was Louis Robert. See, e.g., his “Noms de métiers dans des documents byzantins,” in Xaptotipiov sic “Avaotdouov K. ‘OpAdvéov, 1 (Athens, 1965), pp. 324-47. For the papyrological evidence from Egypt, see Itskhok FE. Fikhman, Egipet na rubeje dvukh epokh: Remeslenniki i remeslennyi trud v [V—seredine VII v. (Moscow, 1965), esp. pp. 25-32. 7 Thus Ugo Monneret de Villard, Introduzione allo studio dell’archeologia islamica (Venice, 1966;

repr. Rome, 1968), p. 299, showed on the basis of inscriptions that in southern Syria down to the Ummayad era the normal word for builder was oikod6p0c, while in the north the more generic téyvitns was preferred. Robert (n. 6 above) was careful to point to the localities (Athens, Corinth, Korykos, etc.) where his epigraphic evidence originated. 8 Harald von Petrikovits, “Die Spezialisierung des romischen Handwerkes, II (Spatantike),” Zeitschrift fiir Papyrologie und Epigraphik 43 (1981), 285-306. 9 Petrikovits, “Spezialisierung.” It is surely not fortuitous that such lead-filled weights disappeared

about the same time (the seventh century) as bronze monumental sculpture. By the tenth century, historical references to bronze casters (e.g., Theophanes Continuatus, ed. Immanuel Bekker [Bonn, 1838], p. 327, lines 18-20) employ the word teyvitne, the same term as is used for masons, painters, and carpenters who are not recognized as members of a guild in the Book of Eparch, chapter 22 (Das Eparchenbuch Leons des Weisen, ed. Johannes Koder, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 33 [Vienna, 1991], pp. 138-40). 10 A. P. Dobroklonskij, Prep. Feodor ispovednik i igumen Studijskij, 1 (Odessa, 1913), pp. 412-13. Analogous difficulties lie in the terminology used in the sources for those who embellished books. On this question in Byzantium, see Jeffrey C. Anderson, “On the Nature of the Theodore Psalter,” Art Bulletin 70 (1988), 558. In the West the eighth-century Ultan, later credited with the ornamentation of a variety of splendid Insular manuscripts, should perhaps be celebrated as a highly competent scribe: Lawrence Nees, “Ultan the Scribe,” Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993), 127-46. 11 Time, Work, and Culture, p. 113: “Other individuals existed only through participation in the being of the hero or saint: the biographer who wrote or the minstrel who sang his praise, the ironsmith who forged his sword, the goldsmith who fashioned the outward signs of his wealth and power.”

The Right Hand’s Cunning 15 uous testimony of language extends to the things that they made. A telling example is that of the sella, described in the Vita Eligii as prepared for King Dagobert and

long understood to describe a throne. It was only when Hayo Vierck suggested that this term was more likely to mean a saddle”? that we could relate the object, however distantly, to others produced by, or attributed to, the mid-seventh-century goldsmith and moneyer—and thereby glimpse the range of creations that could emerge from the hands of a talented early-medieval artificer. Problems of this sort continue to plague our identification of objects both Eastern and Western. But it may be that not all the difficulties to be found in contemporary descriptions are due to our own ignorance; some, surely, are purposeful characteristics of the genre chosen by the writer. We can catch at least a glimmer of this intention in, for

instance, Choricius’s ekphrasis of St. Stephen’s at Gaza. Commenting on its atrium, he observes that “[t]hose [columns], however, that face east surpass the others in height by the same measure that the latter rise above the ground,” a circumlocution that matches the “purely aesthetic purpose” that he attributes to the colonnade itself. Choricius is the sort of writer who would call someone who does a crossword puzzle a “cruciverbalist.” Of the church proper he remarks that “lilts width is such as the length requires, its length is dictated by the width, and the height of the roof proportionate to both.” Whether this apergu was founded on intuition or measurement, it presumably suited Bishop Marcian, the founder in whose honor this public oration was uttered. In other words, it was taken as fitting by both Choricius’s patron and, no less importantly, his auditors. It is “circles” of this sort, the ripples radiating from the commission but preexisting it and largely predetermining its generic form, that are accessible through responses like that of Choricius. If the demands and tastes of this audience beyond the commanditaire may broadly be inferred from the object that resulted from the order to create, they can more accurately be assessed in light of written reactions. Ekphraseis and other documents of this type tell us of the preconditions of the

12 Hayo Vierck, “Werke des Eligius,” in Studien zur vor- und friithgeschichtlichen Archaologie: Fest-

schrift fiir Joachim Werner, ed. Georg Kossack and Giinter Ulbert, Miinchner Beitrage zur Vor- und Friihgeschichte, Erganzungsband 1 (Munich, 1974), p. 311. Lawrence Nees, “The Originality of Early Medieval Artists,” in Literacy, Politics, and Artistic Innovation in the Early Medieval West, ed. Celia M. Chazelle (Lanham, Md.; New York; and London, 1992), p. 83, astutely pointed to the source of the problem: the saint’s life, not his artifacts, is the point of this (and other) vitae. On the broader issue of the credibility of reports on holy craftsmen, see the observations of Joseph Neubner, Die heiligen Handwerker in der Darstellung der Acta Sanctorum, Minsterische Beitrage zur Theologie,

Heft 4 (Miinster, 1929), pp. 14-34; on Eligius specifically, see pp. 123-37. This neglected book includes a useful catalogue of saints and their earthly occupations (pp. 259-72). In common with his sources the author’s prime concern is, however, his holy men’s Christian ministry (askesis, conversion, charity, etc.) rather than their craft practices. On difficulties in the vocabulary of another genre (Byzantine monastic inventories), see Paul Lemerle, Cing études sur le XIe siécle byzantin (Paris, 1977), pp.

36-37, 88-91. 13 | audatio Marciani 2.31-32, in Choricius, Opera, ed. Richard Foerster and Eberhard Richsteig, p. 35. Here and below I cite the translation of Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 3121453 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972; repr. Toronto, 1986), pp. 69-70. This language is in marked contrast to that of Procopius, who, in describing the devices used in the construction of Hagia Sophia (De aedificiis 1.1.50), remarks that “some of these it is both hopeless for me to understand in their entirety, and impossible to explain in words.”

16 The Right Hand’s Cunning work of art,!* of the assumptions and expectations that are inscribed on it’ below the level, so to speak, of the individual craftsman’s contribution. In this sense, the writer constitutes one of the object’s destinataires, that critical circle whose “patronage” is manifested where the “input” of the commanditaire is, more often

than not, invisible.'¢ ,

Obviously, there is no more reason to suppose Choricius’s account of the church’s proportions as typical of less literate visitors to St. Stephen’s than there

. is to regard his language as that which ordinary men and women would have used in their reactions to it. His ekphrasis is a piece of rhetoric high-flown even by the standards of his time, written for a coterie that likely delighted more in the subtleties of his prose than in the nuances of the church’s design. The text does not allow us to go further: we cannot infer from the words addressed to the bishop the reactions of those who were not members of his charmed circle. They, too, in a sense were destinataires, people who entered the church, worshiped there, and constantly encountered it as they perambulated Gaza, spectator-members of what Jean-Pierre Sodini nicely called “une civilisation de la flanerie.”!” They may well have included marmarii who worked on St. Stephen’s, but, if so, their peculiar contributions are as unidentifiable as those who made the artifacts with which I shall be concerned. For the moment there remain other lessons to be derived from a select group of late-antique and early-medieval responses. The enjambment between these periods is justified, first, by the kinship between reactions to craftsmanship, Eastern and Western, of this age and, secondly, by the 14 T do not hesitate to use this term when faced with artifacts that today, as in early Christian thought,

are considered “luxurious.” Once the important point has been made, as it was by Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich, 1990), that these were not primarily gratuitous aesthetic gestures, it is not worth belaboring. It will be obvious from what follows

| that I draw some distinctions between such “gestures” and contemporary reactions to them. This is not to deny, however, that the nature of the latter can often be a profound guide to that of the former. On relative notions of luxury, see Anthony Cutler, “Uses of Luxury: On the Functions of Consumption and Symbolic Capital in Byzantine Culture,” in Byzance et les images: Cycle de conférences organisé au Musée du Louvre..., ed. André Guillou and Jannic Durand (Paris, 1994), pp. 287-327. By using the term “art” I am also signaling that I am here concerned with the “high end” of the market rather than with objects, however well made, intended for everyday use. This preoccupation will be taken by some to be “elitist.” I find something distinctly confused (not to say perverse) in the dismissal as “elitist” of interest in the products of craftsmen, whose manual ability far exceeded their social status and personal wealth, simply because their works were originally made for, and continue to be studied by, persons whose social status far exceeds their manual ability and often their technical understanding. 15 The critical separation of this level of information from the “archaeological” data usually sought (and found) in antique and medieval descriptions is achieved by Liz James and Ruth Webb, “ ‘To Understand Ultimate Things and Enter Secret Places’: Ekphrasis and Art in Byzantium,” Art History 14 (1991), 1-17. On the gaps between the eloquence of Carolingian ekphraseis and the “knowledge of actual objects,” see David Ganz, “ ‘Pando quod ignoro’: In Search of Carolingian Artistic Experience,” in Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson, ed. Lesley Smith and Benedicta Ward (London, 1992), pp. 25-32. 16 For the utility of the distinction between commanditaire and destinataire, as opposed to the obfuscating term “patron,” see Cutler, “Uses of Luxury,” pp. 299-302, and n. 70 below. 17 “T 4 contribution de l’archéologie 4 la connaissance du monde byzantin ([Ve—VIle siécles),” Dum-

barton Oaks Papers 47 (1993), 183. This useful tour d’horizon is to be supplemented, especially for jewelry, by the introductory survey by Anna Gonosova and Christine Kondoleon, Art of Late Rome and Byzantium in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, Va., 1994), pp. 13-31.

The Right Hand’s Cunning 17 difference between these and reports of the Hellenistic and medieval eras on either side. The distinction is apparent, for example, in Ausonius’s salute to the Moselle: this river turns the millstones and shrieking saws that cut the ashlar and limestone

strips of which the walls, buildings, and floor mosaics of Trier were made.!8 A philologist’s commentary on the passage compares it to Pliny’s Natural History." Yet the late-fourth-century author makes poetry of his cerealia saxa and levia marmora, whereas Pliny had sought to instruct his audience in the uses of the lathe-turned Siphnian stone that was his subject.2° Ausonius, moreover, does not show off his technological awareness, as the Elder Philostratus had paraded his | knowledge of various pigment-bearing ores or the reason why Phoenician alourgis is preferable to other purple dyes. The Gaulish poet is still interested in how things come into being, unlike the twelfth-century Gerald of Wales, who was so taken by the intricacies of the pictures in a Gospel book that he saw at Kildare, with “almost as many drawings as pages,” that he was ready to throw up his hands and declare “all these things to be the work not of men but of angels.”2! Unlike classical writers, again, Ausonius does not attempt to be encyclopedic. He assumes that his readers know, if not Trier’s products directly, then the city’s reputation for fine masonry, its industry in semiprecious stones and, probably, in carved rock

crystal.?? |

What was assumed by the ekphrasists and its corollary—what was omitted by artists of this period—was moved to center stage in the debate over the nature of late-antique art some fifteen years ago,”’ although, if the controversy surrounding _ John Onians’s propositions has died down, this has not been the result of any adequate scrutiny of his hypothesis. Observing a decline in the amount of detail in the art of the period and the growing elaboration in contemporary accounts of art, he posited a causal connection between those phenomena.”* Now, no student

of the “art writing” of the times between the Elder Philostratus and Paul the 18 Mosella, lines 361-64. 19 Ausonius, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn White, Loeb ed. (London, 1919; repr. 1951), 1:253, n. 5. On the sawmills see Orjan Wikander, ed., Opuscula Romana, 17, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska Institutet i Rom 46 (Stockholm, 1989), pp. 185-90. 20 Historia naturalis 36.44.159. *? I cite the translation of John J. O’Meara, Gerald of Wales: The History and Topography of Ireland

(Harmondsworth, Eng., 1982), p. 84. For the Latin text see Otto Lehmann-Brockhaus, Lateinische Schriftquellen zur Kunst in England, Wales und Schottland vom Jahre 901 bis zum Jahre 1307, 3

(Munich, 1956), no. 5940. ,

22 Thus a handled agate bowl now in Vienna (Trier: Kaiserresidenz und Bischofssitz, exhibition catalogue [Mainz, 1984], no. 35) is signed by Flavius Aristo of Trier. The pair of rock crystal lions’ heads now in the Musée Cluny, Paris, are tentatively attributed to Trier by Katharine R. Brown in Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century, ed. Kurt Weitzmann (New York, 1979), no. 330. 23 John Onians, “Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity,” Art History 3 (1980), 1-24. In the same vein see James Trilling, “Late Antique and Sub-Antique or the ‘Decline of Form’ Reconsidered,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987), 469-76. 4 A representative statement might be “[I]f Callistratus could actually see colours in bronze and marble statues which were not there, or could feel the metal [of a statue of Dionysus: Callistratus, 8] bending ..., it was clearly less necessary for artists to go to great lengths putting in the information about colour and texture which they had recorded earlier. Such information was superfluous” (Onians, “Abstraction,” p. 12).

18 The Right Hand’s Cunning Silentiary would dispute the geometrical increase in literary description and interpretation; and few would contest the parallel diminution of realistic detail in visual representations of the time, even if not all would describe this treatment as “abstraction.” But if it is correct to identify one’s modern reaction to a text with one’s modern reaction to a late-antique image, then such symmetry should be no less true of the era in which that image was made. If the author of a late-antique text saw more in a picture than we now see, it is entirely possible that the late-antique artist put more into his creation than is now evident to us. Onians’s reading depends upon the modern scholarly preference for explanations couched in terms of the known history of rhetoric rather than the knowable history of things.?5 Before accepting the idea of a disjunction between attitudes within a single society, the contrast between a “reduced” creativity and a heightened response on the part of the spectator, it is necessary to examine more closely the relationship between the

ways things came into being in late antiquity and the degree to which contemporary commentators understood the nature of both substances and the objects fabricated from them. Certainly mistaken is the notion that artists and beholders alike belonged to a culture that sought “to nurture an inner vision where external sensory experiences could be set aside.”26 On the contrary, as has recently been shown, the early Christian experience of the church was nothing if not sensory.?”? Were it not so, the faculties of smell and hearing would not have been so deliberately cultivated in the literature of the age;?® writers like Sidonius Apollinaris?? and Procopius*° would not have gone on and on about the marble cladding of the buildings that they were describing; and the bodies of saints would have been wrapped in cambric rather than silk. Nor are such responses limited to materials. The descriptions of Paul the Silentiary not only abound in references to skillful craftsmen but show that Justinian’s court poet was familiar with at least some building methods and the way tools were used. It would be pointless to stress his famous verses on the marbles of Hagia Sophia.?! His account of the great church’s ambo relates how “t]he mason has beautifully carved the eight sides of each pedestal, while the steel carving-tool has bound its round neck [with a collar] so that the column should rest securely upon the circular [top of] the pedestal that is affixed underneath.” 25 Art-historical writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been plagued by misunderstandings of both the material and technical methods of late-antique and medieval craftsmen. Examples of such misconceptions are pointed out by Ann Terry, “The Opus sectile in the Eufrasius Basilica at

Pore¢,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 40 (1986), 147-64, esp. pp. 147-48, n. 5; Anthony Cutler, “Five Lessons in Late Roman Ivory,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 6 (1993), 171-72, 181-83. 26 Onians, “Abstraction,” p. 20. 27 Thomas FE. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton,

N.J., 1993), pp. 94-95, 128, 136-37. 28 See Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Sanctity and Stench: When Holy Fragrance Turns Foul,” in Abstracts of Papers, Twentieth Annual Byzantine Studies Conference, 20-23 October 1994, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994), pp. 45-46, pending her fuller study of the topic. 29 Fpithalamium 11, lines 17-26; Epistolae 2.2.7 (a variety of marbles at Sidonius’s farmhouse at Avitacum), 2.10.4 (marbles at a church built by Bishop Patiens of Lyons). 30 De aedificiis 1.1.59-60 (Hagia Sophia), 1.4.25 (St. Akakios). 31 Descriptio S. Sophiae, lines 617-46 (trans. Mango, Art [n. 13, above], pp. 85-86). 32 Descriptio ambonis, lines 148-58. I cite the translation of Mango, Art, pp. 93-94.

| The Right Hand’s Cunning 19 More than an aesthetic observation, the passage shows awareness of a principle in statics that accounts for the triumph at this very time of the impost capital.*? There is no need to make an engineer of Paul. Rather, his ekphraseis demonstrate an ability to see beyond surface appearance that is paralleled later in the century when Gregory of Tours repeatedly exposes as “very cleverly gilded bronze”

what others had taken to be gold.** Fascination with the precious metals is of course perennial and, in this period, even notorious. There is no want of anecdotes, revealing in this respect if infuriating to the art historian because they record the

material but not the subject of richly adorned icons that attest to this passion.* But Gregory cannot be tarred with this brush: he seems to have been genuinely interested in craftsmanship, especially when it was practiced by his episcopal predecessors.*¢ Even so, such reports occur only as passing references and treat the industries of art only from the consumer’s point of view. To understand the nature of the crafts in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and their relation to the “market,” we need more systematic accounts. These are available only from technical analyses of workmanship in some of the most favored media of the age.

Data for a case study are provided by the finds from a sculptor’s studio at Aphrodisias. This site was excavated in 1969 but did not yield its secrets until 1991, when it was subjected to the scrutiny of a practicing artist,*” revealing features that are demonstrably or arguably characteristic of the conditions of craftsmanship in the urban workshops with which I shall be chiefly concerned. Most notable is the direct connection between the craftsman and his public. This is suggested by the position in which one of two life-sized images was found: at the entrance to the first of the studio’s two rooms, facing the piazza of the Odeion, where it would have been “waiting for a buyer.” A standing togatus was partly finished, ready to have its facial features trimmed “to meet the needs of a client desiring a portrait statue of a man of importance in a provincial city” (Fig. 1).38 Yet figures

33 For a development of this form between the mid-fifth and the mid-sixth century, see Christine Strube, Polyeuktoskirche und Hagia Sophia (Munich, 1984), pp. 102-10. 34 Historia Francorum 2.42 (“golden” armbands given to Clovis by his liegemen); 4.42 (the Saxons pay obligations with stamped bars of colored bronze), ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SSrerMerov 1/2/1. 35 E.g., Malchus’s report on “a very valuable icon of gold set with precious stones,” presented to the emperor Leo I (457-74) by his Arab phylarch Amorkesos, in The Fragmentary Classicising Historians, 2, ed. and trans. Roger C. Blockley (Liverpool, 1983), p. 406, lines 6-38. 36 Thus Gregory’s account (Historia Francorum 10.31, ed. Krusch, p. 447, lines 1-3) of Leo, bishop of Tours in 526, as a carpenter (faber lignarius) who made font covers of gilded wood, some of which were still in use in Gregory’s day. 37 Peter Rockwell, “Unfinished Statuary Associated with a Sculptor’s Studio,” in Aphrodisias Papers,

2, ed. R. R. R. Smith and Kenan T. Erim, Journal of Roman Archaeology, supplementary series, 2 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991), pp. 127-43. Chronological indications for this shop remain fluid. It is described as “probably not earlier than the second or third century, nor later than the mid- to latefourth century” (R. R. R. Smith and Christopher Ratté, “Archaeological Research at Aphrodisias in Caria, 1994,” American Journal of Archaeology 100 [1996], 13). 38 Rockwell, “Unfinished Statuary,” p. 138. Further on this figure see Jael Inan and Elisabeth Alfoldi-

Rosenbaum, Romische und frihbbyzantinische Portratplastik aus der Turkei (Mainz, 1979), no. 195,

20 The Right Hand’s Cunning of this sort were not the only types produced. A diskophoros, an Asklepios, two finished versions of a satyr with Dionysos (one large, one small), a Europa with the Bull, in various states of completion, show that this workshop produced mythological images as well as portraits. None was a relief, and there were no architectural sculpture or sarcophagi even though the city abounded with such works. In other words, this sculptor was a specialist, but one with several strings to his bow. Types of carving absent from his repertoire may be presumed to have emanated from other shops in the same area between the Odeion and the Aphrodite temple.*? The concentration of closely related crafts in a specific quarter of the city is already thoroughly medieval. The most obvious reason for the existence of these workshops at Aphrodisias was the presence of a good quarry some two to three kilometers away. Yet despite this ready source of material, it is evident that this particular craftsman threw away no usable piece of marble. Work that had been damaged in production was found in the shop, along with completed but unsold pieces. From this it has been inferred that the sculptor “either worked on a low profit margin or had little

| capital for buying new stone.”4° While these explanations reinforce the notion of his immediate dependence on the market about him, they are not necessarily alternatives. We have too little information about the economic situation of craftsmen working in later periods and other materials to insist that they operated under similar hand-to-mouth conditions. But the evidence from the one late-antique ivory workshop that has been adequately published*! confirms the frugal attitude toward a precious material evinced by the sculptor of Aphrodisias. To this point I have continued to refer to this craftsman as an individual rather than as a member of a team.** This would seem justified by the size of the two rooms that made up the studio: neither was larger than thirty—forty square meters—“a very small space for sculpting” where “it would be difficult for more than two persons to be working ... at a time.”*? I shall have reason to suggest that other workshops were no better endowed in this respect. If this supposition is correct, it has obvious implications for the staffing of such shops, that is, for the size of the teams engaged in the processes of manufacture: the huge fabricae of the republican and imperial eras, like the ample chantiers of the Gothic age, are inappropriate models for an understanding of production in this period. Confined within his relatively small area, the fourth-century sculptor had little or no room to store material on which he had not yet worked. While there are no indications to support the belief that this was supplied to him on an ad hoc basis by the client, who, on archaeological grounds, assign it a late Constantinian date. A fragment of a sarcophagus excavated at Aphrodisias shows a sculptor at work on a large bust resting on a pedestal; see Smith and Ratté, “Archaeological Research,” p. 29 and fig. 24. 3° For a popular presentation of the Odeion, including the earlier sculpture found in the area, see Kenan T. Erim, Aphrodisias, City of Venus Aphrodite (New York and Oxford, 1986), pp. 65-67.

40 Rockwell, “Unfinished Statuary,” p. 134.

41 Josef Engemann, “Elfenbeinfunde aus Abu Mina/Agypten,” Jahrbuch fiir Antike und Christentum 30 (1987), 172-86. This shop evidently worked both ivory and bone. While wasters of the latter were abundant, the amount of discarded ivory found was minimal. * Rockwell, “Unfinished Statuary,” speaks variously of “the sculptor” and “sculptors.” 43 Rockwell, “Unfinished Statuary,” pp. 134, 141.

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The Right Hand’s Cunning 21 as will be shown to be the case with goldsmiths and others in Byzantium and the | early-medieval West, his restricted quarters had other effects on his techniques. As

his modern successor realized, limitations of space precluded his use of three-

eye.*4

dimensional models. The Aphrodisias sculptor seems occasionally to have worked from drawings, taking measurements from these; in the main, however, he carved freehand, transferring the proportions of his exemplars by dint of an experienced

The question of models brings up the vexed subject of craftsmen’s working methods. It has been asserted that “in this era” (scil. c. 400) “it was inconceivable that an artist would work directly from nature.”*5 Now it may be true that the majority of draftsmen and, as noted above, workers in three-dimensional media

made use of some sort of visual paradigm. But from the fifth and early sixth centuries there survives testimony of various sorts to the practice of working from life. Portrait sculpture of the sort represented by the unfinished togatus demanded a greater or lesser degree of likeness, at least for the final form of the facial features,

while copying from nature is implied in the well-known picture in the Vienna Dioskorides miniature of a painter at his easel transcribing the features of a plant that is held up to him as a model (Fig. 2).4° No less telling is the analogy drawn by Theodoret of Cyrrhus between those who would imitate some noble ethical exemplar and “painters who observe their model, reproducing the eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, ears, forehead, and even the hair and beard, whether [the sitter] is seated or standing and his aspect, welcoming or terrible. . . .”4” It may be that the direct copying postulated in the Dioskorides miniature and suggested by Theodoret’s moral analogy are no more than memories, dusty photographs, as it were, of bygone methods. The problem is to test whether these are anomalies, or worthy of trust as reflections of habits, manual or mental, that survived in human memory in the fifth and sixth centuries, or evidence of confirming practice. How recent was the time when drawing from life was the normal practice of artists? How long had it been since the degree of lifelikeness that they achieved was the standard by which their performance was judged? Whether naturalism fell from grace or was pushed—out of greater concern, perhaps, for qualities other than verisimilitude*®—the citation of datable responses and other texts that make use of works of art may be only slightly more reliable than the works themselves, 44 Rockwell, “Unfinished Statuary,” pp. 136, 142. Only one of the sculptures found (the diskophoros)

, had measuring points; even this piece offered no evidence for the use of a pointing machine. 45 David H. Wright, The Vatican Vergil: A Masterpiece of Late Antique Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), p. 3. 46 Hans Gerstinger, Dioscurides: Codex Vindobonensis Med. Gr. 1 der Osterreichischen National-

bibliothek, 1 (Graz, 1970), fol. 5v. , 47 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Histoire des moines de Syrie, ed. and trans. Pierre Canivet and Alice Leroy-

Molinghen, 2 (Paris, 1979), p. 248, lines 11-16. 48 For one theory of the causes of “a certain disinterest in the sculptural elaboration of individual forms” dating back as far as the late second century, see Ernst Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making: Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean Art, Third—Seventh Century (Cambridge, Mass.,

1977), pp. 16-17. Contra Kitzinger, and on the survival of verisimilitude in portraiture “until at least the time of Justinian,” see now Jeffrey C. Anderson, “The Byzantine Panel Portrait before and after Iconoclasm,” in The Sacred Image East and West, ed. Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker (Urbana, Ill., 1995), pp. 25-44, esp. pp. 33-34.

22 The Right Hand’s Cunning since such words may be colored by the same agendas (deliberate archaism, propaganda of one sort or another) as the portraits that we normally use in reaching judgments of this sort. But words are the only other instruments that we have to measure the “decline” of naturalism. It is therefore worthwhile recalling a few of the texts that pertain to this question. As an analogue for the way biographies provide patterns for noble action and

utterances, the emperor Julian took it for granted that craftsmen depended on models (apyétuna).4? That he was thinking of portraiture, and that he interpreted the purpose of such copying to be verisimilitude, is clear from his observations on the emperor Claudius’s simple manner of dressing “as may be seen to this day in his images.”°° Almost simultaneously, Eunapius requires of the painter that he

observe in his model (napddetyua) the “deep furrow on the brow, prominent sideburns, or some insignificant detail which, if overlooked, causes the portrait (std6oc) to fail, but if rendered accurately, is the sole reason why the likeness has been caught.”5! And Libanius is on record as applying the same criterion to images of the great men of the past: in a letter to thank a high Bithynian official for a

portrait of the rhetorician Aelius Aristeides, the orator points out that he had already received one but had rejected it: “I could not believe that this was Aristeides, for the face seemed to be out of keeping with his serious illness and the hair indicated that it was someone else, for I could not see how he should have such a growth of it.”52 Theodoret’s insistence on detailed observation is, then, no freak exception of the fifth century but rather the late expression of a traditional habit of hand and mind. The Dioskorides picture of a painter and his model is harder to assess: even though the ostensible purpose of the illustrations in the manuscript was to depict the plants whose uses are described in it, I know of no texts that would support the notion of veristic botanical illustration in the sixth century. All that we have is Choricius’s affirmation that artists copied other works of art.*? And, indeed, this is the avenue by which I return to my initial concern with portrait sculpture in stone. A recent study of unfinished, late-antique heads has found the numbers of measuring points greatly reduced from the quantity used in classical carving. Numerous examples show but two benchmarks: one on the hair above the forehead and one on the chin.** These heads were not portraits taken directly from

49 The Works of the Emperor Julian, ed. Wilmer C. Wright, Loeb ed., 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.,

and London, 1913-23), 1:330-31. 50 Works, ed. Wright, 1:16-17. 51 In Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians (n. 35, above), 2:76, line 7—2:78, line 12.

2 Epistolae 1534 in Libanius, Opera, ed. Richard Foerster, Teubner ed., 12 vols. in 13 (Leipzig, 1903-27; repr. Hildesheim, 1963). I cite the Loeb translation of A. F. Norman, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 2:295-97. 53 Laudatio Marciani 2.40: “[P]ainters whose business it is to select and copy the most beautiful things there are, should they need to represent columns or gorgeous plaques—and I have often seen that sort of thing in paintings—will find plenty of excellent models here” (trans. Mango, Art [n. 13, above], p. 70). 54 Dietrich Boschung and Michael Pfanner, “Les méthodes de travail des sculptures antiques et leur signification dans lhistoire de culture,” in Pierre éternelle du Nil an Rhin, ed. Marc Waelkens (Brussels,

1990), pp. 127-42.

The Right Hand’s Cunning 23 life but multiples of extant images, made by laying the back of a carved head in a sandbox; secured in this way, the upturned face would allow proportional distances to be measured and reproduced. Despite the enormous body of production achieved in this way, and the greatly reduced number of points de repére, the quality of these copies is remarkably high—testimony at once to the skill of sculptors working to respond to what Dietrich Boschung and Michael Pfanner see as an increased demand and to the continuing interest of their clients in more or less faithful reproduction. A middle way was thus found between the painstaking process of copying by means of multiple measuring points and the faster but less accurate method of working by eye alone. The evident success of the “marketing” of such works shows that artists, working in this way, achieved sufficient likeness to satisfy the demand. If we are tempted to see in this method a technical explanation for the reduced detail that Onians attributed to less palpable cultural forces, it should still be remembered that the readiness of commanditaires to invest in the results of such economies would be a precondition of their acceptance. For obvious reasons the carving of portraits in stone was more dependent on direct commission than other forms of sculpture. As the evidence from Aphrodisias shows, mythological subjects were much more likely to be prepared independently of specific orders and offered for sale on the open market as completed works. It

is by now well documented that column drums, capitals, and bases, as well as sarcophagi, were exported from quarries in an advanced state of preparation to meet anticipated, but as yet unrealized, commissions.** But it is the nature of the market in objects made “on spec,” and bought without benefit of a prior order, that remains darkest to us, precisely because such trade involved no documents. It seems safe, however, to point out that not every artifact sold in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages must have been the result of commission: Gregory of Tours’s story about how Count Lendast “went round the shops, looking at what they had for sale, counting how much money he had in his purse and asking to be shown various pieces of jewelry,” may derive some of its modern flavor from its modern translation,®* but the behavior that it represents was surely a reality,

and one that was not confined to sixth-century Gaul. |

I mentioned above a silver vessel, carried on approval to the house of a private individual, used as an exemplum in Justinian’s Digest.°” The law code’s narrative is hardly a surprising one: an ingot of silver is given to a craftsman (faber) to be made into vessels, or gold is deposited to end up as rings.**® In legal terms the owner of the material remains the creditor, but, from my present point of view, the fact that he or she is the source of the metal is more interesting. The Digest

55 To the literature on this question cited by Sodini, “Lartisanat urbain” (n. 5, above), pp. 76-77, should be added Nusin Asgari, “Objets de marbre finis, semi-finis, et inachevés du Proconnése,” in Pierre éternelle, pp. 106-26. 56 Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1974), p. 363. For the original text, see Historia Francorum 6.32 (n. 34, above), p. 303, lines 12-15.

3, above), 2:567. , 57 N. 3, above.

58 192.31, ed. Mommsen and Krueger, Corpus iuris civilis (n. 3, above), 1/2:288; trans. Watson (n.

24 The Right Hand’s Cunning treats the jeweler®’ as the lessee of the metal, but this conceals the raw economic fact that ordinary craftsmen could not afford to hold large quantities of precious metals. The burglary of “nearly one hundred [Roman] pounds of silver” from the shop of Romulos, a silversmith of Jerusalem and archdeacon of Gethsemane about the year 532, was presumably recorded by Cyril of Skythopolis because it was an unusually large amount. Even so, it could not have served many large commissions: the Paternus paten, discussed below, weighed, according to its inscription, twenty pounds. Moreover, Cyril’s text makes it clear that not all the stolen silver belonged to the craftsman, who complained to a vision of St. Theodore that “I have lost my own property and that of others.” Since precious metals were “leased” rather than owned, it is not surprising that commercial disputes arose over these most fungible of commodities.“ The often-cited story in John Moschos of a patrician who supplied gold to a goldsmith for a cross that he intended to give to a church describes both the source of the material and the circumstances in which it was worked. Since the object was to be set with precious stones, the client weighed the cross before these gems were mounted to ensure that he was not being cheated. The point of Moschos’s moral tale is that the patrician thereby discovered that a pious apprentice had added his small portion to the oblation,® but for my purposes it nicely illustrates the tensions that attended such transactions. Craftsmen were suspected not only of diverting precious metals for their own use but of alloying them with baser materials: Cyril of Jerusalem regarded the adulteration of gold with bronze, tin, iron, and lead as so common a practice that it could be used as an allegory of the soul’s need to cleanse itself.°

59 There were no categorical or abiding distinctions in East or West between the various epithets (ypvooydoc, &pyvpoKdnoc, argentarius, etc.) used in the sources. An attempt to describe the complexity of the situation will be found in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New York, 1991), 2:1037, s.v. “Jeweler” (by Alexander Kazhdan and Anthony Cutler). 6 Eduard Schwartz, ed., Kyrillos von Skythopolis, Texte und Untersuchungen 49/2 (Leipzig, 1939), p- 184, line 21—p. 185, line 10. Here I follow the translation of Richard M. Price, Lives of the Monks of Palestine by Cyril of Scythopolis (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1991), p. 193. ‘1 For these disputes see Dietrich Claude, “Die Handwerker der Merowingerzeit nach den erzahlenden und urkundlichen Quellen,” in Das Handwerk in vor- und friihgeschichtlicher Zeit, 1 (G6ttingen, 1981), pp. 204—66, esp. p. 225. On the limited number of silversmiths able to maintain a stock of silver, and their role as “rudimentary bankers,” see Arnold H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284-602, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1964), 2:863—64. Jewelers, on the other hand, may have held larger supplies of their raw materials. Credited with the possession of emeralds and hyacinths, a priest and ex-gem cutter who maintained a poorhouse in the early fifth century was able to extort five hundred nomismata from a rich virgin of Alexandria for the support of his institution. See Cuthbert Butler, The Lausiac History of Palladius, 2 (Cambridge, Eng., 1904), p. 23, lines 10-18. 6 PG 87/3:3088C—3089A. The text is now available in an English version: The Spiritual Meadow (Pratum spirituale) by John Moschos, trans. John Wortley (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1992). As against this “unofficial” addition to the cross, offerings could also be enriched by the donations of third parties. Thus when Domnitziolos, nephew of the emperor Phokas, gave a lump of gold to a jeweler to make into a cross he was joined by Thomas, patriarch of Constantinople (607-10), who offered inter alia a fragment of the stone of Calvary to be inserted into a boss. See Vie de Théodore de Sykéon, ed. and trans. André-Jean Festugiére, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1970), 127-28, 1:103, lines 2-14. 63 PG 33:348A—349A. Cf. the “practical” recipes for the transmutation of, e.g., Cypriot copper into gold and silver in texts of the third or fourth centuries, such as Papyrus Graecus Holmiensis (P. Holm): Recepte fur Silber, Steine und Purpur, ed. Otto Lagercrantz (Uppsala, 1913).

| The Right Hand’s Cunning 25 If it is tautologous to point out that it was the rich who possessed the majority of precious metals, it is still worth insisting how often they recycled those assets. Silversmiths bought and sold vessels unchanged in form, but their business no less involved the melting of objects sold by their owners to raise money or to be reformed as offerings to institutions. The classic example of the latter is the paten of Paternus (Fig. 4), bishop of Tomis, on the inside of which a Latin text records his order to smelt an older vessel while another inscription, in Greek on the footring, reports its content broken down as quantities of pure gold, pure silver, and mixed gold.°* We do not know if the bishop’s original object was his own or another’s property or whether it had served a secular or sacred end. But the smelting of private stocks of domestic treasure for conversion into ecclesiastical furnishings is exemplified by the actions of Sosiana, a mid-sixth-century woman of Constantinople, who gave her own and her husband’s clothes to be made into liturgical veils and napkins and, when this supply was exhausted, offered her “many pounds of silver” from which “chalices and patens and many dishes and spoons were made and distributed.”* The direct conveyance of precious-metal objects to the poor is also known;* but at least in those instances where refabrication was required, a craftsman must have been the necessary intermediary. His services involved more than smelting and reworking. In the rim of Paternus’s paten are two gold medallions set with garnet cloisonné to form equal-armed crosses. These, according to a recent investigation, replaced eight earlier oval inlays attached by rivets; this work was done in Constantinople, where, it has been argued, garnets were frequently recut for secondary use.® Whether or not the gold missorium weighing fifty pounds and encrusted with gems, commissioned by Chilperic and possibly brought back from Constantinople by his envoys to Tiberius II (578—82),”° similarly employed reused 64 As in the story of a bowl stained with the blood of “impure sacrifices to demons” conveyed by a silversmith to the abbot of a monastery in the reign of Maurice (578-602). See The Chronicle of John

of Nikiu, trans. Robert H. Charles (London and Oxford, 1916), pp. 161-62. 65 Now in St. Petersburg. See Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (Washington, D.C., 1961), no. 2. 66 For the inscriptions see now Marlia Mundell Mango and Anna Bennett, The Sevso Treasure (Ann

Arbor, Mich., 1994), pp. 42-43, no. 17. 67 John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, ed. Ernest W. Brooks, in Patrologia Orientalis 19/2

(Paris, 1926), pp. 194-95. 68 Thus, according to Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum 2.22, trans. Thorpe (n. 56, above), p. 134, the saintly Sidonius Apollinaris would donate silver vessels to the needy and, when his wife complained, buy them back from their recipients. 6 Birgit Arrhenius, Merovingian Garnet Jewellery: Emergence and Social Implications (Stockholm, 1985), p. 126. 70 Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum 6.2, trans. Thorpe, p. 328. The text is ambiguous on this point: the missorium can be understood either as independent of the aurei sent by the emperor that Gregory was shown on this occasion or as part of the imperial gift. As in the case of Brunechildis (Historia Francorum 9.27, trans. Thorpe, p. 514), who ordered and dispatched to the king of Spain a clipeus “ex auro ac gemmis mirae magnitudinis,” Gregory is more concerned with the object’s com-

manditaire than with its place of execution. Recording such pieces in the next century, Fredegar (Chronicum 2.53, 4.75) is even less interested in their ultimate origin; for him, the previous possessor of a precious object is a prime source of its worth. Not unrelated to the economic value of “association

copies” in the antiquarian book trade of our time, this emphasis on provenance at the expense of

26 The Right Hand’s Cunning substances, there emerges the picture of jeweler-silversmiths, of whom Eligius is the best-known Western example,”! engaged in the combination of valuable materials. At least some of these were recycled. Given that even less valuable metals were melted down soon or long after an earlier incarnation,” it seems reasonable to infer the greater incentive that attached to the reuse of precious metals. In this light the argument that official stamps were impressed on artifacts such as Paternus’s paten as guarantees of the purity of their silver would seem to be justified.

Yet the majority of late-antique and early Byzantine silver objects lack such stamps. There must therefore have been another reason or reasons for their application in those cases where they do appear. Whether or not they were marks authorizing the release and sale of state reserves of this metal,” their presence would have lent a certain cachet to the objects that bore them. There is an interesting, if oblique, confirmation of this response during the reign of Phokas (60210). The anonymous author of one of the early collections of the miracles of St. Demetrius describes the hexagonal ciborium in the saint’s shrine at Thessalonica as constructed of six columns with panels of “assayed and chiseled silver” between the columns.”* The most likely way for the narrator to have known this is that he (or she) had recognized official stamps upon the panels; even if he fabricated the claim, his story suggests the prestige associated with such stamps. Despite the controversy over the place(s) where they were applied, the presence of stamps coincides more or less with standard metallic compositions, sizes, and typology among the objects that exhibit them.”5 Stamped silver thus presents a set of norms akin to that offered by the imperial currency, an analogy readily apparent to those involved in commerce and one that would not be lost even on those who had little to do with the silver trade. Yet between about 395 and 615 the Eastern Empire created no silver currency for commercial purposes, even while many of the finest (and stamped) silver objects date between those poles. This paradox has

authorship is one aspect of the expectations inscribed on an object in the early Middle Ages described at the beginning of this paper. I am grateful to Alexander C. Murray for discussing this problem with me. 71 See n. 12, above.

” Thus, according to Malalas, 13.3, ed. Ludwig A. Dindorf (Bonn, 1831), p. 318, lines 15-22, Plutarch, a Christian archon of Antioch under Constantine I, reused a bronze statue of Poseidon to make an image of the emperor. Cf. the tragico-comic story, related by Martin O. H. Carver, The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in Northwestern Europe (Woodbridge, Eng., 1992), pp. 34446, concerning the first iron ship rivets from this site, discovered in 1860 and carried off to a neighboring blacksmith to be made into horseshoes. 73 Marlia Mundell Mango, “The Purpose and Places of Byzantine Silver Stamping,” in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate in Sixth-Century Byzantium, ed. Susan A. Boyd and Marlia Mundell Mango (Washington,

D.C., 1992), pp. 203-15. On the continuing debate concerning the function(s) of silver stamps, see most recently Cécile Morrisson, “Trésors d’argenterie des églises byzantines du Vle siécle: Production et valeur,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 8 (1995), 539-48, esp. pp. 544-47. ™ “e& apybpov dokipov Kai dtayeyAvppévov”: see Paul Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de Saint-Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans, 2 vols. (Paris, 1979-81), 1:114, line 25. For the weight and value of the silver on this object, see Marlia Mango, “The Monetary Value of Silver Revetments and Objects Belonging to Churches, A.D. 300-700,” in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate, . 131. ° 75 Mango, “Purpose and Places.”

The Right Hand’s Cunning 27 led to an explanation in terms of what might be called a cultural choice, although the author of the hypothesis resisted such a formulation: because of the high price of silver, the state decided to mint no coins in this metal, leaving it to those who

created silver plate and to their customers.” Now this economic decision may have been the proximate cause of the phenomenon that was the utter asymmetry between the two main uses of silver that otherwise obtained until the invention of photography. But it was a decision that entailed vast implications for craftsmanship, the understanding of which depends upon the truth that far more skill and many more techniques are required to fashion vessels from a given mass of silver than are needed to strike coin from the same amount of metal.”’ Once the dies have been cut, minting is a fairly simple set of largely mechanical processes. By contrast, after the melting of an ingot, silverworking involves the preparation of a plate, a sheet of metal produced by hammering or rolling, thick enough not to break in the course of subsequent stages of production but not so thick as to be unworkable or wasteful of precious material. The sheet must then be cut into sections appropriate to the size of the artifact intended. Such calculations are ostensibly simple where flatware (e.g., a plaque, paten, or polykandelon) is concerned but become more difficult in proportion to the amount of relief that the object is to display.”® For obvious reasons, estimates of size are more com-

plicated—that is, accurately arrived at only through experience—when threedimensional objects (e.g., ewers, chalices, lamps) are planned. There are several excellent, recent accounts” of the stages that follow, but these focus impartially upon distinguishing one technique from another and thus hardly allow the historian of craftsmanship to assess the relative degree of manual skill implicit in each step or to pursue their consequences for workshop organization and their relation to work in other media produced at the same time and for a similar clientele. Briefly, therefore, it will be useful to review some of these stages with an eye to noting their broader implications. A silver object was “raised” from a sheet (or occasionally sheets)®° by hammer76 Philip Grierson, “The Role of Silver in the Early Byzantine Economy,” in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate,

pp. 137-46. 77 This is, of course, not to argue that the absence of silver currency caused the triumph of early Byzantine silver plate. Sasanian Persia enjoyed ample, contemporaneous supplies of both. Ingots were neutral, as Grierson, “The Role of Silver,” p. 140, put it, transformable into both coin and plate. lam here intent only on the impact on craftsmanship of the state’s decision not to mint silver. 78 On occasion, relief, like the handles or a footring of a vessel, may be created from a discrete piece of silver. The differences between such appliqués and the object to which they are attached is another

reason to suppose that official stamps did not indicate the purity of the metal. Conversely, weight stamps refer to the object as a whole and must have been applied in a postproduction stage. Because many artifacts now lack handles and other parts, the weight stamp often indicates a value in excess of the present weight. 7° Notably Ernst Folz, “Untersuchungen zur Herstellung der Silberobjekte,” in Der spdtromische

Silberschatz von Kaiseraugst, ed. Herbert A. Cahn and Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann, 2 vols. (Derendingen, 1984), 1:361-—74, and Carol E. Snow, “From Ingot to Object: Fabrication Techniques Used in the Manufacture of the Hama Silver,” in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate, pp. 197-201. On workshops in general, see Francois Baratte, “Les ateliers d’argenterie au Bas-Empire,” Journal des savants (1975), pp. 193-212. 80 Marlia Mundell Mango, Silver from Early Byzantium: The Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures (Baltimore, 1986), no. 11.

28 The Right Hand’s Cunning ing. That step achieved, its form would be adjusted by “raising” or “sinking” by the same means. Planishing (used to remove unevenness after “raising”) and repoussé (the means whereby an area is raised in relief by pressure from the back or inside of an object, or, from its front, to make the background of an area recede) are likewise effected by depression, using heavier or lighter hammers. The skills required for these various techniques will be apparent to anyone who has studied the relief on a late-antique or early-medieval piece of silver. But less obvious when such a piece is handled is the fact that all of these steps constitute “hot work”; that is, each must be undertaken after the annealing that is necessary to restore the malleability that is lost, and the brittleness that results, when silver is hammered. Annealing is a tempering process (used also in glass manufacture) achieved by the heating (and slow cooling) of the object being worked: in inexperienced hands, the silver exposed for this purpose to a flame is easily burned and at least the labor involved up to this point irrecoverably lost. By contrast, the stages of chasing, engraving, burnishing (using a steel, hematite, or agate tool), polishing, gilding, and inlay inscription®! (if any) are “cold work,” procedures followed away

from the flame; theoretically they may be undertaken long after the “hot work” is done. While on the model of sculpture in stone and ivory, artistry in silver is | often seen to lie in the carving that is done when the material has cooled, from a technical point of view no lesser skills are involved in the “hot work,” the first stages of production. It follows that however many persons may be involved in the manufacture of an artifact, the critical steps are those in which the sheet is produced and its segments raised, sunk, and planished. These are likely to be undertaken by an experienced member of a team, even if, in a small shop, both “hot” and “cold” work could issue from the same pair of hands. Mistakes and anomalies in chasing and assembly*® can be repaired® or, at worst, thrown back into the melting pot, but errors in annealing lead to the damaging of valuable metal, the serious interruption of the manufacturing process at its start, and the dislocation of those waiting to start the “cold” work. This situation could obtain, of course, in a large state factory or a private workshop: it is a condition of the means of production, not of the physical circumstances in which such production took place. 81 As opposed to the fairly limited epigraphy on objects from the Kaper Koraon treasure (Mango, Silver from Early Byzantium, pp. 4-6 and passim) and the Sion treasure (see esp. Ihor Sevéenko, “The Sion Treasure: The Evidence of the Inscriptions,” in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate, pp. 39-56), inscriptions could be lengthy. Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistolae 4.8, when providing the epigramma duodecim versibus that he was asked to compose for a fluted vessel prepared for the Visigothic Queen Ragnahild, concluded his letter by remarking that at this barbarian court the silver would receive more attention than his poem. 82 See, e.g., Kathleen J. Shelton, The Esquiline Treasure (London, 1981), p. 48. 83 E.g., Mango and Bennett, The Sevso Treasure (n. 66, above), p. 27, note the presence of ancient repairs on an amphora with Dionysiac and marine scenes. While the extensive wear of the gilding on this piece suggests that it had been much used, vessels in mint condition in the same treasure display

soldering that could represent attempts to amend slips in the workshop. For ancient repairs to a polykandelon in the Sion treasure, see Richard Newman, “Technical Examination,” in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate (n. 73, above), p. 81 and figs. $28.2-4. These, Newman suggests, may have been necessitated during initial manufacturing. An inscribed silver column sheath, fig. $55.6, displays a patch soldered to a letter that had been incorrectly engraved.

The Right Hand’s Cunning 29 As against the rich body of Roman epigraphic evidence on which Kathleen Shelton could draw in her study of the objects from the Esquiline,* we have no comparable Byzantine or early-medieval documents to support the notion of a division of labor. The evidence must be sought in the artifacts themselves. If the standardized types (e.g., ewers, chalices, patens) and shapes (e.g., lamps) are seen as expressions of function, and even if they are understood as “culturally determined,” we are still left with the question of how the processes described above were organized to meet these norms. The answer is to be found in those silver treasures that contain multiple examples of a particular type, specimens not only found together but which, on the basis of the stamps on some of them, can be shown to have been made at more or less the same time. The best examples are perhaps the approximately thirty objects in the Sion treasure, all presented by Bishop Eutychianos* and dated by their stamps to the period between 550 and 565; among these, the most telling are the twelve polykandela that bear his monogram (in two slightly different forms).8° Variously round, rectangular, or cruciform, they were made in pairs or in groups of three and four. Whatever their shape, they depend on a scheme in which the candle-disks are set within openwork consisting of foliate forms, monograms, and, most remarkably, pairs of dolphins (Fig. 5). Now dolphins are, of course, commonplaces of late-antique ornament,®” but I know of no other silver plate in which they are used as connecting devices whose open mouths and curling tails link together other parts of the object. Evidently, all the pieces depend on the master design, adapted ad hoc to shapes dictated by the commission. The Sion polykandela, however, are related by more than their design. The circular pieces display a diameter that varies by no more than two millimeters; the

, cruciform pieces differ by at most two centimeters, and the rectangular examples by even less. They are all made, moreover, of unusually thick silver. It is this last point that is most revealing about workshop practice, since to qualify as a set of objects linked in their production process they should present material of uniform gauge, best expressed as the relationship between their size and their weight.®* The information that we need in this respect is provided by, inter alia, the Stuma and Riha fans now in Istanbul and Washington.®* In contrast to the objects in the Sion treasure, these rhipidia are of thin fabric, weighing 480.4 and 485 grams respec84 Shelton, Esquiline Treasure, pp. 47-48. Beyond the generic uascularii and argentarii, funerary texts identify craftsmen as caelatores (engravers), crustarii (embossers), brattiarii (workers in gold leaf), and auri nextrices (joiners of gold). 85 On him see Sevcenko, “The Sion Treassure,” pp. 46-47.

| 86 Susan A. Boyd, “A ‘Metropolitan’ Treasure from a Church in the Provinces: Introduction to the Study of the Sion Treasure,” in Ecclesiastical Silver Plate (n. 73, above), p. 10 and nos. 25-36. 87 Examples in silver include the dolphin-handled ladles from the Carthage treasure: Ormonde M. Dalton, Catalogue of Early Christian Antiquities and Objects from the Christian East ... (London, 1901), pp. 79-81. On paired dolphins in wall mosaics and intarsia, see Irina Andreescu-Treadgold, “The Mosaic Workshop at San Vitale,” in Mosaici a S. Vitale e altri restauri: II restauro in situ di mosaici parietali, ed. Anna Maria Iannucci, Cesare Fiori, and Cetty Muscolino (Ravenna, 1992), p. 3 and n. 11. 88 Data concerning weight, published for the pieces at Dumbarton Oaks by Boyd (n. 86, above), are unavailable for the objects in the Archaeological Museum, Antalya.

, 89 Mango, in Silver from Early Byzantium (n. 80, above), p. 15 and nos. 31, 32.

30 The Right Hand’s Cunning tively. They were cast from different molds—their designs vary slightly in their contours and were then lathe-turned—according to Marlia Mango, in a state workshop in Antioch. Whatever their place of origin, the achievement of not only so similar a design but also a difference in weight of less than one percentage point implies a consistency in practice that is inconceivable without serial production.” Two consequences follow from this observation, one internal to the organization of silver workshops, the other relating (and contrasting) it to similar practices in other media. First, the fact that the fans were cast rather than hammered ties them more closely to those shops (and I suspect that they were in the majority) where both techniques were employed. Nine objects in the Hama treasure, part of the Kaper Koraon group,*! consisted of cast and raised components, all probably from one melt of metal,®” soldered together. If serial production requires the “many hands” through which a vessel passes in Augustine’s comparison,” the likelihood that this observation is correct is greatly strengthened by twentiethcentury technical analysis that detects the use of a lathe and the assembly of separately made parts even before the half-finished object was turned over to the craftsman who worked it in its “cold” state.** If there was more than one of these, on most silver objects the number is unascertainable. This is due not only to the fineness of the workmanship*® but also to the interaction of variables—among them, the size of the workshop and of the commission that it recerved—that cannot be assessed. The most that even the best physical examination can tell us is how many stages were involved in a particular act of creation. It is not necessary to equate each of these with one of the specialists cited in the Roman literary sources.”°

Those who feel frustrated by this negative finding may take some comfort in the fact that in crafts that did not involve the use of heat and nice timing, as silverworking, glass making, and enameling did, the number of workers engaged in the production of a single artifact can be better estimated, particularly if we decline to multiply human entities unnecessarily. In the carving of consular diptychs, for example, there is no need to suppose more than one pair of hands at work on any particular leaf.°7 Among the three diptychs of Justinian that we 90 On this concept, occasionally and misleadingly called “mass production,” see Marlia Mundell Mango, “The Origins of the Syrian Ecclesiastical Silver Treasures of the Sixth—Seventh Centuries,” in

Argenterie romaine et byzantine, ed. Francois Baratte (Paris, 1988), pp. 163-84, and its useful expansion to cover nonhallmarked objects by Boyd, “A ‘Metropolitan’ Treasure,” p. 16. °1 This identification has been questioned by Arne Effenberger, “Bemerkungen zum ‘Kaper-KoraonSchatz,’ ” Jahrbuch fiir Antike und Christentum, Erganzungsband 18 (Miinster, 1991), 241-77. °2 Snow, “From Ingot to Object” (n. 79, above), p. 199.

°3 See n. 2, above. .

** Concerning so complex an object as the Projecta Casket, Shelton, Esquiline Treasure (n. 82, above), p. 49, suggested “a maximum of three hands” at work and a minimum of “one craftsman working from three different models or in three different styles.” Lathes were again used in the polishing stage: Anna Bennett, “Conserving the Sevso Treasure,” Minerva 6 (1995), 52. 95 See, e.g., Snow, “From Ingot to Object” (n. 79, above), p. 199, on the virtual invisibility of soldered joints on objects from the Hama treasure. 96 See n. 84, above.

°7 This is not to rule out the use of an assistant. Whenever a tool driven by human power was involved, as in the case of the bow-drills used by gem cutters (see Arrhenius, Merovingian Garnet

The Right Hand’s Cunning 31 possess there is greater diversity than there is between the Riha and Stuma fans: on the example in Milan both the carving of the lions’ heads and the distribution of the inscriptions in the central medallions differ from those on the versions in Paris and New York.’ Even so, we cannot be sure that these variants are the work of distinct sculptors. All we know is that there was a demand for a goodly number of such diptychs in time for the consul’s inauguration. Whether the examples that we have are the successive products of one artist or were generated by different members of a team can be only a matter of conjecture. Where we can identify variations upon a theme as signs of different craftsmen is when they were produced simultaneously. This was the situation when the more than two hundred cornice blocks of the gallery and nave levels of Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, were installed, leveled, and gilded (Fig. 6). Four long homogeneous stretches, extending into the exedrae, have been identified, each with a different form of acanthus ornament on the underside of the blocks.?? Here it makes sense to equate variants with discrete teams of masons. I would not call these workshops but reserve that term for the organization that undertook the job as a whole. Its task was to finish the work as quickly as possible: for this reason it broke up into smaller units whose work is clearly distinguished even on the upper surface of the blocks (Fig. 6). Lawrence Butler noticed telltale signs of haste at the ends of his long stretches,!©° and Procopius himself speaks of Justinian’s eagerness to have the thing built.!°' The speed of construction was indeed remarkable, and eloquent testimony to the number of skilled craftsmen who could be assembled in short order, given a client of sufficient authority. But no more than in the case of the consular diptychs can we assume a brief specifying that the results should be identical. Working on the ground, the teams probably depended on freehand renderings based upon a master plan. Once the blocks were hoisted into place at the gallery level and installed nearly ten meters above that at the upper cornice, the differences in the work were, and are, imperceptible from the pavement. By contrast where the products of teamwork can be studied more closely, notional formal distinctions have given rise to superfluous hypotheses. In the case of the Theodosian obelisk base in Constantinople, for example, supposed variations in style led to the belief that its reliefs were creations of different reigns.1°? Not

Jewellery [above, n. 69]) or rock crystal carving (see Genevra Kornbluth, Engraved Gems of the Carolingian Empire [University Park, Pa., 1995], pp. 15-16), such a presence would have been necessary.

78 Anthony Cutler, “The Making of the Justinian Diptychs,” Byzantion 54 (1984), 75-115, esp. pp. 77-95. Distinguishable craftsmen apparently made the leaves of the Symmachi-Nicomachi diptych. See idem, “Suspicio Symmachorum: A Postscript,” American Journal of Archaeology 98 (1994), 47380.

°° Lawrence E. Butler, “Hagia Sophia’s Nave Cornices as Elements of Its Design and Structure,” in Hagia Sophia from the Age of Justinian to the Present, ed. Robert Mark and Ahmet $. Cakmak (New York and Cambridge, Eng., 1992), pp. 57-77. I am grateful to Lawrence Butler both for informative discussion on this point and the photograph that is my Fig. 6. 100 Butler, “Hagia Sophia’s Nave Cornices,” pp. 70, 72, 73. 101 De aedificiis 1.1.23.

102 Gerda Bruns, Der Obelisk und seine Basis auf der Hippodrom zu Konstantinopel (Istanbul,

32 The Right Hand’s Cunning only does this neglect the improbability that a monument in so conspicuous a place as the hippodrome would have been left incomplete for a period of at least

three years,'> it ignores the reasonable assumption that different craftsmen worked concurrently on the several faces of the base. Thus the putative contrast between the “hieratically rigid” figures of the southwest side (Fig. 7) and the comparatively fluid dancers on the adjacent face (Fig. 8) is better explained by the difference of genre between those subjects; the thesis, in any case, is belied by the juxtaposition of the two “styles” on this latter, southeastern aspect. On the plinth Greek and Latin inscriptions, carved by distinct individuals,!°* celebrate the speed with which the obelisk was erected. Since these texts are phrased in the past tense, it is obvious, first, that they followed the raising of the monolith and, consequently, that both the inscriptions and figural reliefs of the base were carved in situ. To the extent that the imperial will to completion may be considered insufficient incentive, the rapid termination of the monument is argued by both artisanal logic and the economy of means by which the sculptors arrived at their simultaneous ends.!%

The cunning of their right hands lay not least in their ability to work together, a talent that has deceived generations of scholars intent upon imposing the irrelevant concept of individual creativity upon a team of sculptors that remains unidentified, and significantly undifferentiated, in the sources. The absence of craftsmen’s names, and the attribution of their achievements to the founder or funder of a project, is banal in late-antique and early-medieval ~— texts!°° and another phenomenon that distinguishes this period from the Hellenistic era and the later Middle Ages. Yet this very circumstance allows us direct access to the demand for art, an aspect of social psychology that otherwise, as we have seen, can be approached only indirectly via the artifact. Connecting metropolitan undertakings like the Theodosian obelisk base and such provincial ventures as the building and decoration of desert monasteries is an emphasis on the 1935), most recently and properly criticized by Sodini (below, n. 103) and Linda Safran, “Points of View: The Theodosian Obelisk Base in Context,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 34 (1993),

409-35, esp. pp. 422-23. 103 For a discussion of the chronology, which is to be set entirely within the period between 390 and the death of Theodosius I in 395, see Jean-Pierre Sodini, “Images sculptées et propagande impériale du IVe au Vle siécle: Recherches récentes sur les colonnes honorifiques et les reliefs politiques 4 Byzance,” in Byzance et les images, ed. Guillou and Durand (above, n. 14), pp. 68—78. Sodini’s argument _

is founded on the monument’s iconography; the same conclusion can be reached (and I reach it immediately below) on the basis of craft practice. 104 Where the Greek and Latin texts employ the same letters (notably B, C, E, M, N), albeit sometimes representing different phonic values, the forms of the letters differ markedly. It is clear that the longer Latin inscription, on the side that faced the emperor, was the “main” text: its thirty words are perfectly spaced within its frame, while the second and fourth lines of the twenty-one words in the Greek are symmetrically indented and “unjustified.” For the work of a team of mosaicists, distinguishable from the scaffold but presenting a “perceived unity” from the pavement, see Andreescu-Treadgold, “Mosaic Workshop” (n. 87, above), esp. p. 37. 105 Beyond the often-observed round “Theodosian” heads and caplike coiffures, one notes the herms and the uniform rilievo schiacciato employed for the spears and on all four faces of the base. Of the three patterns (cross-hatched, chiastic with peltate ornament, and honeycombed) used for the cancelli of the imperial loge, all save for the last occur on all four sides.

106 | have discussed this in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (n. 59, above), 3:1602-4, s.v. “Patrons and Patronage.”

| The Right Hand’s Cunning 33 speed of their execution. In Cyril of Skythopolis’s lives of the monks of Palestine, the ability to procure skilled workmen!” and the rapidity of their labor are cognate marks of his heroes’ sanctity. “Thanks to the number and speed of the builders,” for instance, a new church and koinobion at St. Euthymius’s Javra were “completed in only three years” (in 483),!°8 while the saintly Sabas, arriving at his New Laura with “workmen and all the requisites and, spending five months with them” in the years 507-8, furnished his monks with a bakery and a church.!” Generally, speed of execution is a quality expressed so often by contemporary commentators that it warrants recognition as a major desideratum of the era, insofar as it is not true of all clients at all times.1!°

To this point, I have described late antiquity as a period in which ties to the classical world slipped sooner in the language in which works of art found expression than in the artifacts themselves, the objects that are mentioned in the written record. If the day has passed when, in the manner of Bernard Berenson,!"! levels of craftsmanship were judged by formal standards inappropriate to an age when the purposes and ends of manufacture were quite other than they had been

in the heyday of the Roman Empire, it has yet to be recognized that the means and circumstances of production adhered to patterns of earlier times. At least until the sixth century, monumental sculptors and silversmiths still employed techniques

and worked under conditions that had long prevailed in urban, Mediterranean societies. At Aphrodisias, for example, the sculptor’s limited studio space and staffing represent the diminution, not the disappearance, of a situation that had prevailed earlier. If my emphasis on such factors seems excessively materialist for

some tastes, too lacking in due regard for a sort of artistic volition supposedly truer to the nature of medieval creation, it should be remembered that the approaches to both representation and ornament which, for Alois Riegl, defined such an aesthetic were born in this very environment. In truth, the “new” Kunstwollen was an invention of the nineteenth century,!!* not of perceptually challenged Roman craftsmen unable to reproduce forms in three-dimensional detail or of barbarian clients that rejoiced in this hypermetropia. 107 The emphasis is a topos in Cyril. It is used apparently in direct response to the shortage of such craftsmen, a perennial phenomenon that I consider in a forthcoming paper. 108 Schwartz, ed., Kyrillos von Skythopolis, p. 65, lines 9-10; trans. Price (n. 60, above), p. 62. For the history of the building projects of Sabas and his disciples, see now Joseph Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 32 (Washington, D.C., 1995), esp. pp. 57-166. 109 Schwartz, ed., Kyrillos von Skythopolis, p. 123, lines 25—26; trans. Price, p. 133. 110 Pride in rapid accomplishment was also, of course, part of the craftsman’s image of himself, as it was of the society that sustained him. Thus the time taken by Wayland the Smith to prepare each of three swords that he made for King Nidung is a pronounced aspect of his legend. See Thidrekssaga, ed. Helga I. Reuschel (Halle, 1934), pp. 19-21; trans. Edouard Salin, La civilisation mérovingienne d’apres les sépultures, les textes et le laboratoire, 3 (Paris, 1957), pp. 275-76, no. 250. 111 Bernard Berenson, The Arch of Constantine or the Decline of Form (New York, 1954). 112 A lucid and recent exposition is to be found in Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park, Pa., 1992), pp. 148-53. On Riegl’s belief that “a distant optical

view” came to usurp the field of creation with respect to both figures and ornament, see ibid., pp. 130-31.

34 The Right Hand’s Cunning As against technical continuity, I have stressed a novelty in the role that productions were called upon to play. One demand increasingly laid upon art in late antiquity was that it serve as raw material for the intellectual processes of ekphraseis and argument by analogy. Such approaches were, of course, not new (I have in mind the shield of Achilles interpreted in Hellenistic literature and Ovid as a figure of the demiurge’s handiwork),'!3 but the number of occasions on which examples of craftsmanship are translated to a higher plane increases exponentially. A remarkable instance is afforded by a little-known passage in the early-seventhcentury Syrian Bar Hadessaba, whose Origin of the Foundation of the Schools expands the familiar trope of icon painting as an analogue of divine creation to offer an account of the lost wax method of bronze casting.!'4 Surprising perhaps

at this late date, it yet treats the replacement of the provisional wax form by enduring bronze as an allegory of the way in which fidelity is arrived at. If this , text is the last antique account to describe the process as current practice, evidence for the awareness of elaborate, many-stage techniques and their exploitation as images of holy truths continues well into the Carolingian era. In the Utrecht Psalter a miniature of David beset by the weapons of the wicked includes two vignettes

devoted to the manufacture of a long-sword (Fig. 3). Far from showing “two methods of sword-sharpening,” as Ernest DeWald believed,'!5 these depict, first, the grinding of the blade on a stone turned by an assistant and then, laid flat on

a bed prepared for this purpose, its polishing with a file. Whether or not the illustration rehearses an earlier model, the distinction between these successive stages presupposes that they would have been understood as such in the ninth century.'*¢

Preoccupation with the notion of “renaissance” —a credulous extension of the idea of renovatio promoted by Carolingian and Ottonian ideologues—has resulted in a one-sided view of production in both these eras. More establishable 113 Stephen M. Wheeler, “Imago Mundi: Another View of the Creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” American Journal of Philology 116 (1995), 95-121. 114 Ed. and trans. Mgr. Addai Scher in Patrologia Orientalis 4/4 (Paris, 1907), p. 361, lines 9-12. To my knowledge, the only use made of this text has been that of Helen Saradi, Aspects of the Classical

Tradition in Byzantium (Toronto, 1995), p. 32, to whom I am grateful for knowledge of the passage.

On the identity of Bar Hadessaba, who participated in the synod of K Grigér in 605, see Anton Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur mit Ausschluss der christlich-palastinensischen Texte (Bonn, 1922), p. 136. 15 Ernest T. DeWald, The Illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter (Princeton, N.J., 1932), p. 29 and pl. LVIII. See Koert van der Horst, William Noel, and Wilhelmina C. M. Wiistefeld, eds., The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: Picturing the Psalms of David (Westrenen, 1996), p. 61 and fig. 32. The text in question, Ps. 63(64).4, specifies a single gladius. For Suzy Dufrenne, Les illustrations du Psautier d’Utrecht: Sources et apport carolingien (Paris, 1978), p. 87 and n. 124, the presence of the mechanical grinding wheel in this miniature proved that the device was known to the Romans, a notion otherwise disputed by some historians of technology. 116 An up-to-date study of this aspect of Carolingian weaponry, on the model of Wilfried Menghin, Das Schwertz im friihen Mittelalter: Chronologisch-typologische Untersuchungen zu Langschwertern aus germanischen Grdabern des 5. bis 7. Jahrhunderts n. Christus (Stuttgart and Nuremberg, 1983), would fill a large gap in our knowledge. A useful technical study of an elaborately damascened example that he dates between 780 and 950 is provided by Martin Ehretsmann, “L’épée carolingienne de Stras-

bourg,” Cahiers alsaciens d’archéologie, d’art et d’histoire 31 (1988), 85-94. I am grateful to JeanMichel Spieser for making this paper available to me.

The Right Hand’s Cunning 35 than the sources on which craftsmen drew are the uses to which they put their acquired knowledge: the reception and application of an older phenomenon, be it a style or a technique, is always the more interesting part of the equation of influence. Beyond a desultory nod toward Hellenistic mechanics, for example, it is not possible to know how there came into being the bronze eagle on the pulpit commissioned by Bishop Notker of Liége (972-1008) for his monastery at Lobbes, the wings of which extended to hold a Gospel book and whose flexible neck, according to Folcuin, included a device that expelled clouds of incense and enabled it to cock an ear to the chants of the deacon.!!” Not because we have only

, a literary account of this creation but precisely because it was a unique work of art, it will not help us to measure technological advance or regression. For such an assessment, creations that were widely diffused—the objects, therefore, of archaeology as much as of art history—are more useful. The visually striking polykandela (Fig. 5), in wide use in the East in and after the fifth century, were technically a step backwards: the glass vessels that they contained could support only floating wicks, which, unlike nozzled lamps, could not be prevented from smoking. Weaponry and building methods constitute better indices of progress than unica, however elaborate. Thus, like the long-sword, which, in its various regional and chronological manifestations, underwent a huge number of modifications in terms of design, metallurgy, and methods of employment,''® so the shield, probably in response to the challenge of weapons that could both cut and thrust, underwent its own development. A recent study of Anglo-Saxon shields has emphasized the expertise in ironworking required for a strong and long-lived boss, as well as the importance of the lumber chosen for the boards to which the umbo

| was attached. This selection seems to have been made on the basis of battlefield experience: of at least five different species of tree exploited for boards, the vast | majority of surviving examples are of willow or alder.1" Similar empirically derived material advances can and have been detected in late-antique and early-medieval building,'° a field in which the confluence of function, availability of materials, and expertise necessary to their employment is no 117 Folcuin, Gesta abbatum Lobiensium, ed. Georg H. Pertz, MGH SS 4:70, line 47—4:71, line 1. The silver eagle that “looked sideways” while stifling a serpent, said to have been set on a cistern pipe in the Great Palace at Constantinople by Constantine VII (Theophanes Continuatus [n. 9, above], p.

451, lines 7-9), was apparently not an automaton. } 118 The far-ranging survey by Salin, Civilisation mérovingienne, pp. 57-115, is still useful. 119 Tania Dickinson and Heinrich Harke, Early Anglo-Saxon Shields (London, 1992), pp. 32-35, 48. 120 F..g., leveling courses made of thin brick in the “atrium church” at Apamea early in the sixth century (Jean-Charles Balty, “Apamée au Vle siécle: Témoignages archéologiques de la richesse d’une

ville,” in Hommes et richesses dans l’empire byzantin, 1 [Paris, 1989], p. 84) and in the “tribune church” at Qasr ibn Wardan, part of a complex built between 561 and 564. Because of its thinness, material of this sort allowed the mason more flexibility than the normal Syrian ashlar. In the churches of Julianus Argentarius in Ravenna it replaced the taller, more unwieldy brick of the fifth century. See Friedrich W. Deichmann, Ravenna, Hauptstadt des spatantiken Abendlandes, 2/3 (Stuttgart, 1989),

pp. 246-48. On the other hand, standards of execution did not necessarily keep pace with advances in technology. As Helen Saradi, “Notes on the Vita of Saint Markianos,” Byzantinoslavica 57 (1996), 23, has pointed out, the hagiographical commonplace of saintly solutions to problems encountered in church construction may well point to a decline in early Byzantine craftsmanship.

36 The Right Hand’s Cunning less critical. This nexus of conditions lies at the heart of what has been called the “technological style” of a culture.!*! It will be the focus of the first of three essays that will constitute the sequel to the present study. 121 Heather Lechtman, “Style in Technology—Some Early Thoughts,” in Material Culture: Styles, Organization and Dynamics of Technology, 1975 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society (St. Paul, Minn., 1977), pp. 3-20.

Anthony Cutler is Research Professor of Art History at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802-2901 (e-mail: [email protected]).

The Derrynaflan Hoard and Early Irish Art By Michael Ryan The discovery in 1980 of a hoard of church plate in the ancient monastery of Derrynaflan, Co. Tipperary, Ireland (Ill. 1), at a stroke added significantly to the corpus of Insular metalwork, extended our knowledge of early-medieval European altar plate, and raised afresh important questions about patronage, craft organization, wealth, trade, and exchange. Issues of importance to the interpretation of the history of early-medieval Ireland brought into sharp focus included the relative significance of the Viking invasions as a disrupting influence on Irish society in the ninth century and the form and origins of the liturgy practiced in the early Trish church. Above all, the extension of the known variety of motifs and decorative techniques has greatly enriched the understanding of one of the great ecclesiastical arts of medieval Europe.! The circumstances of the finding of the hoard led to litigation lasting almost seven years, which eventually enabled the state to replace the law of treasure trove with new measures to protect archaeological finds in Ireland and to rescue substantial numbers of artifacts, many of them also adding significantly to the corpus of early Irish art.” 1 The literature on the discovery is now substantial. See Michael Ryan, “The Derrynaflan Hoard,” Ireland Today 965 (April 1980), 2-5; idem, “An Early Christian Hoard from Derrynaflan, Co. Tipperary,” North Munster Antiquarian Journal 22 (1980), 9-26; idem, ed., The Derrynaflan Hoard, 1: A Preliminary Account (Dublin, 1983); and catalogue entries in Susan Youngs, ed., The Work of Angels: Masterpieces of Celtic Metalwork, 6th—9th Centuries AD (London, 1989), pp. 130-33, with extensive references. 2 See Michael Ryan, “A Hoard of Early Medieval Metalwork from Donore, Moynalty, Co. Meath,

Ireland,” Antiquity (March 1987), pp. 57-63; Eamonn P. Kelly, “The Lough Kinale Book Shrine,” in R. Michael Spearman and John Higgitt, eds., The Age of Migrating Ideas: Early Medieval Art in Northern Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 168-74; idem, “The Lough Kinale Book Shrine: The Implications for the Manuscripts,” in Felicity O7Mahoney, ed., The Book of Kells: Proceedings of

, a Conference at Trinity College, Dublin, 6-9 September 1992 (Aldershot, Eng., 1994), pp. 280-89; Cormac Bourke, “The Blackwater Shrine,” Duiche Néill: Journal of the O’Neill Country Historical Society 6 (1991), 103-6; idem, Patrick: The Archaeology of a Saint (Belfast, 1993), pp. 14-16 (Black-

water shrine) and 24-39 (various other discoveries on the River Blackwater in Co. Armagh); and Michael Ryan, “Ten Years of Early Irish Metalwork,” Irish Arts Review 10 (1994), 153-56. Other important pieces not otherwise published are in Youngs, Angels, nos. 93 (bossed penannular brooch) and 146 (highly decorated plaque from Inchbofin, Co. Westmeath), and an unpublished filigree-decorated ninth-century brooch from Lough Rynn. A composite metal-and-wood cross with figural ornament from Tully Lough, Co. Roscommon, is currently the subject of litigation. Renewed interest in the subject has also brought to light pieces hitherto unrecognized in museums abroad: see Fabrizio Mancinelli, “Reliquie e reliquari ad Abbadia San Salvatore,” Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia rendiconti 46 (1974), 251-71; Martin Blindheim, “A House-Shaped Irish-Scots Reliquary in Bologna and Its Place among the Other Reliquaries,” Acta archaeologica 55 (1984), 1-53; Michael Ryan, “Decorated Metalwork in the Museo dell’Abbazia, Bobbio, Italy,” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 120 (1990), 102-11. See also Michael Ryan, “A Gilt-Bronze Object in the

MRAH,” Musea 56 (1986), 57-60 (shrine fragment in Brussels), and Egon Wamers, Insularer Metallschmuck in Wikingerzeitlichen Grabern Nordeuropas (Neuminster, 1985), for a survey of finds in Viking-Age contexts in Norway that contains much new material and analysis.

37

38 The Derrynaflan Hoard

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Ill. 1. Map of Ireland showing the location of Derrynaflan.

The new discoveries in art have been paralleled by a reevaluation of the early documentary sources that has opened exciting new perspectives on how earlymedieval Irish society functioned. The influence of Christianity is seen as all-pervasive in the laws and literary compositions, and the observed behavior of kings is now being interpreted increasingly in terms of Realpolitik.? The Ireland of the later first millennium can no longer be regarded simplistically as a primitive IndoEuropean society preserved as a curiosity on the periphery of Christian Europe. Its distinctiveness is clear, but its similarities to, and links with, contemporary Europe have been greatly underestimated. The issues have been the subject of intense debate, which one hopes will end in the normalization of discussion about early-medieval Ireland as a functioning society, not as a ritual-ridden, otherworldly place in the study of which the relative contributions of Christian learning and native tradition cannot be given due weight. 3 The best new survey of the culture of the early Irish church is Donncha O Corrdin, “The Historical

and Cultural Background of the Book of Kells,” in O’Mahoney, ed., Kells, pp. 1-32; on the development of the institution of kingship see Patrick Wormald, “Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship: Some Further Thoughts,” in Paul E. Szarmach, ed., with Virginia Darrow Oggins, Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1986), pp. 151-83. 4 A survey from a strongly revisionist perspective is in Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Maynooth, 1990), pp. 1-28.

The Derrynaflan Hoard 39 The Derrynaflan hoard represents the most complex and sumptuous expression of the ecclesiastical art style of early-medieval Ireland as we know it in its eighth-

and ninth-century maturity, when a successful synthesis of the elements that formed it—insular Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and other Germanic animal ornament and late-antique/early Christian traditions—had been achieved. It contained five objects—a large silver chalice; a composite paten; a hoop, which may have been a stand for the paten; a strainer; and a basin. The finder recounted that the chalice had stood upright in a shallow pit with the paten and ring leaning against it. Between them, lying face down was the strainer, and, covering them all, was the basin. The basin, which was made of bronze, had decayed considerably in the ground. Copper salts from this process had been washed over the underlying objects and had stained a thin layer of calcite deposited on the pieces by rainwater percolating through the surrounding soil. During removal from the ground at the time of discovery a great many of the components of the paten became detached, and they were gathered up without documentation of their relative positions on the piece. Subsequent extensive excavation by the National Museum at Derrynaflan added significantly to the knowledge of the site, while a place-name and historical study established that the monastery had been an important foundation in the later eighth and ninth centuries.’ Close to Cashel, the ancient capital of the kings of Munster, it was evidently an important monastic site before the Viking raids on Ireland began at the end of the eighth century. Its abbots were among the group of leading reforming clergy who are often referred to as the Céli Dé—the clients of God—famed for their piety and discipline and also for literary innovation. In the ninth century the monastery enjoyed the patronage of one of the leading kings of the time—Feidlimid mac Crimthann, king-bishop of Cashel, who died in 847.6 Derrynaflan seems to have slipped into obscurity thereafter; and apart from some references in later documents that imply its continued use, even for a time as a temporary refuge for the Franciscans in the seventeenth century, it does not appear

| to have retained its importance. Shards of imported pottery discovered there suggest that it partook of the longdistance trade and exchange noted on other contemporary pre-Viking early-medieval settlement sites. A fragment of metal with Ringerike-style ornament of the

later eleventh century was found by the excavator, Raghnall O Floinn of the National Museum of Ireland, but neither it nor documentary sources, which are scant for Munster at this period, indicate Viking occupation at Derrynaflan. 5 Nollaig O Muraile, “Notes on the History of Doire na bhFlann,” in The Derrynaflan Hoard, ed.

Ryan, pp. 54-61, esp. pp. 56-59. 6 This exceptional ecclesiastic became king of Munster in 821 and pursued a spectacular career that included, in a bid to obtain a wider hegemony, forcible interference in the affairs of many monasteries and frequent warfare. His prestige in Munster was immense, and the respect in which he was held by leading churchmen obvious from poetic references to him. He was, perhaps for political advantage, an advocate of the primatial claims of Armagh: see FE. J. Byrne, Irish Kings and High-Kings (London, 1973), pp. 211-29, for an account of his career. His association with Derrynaflan prompts suggestions that he may have been the patron of the chalice, the manufacture of which possibly took place during his reign. This sort of particularism is dangerous as hypotheses of this nature tend to be elevated into

“facts.” |

40 The Derrynaflan Hoard At Derrynaflan today a large early-medieval monastic vallum and fosse enclose a late-medieval cemetery and a ruined nave-and-chancel church (Ill. 2). The standing architectural remains are probably of twelfth- to fifteenth-century date and

are modest in scale.” We cannot assign the deposition of the hoard to a clear archaeological horizon, but there is no evidence to suggest that the pieces were still in circulation in the later-medieval period. The likelihood is that they were cached sometime between the tenth and twelfth centuries, when the Viking wars and later regional dynastic disturbances provided many occasions when it would have been wise to conceal valuables. The comparable Ardagh, Co. Limerick, hoard, which contained two chalices and a number of brooches ranging in date from the eighth to the tenth centuries, was probably concealed about the same time.® The tenth century is marked by a particular concentration of hoarding in Ireland with two significant peaks in the deposition of silver coin hoards in its early and again in its later decades.’ Given the condition of the Derrynaflan objects and the fact that nothing later than the ninth century occurs in the find, it is likely ? The earthworks and buildings are described by Kelly and O Floinn in The Derrynaflan Hoard, ed.

Ryan, pp. 46-51. § Earl of Dunraven, “On an Ancient Chalice and Brooches Lately Found at Ardagh in the County of Limerick,” Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 24 (1874), 433-54; L. S. Gogan, The Ardagh Chalice (Dublin, 1932); Adolf Mahr, Christian Art in Ancient Ireland, 1 (Dublin, 1933), pls. 51-56; J. Raftery, “Descriptive and Chronological Notes,” in J. Raftery, ed., Christian Art in Ancient Ireland,

2 (Dublin, 1941), pp. 87-168, at pp. 142-43 (both volumes reprinted by Hacker Art Books, New York, 1976); Francoise Henry, Irish Art in the Early Christian Period to A.D. 800 (London, 1965),

pp. 106-7; Treasures of Early Irish Art, 1500 B.C-1500 A.D, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1977), pp. 138-39, 141, 178-180; Michael Ryan, Treasures of Ireland (Dublin, 1983), pp. 124-32. ° With hoards containing coins as a guide, the evidence is of concealment of silver among the Irish outside the zone of Viking settlement. A good recent summary is in Nancy Edwards, The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland (London, 1990), pp. 174—79, but see esp. James Graham-Campbell, “The

Viking-Age Silver Hoards of Ireland,” in Bo Almqvist and David Greene, eds., Proceedings of the Seventh Viking Congress, Dublin, 15-21 August 1973 (Dublin, 1976), pp. 39-74, who combines the evidence of numismatic and nonnumismatic finds, and Michael Kenney, “The Geographical Distribution of Irish Viking-Age Coin Hoards,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 87C (1987), 50727, and esp. pp. 511-16. All the hoards in question contain relatively recently imported silver brought along Viking trade routes from the East. The silver, which is very pure, seems to have been derived in the main from Islamic dirhams with inscriptions in Kufic characters. These were broken up and recycled in Scandinavia and the West to form ornaments and local issues of coin. The first coinage to be struck in Ireland did not appear until the end of the tenth century— it was issued by the Vikings of Dublin.

Between the collapse of the Roman colony of Britain and the Scandinavian settlements, coin was virtually unknown in Ireland, and bullion was exceptionally rare. The source of the silver used by Irish workshops in pre-Viking times is unknown—little chemical analysis has taken place, and its value for source identification is questionable given the likelihood of repeated recycling and mixing. The com-

posite nature of many of the pieces where the silver is often a minor part of the structure inhibits programs of analysis. The silver is often gilded, and this militates against the nondestructive analysis of major objets d’art. The coin-dated Viking Age hoards of Ireland provide at once the first closely dated horizon for a late stage in the development of native metalwork, evidence of the importation of bullion on a massive scale from new sources unavailable to the makers of the Derrynaflan pieces and their contemporaries, and a clear signal of the kind of disturbed conditions during which the concealment of valuables was often desirable (see M. Ryan, R. O Floinn, N. Lowick, M. Kenney, and P. Cazalet, “Six Silver Finds of the Viking Period from the Vicinity of Lough Ennell, Co. Westmeath,” Peritia 3 [1984], 334-81).

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Ill. 2. Plan of the monastery of Derrynaflan.

42 The Derrynaflan Hoard that the hoard was concealed no later than the tenth century. It is critically important in this connection that although it later disappeared from the record, the monastery was prosperous and well known at the time when stylistic considerations would suggest that the objects in the hoard were made. It seems unnecessary, therefore, to canvass the proposition that the treasure was originally the property

| of another foundation which had been fortuitously concealed at Derrynaflan. What we have in the hoard is a sample of the finest altar plate that might be commissioned for a monastery of high standing in eighth- and ninth-century Ireland. Derrynaflan was just such a monastery. The Paten The paten (Fig. 1) is a very complex assembly. Recovered in a largely dismantled state, it gives a remarkable insight into the technology and workshop practices of

the times. Manufactured from over two hundred components, the range of metalwork techniques used in its manufacture includes casting, engraving, lathe polishing (but not lathe forming), die stamping, wire making, fire gilding, riveting, and soldering. Its polychrome ornaments are not gemstones but cast glass in the familiar Insular manner—they are not true enamels fused in situ. To mimic true cloisonné enamel, some of the studs have angular grilles cut from thin silver plate and placed in the mold before the molten glass was poured: polished down after casting, they present the superficial appearance of metal compartments containing segments of enamel. In some cases a pattern was formed intaglio in the mold prior to casting so that a design in relief appears on the surface of the stud. The paten is a large thin plate made of silver with an admixture of about 30 percent copper: it is seated on a decorated rim made of a double hoop of bronze which contains a significant admixture of lead. This raises it about 3 cm. (Fig. 2). The assembled paten varies between 35.6 and 36.8 cm. in diameter. The plate is slightly dished: it was hammered and then lathe-spun for final polishing. Its edge is flattened, and on its upper surface placed around the circumference are twelve pairs of filigree panels set in gilt bronze frames and separated by molded, gem-set pseudocloisonné and other glass studs. The side of the rim also carries pseudocloisonné glass decorations in the form of twelve rectangular plaques between which occur twelve elegant stamped gold foils. ‘The paten was assembled in an unusual and awkward manner!°—the plate was stitched to the outer hoop of the rim. The inner hoop, which stiffened and supported the assembly, is a reversed L-shape in vertical section. Its upper edge is seated in a hammered groove on the reverse of the silver plate, and its lower edge engages a catchplate formed of a horizontal ring of sheet bronze which runs around the circumference of the paten. The assembly is held together by twelve removable vertical pins with T-shaped ends, which pass through the silver plate and narrow slots in the catchplate and are turned ninety degrees to lock on the underside of the latter. The pins are capped by enamel studs. It is clear that the paten was made to be disassembled, perhaps for occasional cleaning. There are

10 Ryan and O Floinn, in The Derrynaflan Hoard, ed. Ryan, pp. 17-29.

The Derrynaflan Hoard 43 moldings marking the bottom and top of the rim and the inner edge of the decorated frames. These are formed of knitted silver and copper wire with the stitch

, varied to change the texture every few centimeters. These are also held in place with wire stitching. The construction of the paten gives a strong impression of being experimental—there are simpler and more constructionally sound ways of achieving a large, gem-decorated communion plate with filigree ornament, but they involve the use of greater quantities of precious metal. The impression given by the Derrynaflan Paten is that materials were not freely available, and the technical range of the artificers was being stretched to the limit to achieve the ambition

of the patron or designer. The supply of silver available to them did not match the enormous quantities that were used in the making of the large surviving Byzantine communion plates of the sixth and seventh centuries or the vessels presented to the churches of Rome recorded in the Liber pontificalis.“' The paten’s detachable components and the silver plate bear a code of Insular letters (Ill. 3) and other symbols, which guided the assembly of the piece.!2 There 11 Raymond Davis, trans., The Lives of the Eighth-Century Popes (Liber pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of Nine Popes from AD 715—AD 817 (Liverpool, 1992), e.g., pp. 169, 172, 191-92, 207,

230. On Byzantine silver treasures see inter alia Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Byzantine Silver Stamps (Washington, D.C., 1961), and Byzantine Silver Treasures (Bern, 1973); for a modern survey with significant new information on structure and materials see Marlia Mundell Mango, Silver from Early Byzantium: The Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures (Baltimore, 1986). There seems little point in attempting to relate the bullion weights of the chalices and patens recorded in early inventories or surviving in hoards from the Eastern Empire with the few later Insular eucharistic vessels. The Derrynaflan Paten is a unique survivor in early-medieval western Europe in its size and its complex structure. The surviving Byzantine patens of the sixth—-seventh centuries are made of solid metal. Of the

, three surviving Irish silver chalices, two are heavily encrusted with appliqué gold, glass, and copper. alloy ornaments and have significant bronze structural components. An accurate silver weight is exceptionally difficult to calculate—a problem complicated in the case of the Ardagh Chalice by the presence of a large lead plug in its stem (see Michael Ryan, “The Formal Relationships of Insular Early

Medieval Eucharistic Chalices,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 90C [1990], 281-356, at pp. 285-93). The silver of the Ardagh and Derrynaflan chalices has been found on analysis to have had about 30 percent copper alloyed with it. No analysis is to hand for the little chalice from Lough Kinale. The remaining two Irish chalices—or putative chalices—are entirely of copper alloy. Where precisely the Irish examples should fit into the series as a whole is difficult to say, as in the Liber pontificalis there is considerable variation in the weights of chalices described—some are so heavy that assistance was needed to raise them; smaller chalices for dispensing the communion wine were filled from larger vessels; and so on (see Davis, Lives of the Eighth-Century Popes, p. 107). 12 Michelle Brown, “‘Paten and Purpose’: The Derrynaflan Paten Inscriptions,” in Spearman and Higgitt, eds., Migrating Ideas, pp. 162-67, comprehensively discusses the inscriptions as an assembly guide and identifies a tiny inscription, which may be part of a hymn, concealed under the ornament. The latter may be an example of the practice, attested in Anglo-Saxon sources, of writing a devotional text on the paten as part of a charm against illness and evil. I am grateful to my colleague Raghnall O Floinn, who originally observed and investigated the assembly code, for much discussion over the years. For assembly marks in contemporary manuscript illumination see Mildred Budny, “Assembly Marks in the Vivian Bible and Scribal, Editorial, and Organizational Marks in Medieval Books,” in Linda Brownrigg, ed., Making the Medieval Book: Techniques of Production (Los Altos Hills, Calif., and London, 1995). For a consideration of the reconstruction of a complex piece in another medium see Lawrence Nees, A Tainted Mantle: Hercules and the Classical Tradition at the Carolingian Court (Philadelphia, 1991), on the Cathedra Petri (pp. 147-77), where the reconstruction was assisted, as on the Derrynaflan Paten, by the presence of construction slots, pegholes, etc. The Hercules cycle, which might guide restoration, points the message that even where a recognized iconographical scheme exists, the reconstruction may still be subject to a good deal of uncertainty.

.1

44 The Derrynaflan Hoard

es cde psophieFet abeed & Ag | Ie L

Ill. 3. The letter assembly code for the Derrynaflan Paten (after M. Browne).

is little doubt that the process of creation involved the collaboration of a literate

| individual, almost certainly a cleric; and while we cannot be certain where the piece was made, there is abundant evidence for the practice of fine metalworking on monastic sites. The archaeological evidence consists of debris of metalworking, crucibles, clay molds, occasional scrap metal, motifs carved on bone and intended either as sketches or as models for copying, and traces of glass and amber working. Excavations at sites such as Armagh, the ancient ecclesiastical capital, the monasteries of Movilla and Nendrum, Co. Down, and Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly, have confirmed the presence of workshops. Other finds and inscriptions on surviving shrines indicate that important pieces were fabricated at Clonmacnoise, Kells, and Armagh during the eleventh- and twelfth-century renaissance, and saints’ lives and other documentary sources establish the existence of monastic ateliers beyond

question.'® , The Paten Stand

The hoop (Fig. 2), which may have functioned as the stand for the paten, was probably made necessary by the choice of wire mesh for the rims of the latter. These would easily have been dented by the fingers when the paten was lifted, and some structure to raise it so that it could be handled without damage was clearly needed. The hoop—its diameter is less than that of the paten—provided the answer. It is decorated on its outer aspect with applied silver-stamped ornaments and pseudocloisonné glass plaques, which echo the side of the paten in style and construction but differ from it in their relative lack of elaboration. It seems plausible to suggest that it was made as an afterthought, although conceivably not long after the original creation of the piece. 13 Michael Ryan, “Fine Metalworking and Early Irish Monasteries: The Archaeological Evidence,”

in John Bradley, ed., Settlement and Society in Medieval Ireland (Kilkenny, 1988), pp. 39-44. The , status of artificers of all kinds is described in early Irish law; see the important survey by Douglas Mac Lean of the documentary evidence for the social standing and grading by skill of craftworkers in many disciplines, “The Status of the Sculptor in Old-Irish Law and the Evidence of Crosses,” Peritia 9 (1995), 125-55 (I am especially grateful to Professor Mac Lean for a copy of the typescript of his

paper in advance of publication). For artistic production on a contemporary Continental monastic site, including wall painting, glasswork, and ivory carving, see Richard Hodges and John Mitchell, eds., San Vincenzo al Volturno: The Archaeology, Art and Territory of an Early Medieval Monastery, B.A.R. International Series 252 (Oxford, 1985).

The Chalice | The Derrynaflan Hoard 45

The chalice (Fig. 3) is a large, two-handled silver vessel (18.75—19.2 cm. high and 20.7—21 cm. in diameter) almost certainly to be identified as ministerial, that is, a chalice intended for dispensing the eucharistic wine to the congregation during mass. It is of the same type as the well-known Ardagh silver chalice (Fig. 4), the composite construction and form of which (Fig. 5), with its broad bowl and foot and tripartite cast copper-alloy stem and paired handles, it mirrors closely (III. 4).14 Like the Ardagh Chalice it has filigree decoration applied to a band around the bowl and to the handles; unlike it, it also carries filigree in two bands on the stem and one on the upper surface of the foot.'5 In contrast to the Ardagh Chalice it has no glass ornament; instead fifty-seven settings carry amber studs. The chalice employs a substantial quantity of solid silver in its make-up in marked contrast with the paten.

The Strainer

The strainer is a sieve created by adding an internal grating in the form of a pierced plate to the bowl of an Insular ladle. It has a long handle with a decorative terminal in which is set a hemispherical rock crystal. It would have been used by

pouring through one side and allowing the liquid to pass through the grating before being poured out the other.’ The bowl has an elaborate lip with appliqué stamped-silver ornament and pseudocloisonné studs, which do not make for an efficient pour. It may therefore never have been intended for practical use.‘” Its style is fairly simple, and its decoration of colored glass suggests that it belongs to the heyday of the polychrome style in the eighth century. The Basin

The basin belongs to a well-documented Insular type, and little needs to be added here except to remark that basins were the particular attribute of deacons and were essential for the ritual ablutions during the liturgy." The structure of the Derrynaflan pieces raises an interesting question. The paten is exceptionally complex; and although made so that it could be dismantled and possibly cleaned, its mesh moldings (Fig. 6) would have trapped particles of the

14 R, M. Organ, “Examination of the Ardagh Chalice—A Case History,” in William J. Young, ed., The Application of Science in Examination of Works of Art (Boston, 1973), pp. 238-71; Ryan, “Formal Relationships,” pp. 288-90.

| ‘5S Michael Ryan, “The Menagerie of the Derrynaflan Chalice,” in Spearman and Higgitt, eds., Mi-

grating Ideas, pp. 151-61, at pp. 151-56. } 16 © Floinn, in The Derrynaflan Hoard, pp. 31-34. 17 Tbid., p. 33. 18 Thid.

46 The Derrynaflan Hoard

\ BOWL GIRDLE | | HANDLE ESCUTCHEON BOWL

STEM

FOOT

\ FOOT CONE UNDERFOOT DISC

Ill. 4. Profile drawing of the Derrynaflan Chalice showing the principal structural elements.

eucharistic bread, thus creating problems of respect for the consecrated host.” The rims themselves were subject to damage when the plate was lifted for carrying.

Was it therefore a votive object, made to be placed on the altar at important celebrations while other vessels were employed for the distribution of communion? Was the strainer also a liturgical token? Was it made for propriety, for the imitation of a practice seen abroad and especially at Rome, where the pope con-

secrated in a two-handled chalice that was filled by wine poured through a strainer?7° 19 Brown, “Paten and Purpose,” pp. 164-65, adds to the discussion of the complex fraction of the eucharistic bread on the paten described as appropriate to Christmas and Easter in the tract on the mass contained in the Stowe Missal and renews the speculation that the ornamental studs may have been markers for the laying out of the fragments of the host in a wheeled-cross arrangement. The Irish church was by no means unique in having the broken bread laid out in a pattern on the communion plate. 20 The collection of sumptuous vessels for votive purposes or for display on altars is attested in earlymedieval Europe. In the reign of Pope Leo III sixty-four gold-rimmed silver chalices were provided for suspension between the columns of St. Peter’s in Rome (Lives of the Popes, trans. Davis [above, n. 11], p. 208). Sacred vessels, including chalices, basins, and ewers, are sometimes shown hanging in canon table arcades in Carolingian manuscripts (see, for example, Victor H. Elbern, “Der eucharistiche Kelch

im friihen Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins fiir Kunstwissenschaft 17 [1963], 29 [fig. 23] and 31 [figs. 26, 27]). The scale of collection of large numbers of vessels suggests that donation

The Derrynaflan Hoard 47 . Ill. 5. Conjectural interpretation of the stem assembly of the Derrynaflan Chalice deduced

Vat _ from X-rays. The stem is tripartite in con= struction: two decorative rings with settings Wi: for filigree and amber are riveted to a cylinUj drical central element. These are in turn rivY eted to the bowl and foot, while a large domeY headed pin passes through the base of the Wy bowl and the upper surface of the foot and is xy fastened on the foot in a manner not readily SK QD, identifiable. A further flange feature, which Ds Z may have been intended to steady the comLZ,