Anglo-Saxon Art - Monumental Sculpture and Wall Painting

Monumental Sculpture and Wall Painting

Apart from Anglo-Saxon architecture, which survives entirely in churches, with only a handful of largely unaltered examples, monumental stone sculpture survives in large stone crosses, an equivalent to the high crosses of the Celtic areas of Britain. Most sculpture was probably once painted, clarifying the designs, which are mostly in relatively low relief and not finished with great precision, and now almost all badly worn and weathered. Dating is usually difficult. Sculpture in wood was very likely more common, but almost the only significant large survival is St Cuthbert's coffin in Durham Cathedral, probably made in 698, with numerous linear images carved or incised in a technique that is a sort of large-scale engraving. The material of the earliest recorded crosses is unknown, but may well have been wood. From various references (to its destruction by Christians) there would seem to have been a tradition of Anglo-Saxon pagan monumental sculpture, probably in wood, of which no examples remain (as opposed to later Anglo-Scandinavian pagan imagery), and with which the crosses initially competed.

The Anglo-Saxon crosses have survived less well than those in Ireland, being more subject to iconoclasm after the English Reformation. Some featured large figurative sculpture of considerable quality, as on the Ruthwell Cross and Bewcastle Cross (both probably around 800). Vine-scroll decoration and interlace are seen in alternating panels on the early Northumbrian Ruthwell, Bewcastle and Easby Crosses, though the vine-scroll is already more prominent, and has faces to itself. Later Southumbrian crosses often only use vine-scrolls. There may be inscriptions, in the runic or Roman scripts, and Latin or Old English, most famously at Ruthwell, where some of the poem the Dream of the Rood is inscribed together with Latin texts; more often donors are commemorated. It has also been suggested that as well as paint, they may have been embellished with metalwork and gems. Typically, Anglo-Saxon crosses are tall and slender compared to Irish examples, many with a nearly square section, and more space given to ornament than figures. However there are exceptions, like the massive Sandbach Crosses from Mercia, with oblong sections mostly covered by figures on the wider faces, like some Irish crosses. The Gosforth Cross, of 930-950, is a rare example to survive complete; most survivals are only a section of the shaft, and iconoclasts were more concerned to destroy imagery than ornament. Many crosses must have just fallen over after some centuries; headpieces are the least common survivals, and the Easby Cross was repaired with lead in a way described in early documents. Like many monuments from the area of the Danelaw, the Gosforth Cross combines Christian images with those from pagan mythology; apart from a Crucifixion scene, and perhaps scenes of the last Judgement, all the other images appear to belong to the Norse myth of Ragnarök, the destruction of the gods, a theme detected in other Christian monuments in Britain and Scandinavia, and which could be turned to Christian advantage.

Anglo-Scandinavians took up Anglo-Saxon sculptural forms with great enthusiasm, and in Yorkshire alone there are fragments from more than 500 monumental sculptures of the 10th and 11th centuries. However quantity was not matched by quality, and even the products of the main city, York, are described by David M. Wilson as "generally miserable and slipshod". In the early stages the successive styles of Norse art appear in England, but gradually as political and cultural ties weakened the Anglo-Scandinavians fail to keep up with trends in the homeland. So elements of the Borre style are seen, for example in the "ring-chain" interlace on the Gosforth Cross, and then the complex animals of the Jelling style are mostly rather incompetently depicted in England, but traces of the next Mammen style are hard to detect; they are much clearer on the Isle of Man. They are "perhaps, dimly" evident in the cross shaft from St Oswald's Priory, Gloucester (illustrated right). In general the traces of these styles in other media are even fainter. A uniquely Anglo-Scandinavian form is the hogback, low grave-marker shaped like a long house with a pitched roof, and sometimes muzzled bears clutching on to each end. Ornament is sometimes a crude pattern of scoring, or scale-like elements presumably representing roofing shingles, but may include interlace and images.

Many fragments, parts of friezes and panels with figure and ornamental carving, have been recovered by archaeology, usually after being reused in rebuilt churches. The largest group of Anglo-Saxon sculpture is from a former abbey at Breedon-on-the-Hill in Mercia, with a number of elements of different dates, including lively narrow decorative strip friezes, many including human figures, and panels with saints and the Virgin. The most intriguing fragments are firstly a group, now at Canterbury Cathedral, from Reculver in Kent, from a large composition with many figure scenes and groups on a curved surface, evidently of high quality, though uncertain date (perhaps early 10th century). A Sacrifice of Isaac and an Ascension can be identified, and parts of standing groups of saints, prophets or apostles.

Standing equally apart from other survivals is a late slab from the Old Minster, Winchester which appears to show a section of a large frieze with the story from Germanic mythology of Sigmund, which it has been suggested may have been as long as eighty feet wide, and over four feet high. There are literary references to secular narrative tapestries, a tradition of which the Bayeux Tapestry is the only survival, and this may have been a stone equivalent, celebrating Sigmund, who was believed to be an ancestor of the intermarried royal houses of both England and Denmark, many of whom were buried in what was then the largest church in England.

It is also clear from literary sources that wall paintings were not uncommon, although not a prestigious form, and fragments of painted plaster have been found, as well as a painted face on a reused stone at Winchester, dating to before 903, and so an important early example of the Winchester figure style. A metaphor in a letter of Alcuin speaks of "stars, like the painted ceiling of a great man's house". However, no paintings that are at all complete have survived on either wall or panel.

  • The Gosforth Cross Cumbria

  • Irton Cross, Cumbria

  • 8th century cross at Eyam (section missing) with interlace; see here for face with vine-scrolls

  • The Hedda Stone, a rare example of 8th century Anglo-Saxon stone carving not from a cross.

  • Worn relief of an angel

  • Hogback tombs at Gosforth, Cumbria

Read more about this topic:  Anglo-Saxon Art

Famous quotes containing the words monumental, sculpture, wall and/or painting:

    I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn’t like it.
    Samuel Goldwyn (1882–1974)

    You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.
    Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)

    I discovered
    the colors in the wall that woke
    when spray from the hose
    played on its pocks and warts....
    Denise Levertov (b. 1923)

    If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.
    James Mcneill Whistler (1834–1903)