Carolingian Art - Overview

Overview

Having established an Empire as large as the Byzantine Empire of the day, and rivaling in size the old Western Roman Empire, the Carolingian court must have been conscious that they lacked an artistic style to match these or even the post-antique (or "sub-antique" as Ernst Kitzinger called it) art still being produced in small quantities in Rome and a few other centres in Italy, which Charlemagne knew from his campaigns, and where he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 800.

As symbolic representative of Rome he sought the renovatio (revival) of Roman culture and learning in the West, and needed an art capable of telling stories and representing figures with an effectiveness which ornamental Germanic Migration period art could not. He wished to establish himself as the heir to the great rulers of the past, to emulate and symbolically link the artistic achievements of Early Christian and Byzantine culture with his own.

But it was more than a conscious desire to revive ancient Roman culture. During Charlemagne's reign the Byzantine Iconoclasm controversy was dividing the Byzantine Empire. Charlemagne supported the Western church's consistent refusal to follow iconoclasm; the Libri Carolini sets out the position of his court circle, no doubt under his direction. With no inhibitions from a cultural memory of Mediterranean pagan idolatry, Charlemagne introduced the first Christian monumental religious sculpture, a momentous precedent for Western art.

Reasonable numbers of Carolingian illuminated manuscripts and small-scale sculptures, mostly in ivory, have survived, but far fewer examples of metalwork, mosaics and frescoes and other types of work. Many manuscripts in particular are copies or reinterpretations of Late Antique or Byzantine models, nearly all now lost, and the nature of the influence of specific models on individual Carolingian works remains a perennial topic in art history. As well as these influences, the extravagant energy of Insular art added a definite flavour to Carolingian work, which sometimes used interlacedecoration, and followed more cautiously the insular freedom in allowing decoration to spread around and into the text on the page of a manuscript.

With the end of Carolingian rule around 900, high quality artistic production greatly declined for about three generations in the Empire. By the later 10th century with the Cluny reform movement, and a revived spirit for the idea of Empire, art production began again. New Pre-Romanesque styles appeared in Germany with the Ottonian art of the next stable dynasty, in England with late Anglo-Saxon art, after the threat from the Vikings was removed, and in Spain.