Anglo-Saxon Art - Ivory Carving

Ivory Carving

As in the rest of the Christian world, while monumental sculpture was slowly re-emerging from its virtual absence in the Early Christian period, small-scale sculpture in metalwork, ivory carving and also bone carving was more important than in later periods, and by no means a "minor art". Most Anglo-Saxon ivory was from marine animals, especially the walrus, imported from further north. The extraordinary early Franks Casket is carved from whalebone, which a riddle on it alludes to. It contains a unique mixture of pagan, historical and Christian scenes, evidently attempting to cover a general history of the world, and inscriptions in runes in both Latin and Old English. We have few Anglo-Saxon panels from book-covers compared to those from Carolingian and Ottonian art but a number of figures of very high quality in high relief or fully in the round. In the last phase of Anglo-Saxon art two styles are apparent: one a heavier and formal one drawing from Carolingian and Ottonian sources, and the other the Winchester style, drawing from the Utrecht Psalter and an alternative Carolingian tradition. A very late boxwood casket, now in Cleveland, Ohio, is carved all over with scenes from the Life of Christ in a provincial but accomplished version of the Winchester style, possibly originating in the West Midlands, and is a unique survival of late Anglo-Saxon fine wood carving.

• Rear panel of the Franks Casket; Titus takes Jerusalem.

• 8th century plaque from ?a book cover

• Baptism of Christ, Winchester style

• Anglo-Saxon "corpus" on a German cross