Anglo-Saxon Art - Overview

Overview

Metalwork is almost the only form in which the earliest Anglo-Saxon art has survived, mostly in Germanic-style jewellery (including fittings for clothes and weapons) which was, before the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England, commonly placed in burials. After the conversion, which took most of the 7th century, the fusion of Germanic Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Late Antique techniques and motifs, together with the requirement for books, created Hiberno-Saxon style, or Insular art, which is also seen in illuminated manuscripts and some carved stone and ivory, probably mostly drawing from decorative metalwork motifs, and with further influences from the British Celts of the west and the Franks. The Kingdom of Northumbria in the far north of England was the crucible of Insular style in Britain, at centres such as Lindisfarne, founded c. 635 as an offshoot of the Irish monastery on Iona, and Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey (674) which looked to the continent. At about the same time as the Insular Lindisfarne Gospels was being made in the early 8th century, the Vespasian Psalter from Canterbury in the far south, which the missionaries from Rome had made their headquarters, shows a wholly different, classically based art. These two styles mixed and developed together and by the following century the resulting Anglo-Saxon style had reached maturity.

However Anglo-Saxon society was massively disrupted in the 9th century, especially the later half, by the Viking invasions, and the number of significant objects surviving falls considerably, and their dating becomes even vaguer than of those from a century before. Most monasteries in the north were closed for decades, if not forever, and after the Canterbury Bible of before 850, perhaps well before, "no major illuminated manuscript is known until well on into the tenth century". King Alfred (r. 871-899) held the Vikings back to a line running diagonally across the middle of England, above which they settled in the Danelaw, and were gradually integrated into what was now a unified Anglo-Saxon kingdom. The final phase of Anglo-Saxon art is known as the Winchester School or style, though it was produced in many centres in the south of England, and perhaps the Midlands also. Elements of this begin to be seen from around 900, but the first major manuscripts only appear around the 930s. The style combined influences from the continental art of the Holy Roman Empire with elements of older English art, and some particular elements including a nervous agitated style of drapery, sometimes matched by figures, especially in line drawings, which are the only images in many manuscripts, and were to remain especially prominent in medieval English art.