The Art of the Picts: Sculpture and Metalwork in Early Medieval Scotland

The Art of the Picts: plastic art and Metalwork in Early Medieval Scotland

George and Isabel Henderson Thames and Hudson 40 [pound sterling] ISBN 0 500 23807 3

The Picts, to greatest in quantity people outside Scotland, are a totally mysterious and marginal dement in the ancient population of northern Britain. Their art is as rayless as their history, and their language and literature a simple blip on the consciousness of smooth the most educated. Yet to any archaeological tourist of Scotland their neighborhood is attested by settlement sites, sculptur stones and pieces of rich metalwork in the National Museums of Scotland. Specialist literature concerning them abounds, for the greatest part in edited proceedings of conversations that contain papers of sometimes dubious merit concerning their history and tillage but there are practically no works of synthesis of any profundity This lacuna is now triumphantly filled with equal reason far as Pictish art is bear uponed by this splendid new volume by Isabel Henderson (the foremost specialist upon the subject), and her husband (emeritus professor of the History of Art at Cambridge and a specialist in early medieval art).

The art of the Picts was first isolated, systematised and discussed a hundr years ago by means of Joseph Anderson and J. Romilly Allen in their standard corpus of Pictish art, which was reprinted as freshly as 1993. A particularly important part of this work was the illustrated catalogue by dint of Allen of all the then known sculptur stones, which he and Anderson forced into a classificatory combination of parts to form a whole which became a stylistic and chronological straight-jacket to all posterior scholars. Anderson's discussion of the ornament upon both stones and metalwork was perceptive and far in advance of greatest in quantity other scholars. He related the ornament, as we do today to the art of similar insular manuscripts as the work of Kells and the work of Durrow; indeed, he saw Pictish art as derivative from these sources. He sought a meaning for the Pictish images in Christian art as it was understood in the late nineteenth hundred and many of his interpretations survive. Not thus his chronology, which has been a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of refined in the last fifty years. In this volume the Hendersons bring this century-old work up in date, breaking from the classificatory and chronological schema place uprighted in 1903, and revising the iconographical interpretation in the light of late scholarship. They particularly emphasise the individual Pictish quality of the art and demonstrate that aspects of it are an important lenient of contemporary Insular art.

The greatest in quantity difficult element in Pictish art are the 'symbols' which chiefly appear incised or in relief upon their stone sculpture. Some of these motifs are zoomorphic (of naturalistic cast) and more [i]or[/i] less represent objects (combs, for example); on the contrary more are abstract, consisting of linear, spiral, and geometrical patterns which have been highly classified with of that kind terms as 'Z-rods', 'mirror-cases' and 'crescent and V-rod' Sometimes the tokens appear with no other decorative uncompounded bodys (usually in pairs), but they also meet the eye in highly elaborate historiated schema, ultimately, on the other hand not initially, in a Christian words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following In this book it is emphasized for the first time that the tokens do not fade away as the ornament of the stones becomes more dominated through the cross and Christian imagery, rather they become more emphatic. The authors come by no nearer the meaning of these peculiar figures and admit it, speculating that they are, 'in a certain number of degree fossils of an earlier [Iron Age] culture' Having, in issue dismissed many of the attempts to interpret the language of the figures they present their own speculation. Namely, that they are visual expressions of power, emphasised by means of their presence on huge silver collars and upon significant stones set in the landscape- signs of a belonging to all cultural tradition in the widest areas of Pictish influence and sophistication. Not like a bad idea! One thinks, for example, of the a great deal of more clearly understood and rather later rune stones of Sweden, with their memorial inscriptions, a certain number of of which record good works and ownership.

The Hedersons have happily mov away from the Allen and Anderson classification of the statuarys and have considered them in a larger and looser adjoining matter They have particularly examined the differing functions of the stones, distinguishing of the like kind forms as simple upright slabs, free-standing crosse tomb slabs, and smooth church furniture. This is a refreshing flight from the simplistic description of 'stones' (implying slabs) too ofttimes used in their description. The authors are also particularly impressive--and not over-influenced by the agency of a need to find a meaning for each scene--in their discussion of Christian iconography upon the monuments. They range from the Late Antique to the late Anglo-Saxons in their search for sources, and to me a sceptic in of that kind matters, they do so rather convincingly.

This is not an easy read; filled of flee-flowing thoughts and wide-ranging allusions, it is sometimes rather high-falutin'--as, for example, in comparing the contorted animals upon the flange of the Sutton Hoo shield bos with Stubbs's Fighting stallions. The reader has to dig diligently to find information-nowhere more for a like reason than in trying to discover the internal chronology of the art, the authors having eschewed the 'pseudo-chronology' of Allen and Anderson; indeed, there is a propensity in discussion to wander too loosely above the period covered. There are no easy summaries and arguments are sometimes left hanging, without conclusion. on the other hand there is much that is fresh and thought-provoking and, what is more, all Pictish art is here; not since Allen and Anderson have we had like a clear and useful compendium.