12 - Looking Down from the Rothbury Cross: (Re)Viewing the Place of Anglo-Saxon Art

Summary

A mere five generations of scholarship away from John Ruskin (with W. G. Collingwood, T. D. Kendrick, Rosemary Cramp, and Richard Bailey forming the intellectual chain), a central and highly significant aspect of Jane Hawkes’ work is her consistent foregrounding of the artistic importance of Anglo-Saxon England, and the sophistication of its visual products, while fully acknowledging its debt to its origins in the post Roman world. This approach, which firmly situates Anglo-Saxon art as an inheritor of the visual traditions of late antique and early Christian art, has done much to rid the period of its ‘Dark Age’ reputation, where the artists and artisans who produced the era's visual motifs and schemes were often seen by early scholars as ‘blind copyists’, incapable of the independent creation of innovative or sophisticated imagery. Further, Hawkes’ approach to Anglo-Saxon art has not only challenged the period-based assumptions surrounding the style and sophistry of Insular art, but has also served to reposition these sculpted objects as artworks worthy of close art-historical scrutiny and attention. Indeed, so convincing is her art-historical engagement with these carved stone monuments, and so complete her repositioning of them as art-historical objects, that her research has ensured that they may be fully treated as belonging to a period of art worth studying in and of its own right in any art-historical setting, alongside more ‘known’ and studied periods such as the Classical, the Renaissance and the Modern.

However, despite the work of Hawkes and other scholars – such as Catherine Karkov, Heather Pulliam, and the late Jennifer O’Reilly, as well as many others – the period has remained somewhat outside the canon of works discussed by most Art History departments in the UK (at least), and the canonical discussions such departments perpetuate and (re)structure. Yet Anglo-Saxon art offers many glimpses of artistic processes, including virtuoso carving, both in the round and in relief; monumental (if fragmentary or fragmented) objects; luxe manuscripts; and elaborate, small-scale, precious decorative objects. Many of these demonstrate delicate and beguiling paintwork alongside their innovative sculptural techniques and iconographies, and a proficiency with mixed media.