Anglo-Saxon Art

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This is gonna be a hugely popular thread, I can just tell. But in my readings I come upon some interesting stuff that it seems worth sharing.



This is the Fuller Brooch, from the 9th century and now in the British Museum. Possibly it was made by craftsmen of the court of Alfred the Great. On the brooch are depictions of the 5 senses.



Here is an account I picked up somewhere on the Internet.

At the centre is a man with staring eyes holding two plants. Around him are four other men striking poses: one, with his hands behind his back, sniffs a leaf; another rubs his two hands together; the third holds his hand up to his ear; and the final one has his whole hand inserted into his mouth. Together these strange poses form the earliest personification of the five senses: Sight, Smell, Touch, Hearing, and Taste.

Surrounding these central motifs are roundels depicting animals, humans, and plants that perhaps represent God's creation. This iconography can best be understood in the context of the scholarly writings of King Alfred the Great (d. AD 899), which emphasised sight and the 'mind's eye' as the principal way in which wisdom was acquired along with the other senses.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Anyone out there ever study art history?

I have discovered that 'insular art' = the art of the British Isles from the 4th century (when the Romans leave) down to the 9th century. As such, it is a fusion of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon art (well, I am not as yet so sure of this - possibly only the Anglo-Saxon insular art is a fusion).

I started thinking about Anglo-Saxon visual art after discovering that the staircase within the Anglo-Saxon tower of Tolkien's 1936 allegory is a spiral staircase, and this got me wondereing about the spiral patterns of the pages of Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscripts and metal work. So far I have made little headway - I read that all the geometrical patterns have meanings but cannot work out what they are.

But the very idea of insular art as a fusion fits rather well with Tolkien's reading of 'Beowulf' as a work of fusion. He has in mind primarily the fusion of Germanic myth and Christianity, but he sees also a borrowing from native British stories of Arthur.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

The Strickland Brooch, 9th century.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This one for historical curiousity rather than aesthetic merit. It speaks of distant connections in distant days. The coin was minted in Mercia in the reign of King Offa (died 796 AD), but is made in imitation of a gold dinar of caliph al-Mansur, great ruler of the Islamic Abbasid dynasty and founder of imperial Baghdad.

The engraver has substituted the name OFFA REX for the Arabic inscription in the middle of the coin but copied the Arabic around the coin - apparently with no understanding of what was copied because the Latin text OFFA REX is upside down in relation to the Arabic.

Here is a better image, showing both sides of the same coin.