Ethnicity and identity have formed a major focus in late antique and early medieval archaeology and history. Wide-ranging debates between the so-called Vienna and Toronto Schools have had massive impacts beyond early medieval history, as has the famous project, The Transformation of the Roman World.1 Here, a new paradigm emerged, slowly substituting the previous ‘decline-and-fall’ ideas of the antique world with that of ‘transformation’. The study of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the Roman West is thus very much entangled with research on identity, ethnicity, and grand narratives, such as transformation or decline, ‘Germanic’ or barbarian invasions. These influential concepts and ideas should not be underestimated in the study of art and visual culture as they too frame the historical scenes in which art history is set. Since the mid-2000s, there have been new debates, mostly (but not solely) triggered by Heather, Ward-Perkins, and Halsall.2 The question of the extent to which ethnicity has played a significant role in the use of material culture, and to which it can thereby be identified in the archaeological record, has been widely, and often intensely, debated across late antique and medieval archaeology.3 The research on art and visual culture, however, embarked on a different tangent. Largely ignoring recent debates in history and archaeology, most scholars still emphasise the function of early medieval art and images as fostering perceptions of ‘Germanic’ identity, ethnicity, or religion.4 But why does the ‘Germanic’ remain such a pervasive terminology?

Ornamentation is a well-established area of research in early medieval art and archaeology with many formalist studies focussing on questions related to style and motif. Only rarely discussed, however, are the material and aesthetic properties of early medieval ‘ornament’ and ‘surface’. In terms of the ‘Germanic’ early Middle Ages, it is most often animal art or animal style that is considered in scholarship. The initial aim of this chapter was similarly to address such art, but the work has developed into an analysis of agency and aesthetics informing ornament and surface beyond specific stylistic boundaries. The chapter argues that variety (varietas) was an influential and important aesthetic principle in the early Middle Ages.

Early medieval art in the post-Roman West often falls between two stools, that of archaeology and that of art history, often taken for neither fish nor fowl by the respective fields of study. This is particularly true for art and material culture deriving from archaeological contexts, most importantly furnished burials from the mid-fifth to the early eighth centuries. While archaeologists and art historians coming from the more ‘classical’ tradition focus on the legacies of Mediterranean art in Christian late Antiquity and Byzantium, medieval art historians tend to engage with the ‘renaissance’ of classical traditions from the Carolingian period onwards. On the other hand, early medieval archaeology (in German also called frühgeschichtliche Archäologie) mostly neglects the art historical, visual, or aesthetic perspectives on the archaeological record, attending more to political history, elites, identity, economy, environment, or landscape. Only few engage with the visual world of the early Middle Ages, and if so, mostly from a formalist and iconographic point of view. While there has been a recent interest in images, ornamentation, and the human figure in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England and Scandinavia,1 Merovingian Europe has been largely untouched by the debate. This book tries to bridge these gaps, shifting perspectives with an archaeology of art in the Merovingian world.

In the previous chapters I suggested the importance of establishing a more critical encounter with early medieval art and imagery in order to establish a shift in nomenclature that, at a fundamental level, resulted in the rejection, or rather letting-go, of the term ‘Germanic’. This chapter will thus be devoted to how we can perceive early medieval art in alternative ways and on different terms. How so? The study of early medieval visual culture has long been dominated by iconographic approaches based on Panofsky’s most influential work.1 His three levels, pre-iconographic description, iconographic analysis, and iconological interpretation,2 are often seen as the most convenient methodological way to interpret the meaning of art and imagery.3

This book has challenged relevant concepts and dichotomies in the research on early medieval art and archaeology, especially between the fifth and eighth centuries, and explored new ways of engaging with the visual and material world of Merovingian Europe and beyond. Through interrogating so-called Germanic art, this study sits (methodologically and in terms of its subject matter) between medieval archaeology and art history. The scholarly mode of expression employed throughout this book has for the most part been, by design, the ‘early medieval present’, which prefers to focus on social relations rather than historical grand narratives as the pivotal point of archaeology. Understanding art objects as active things in social relations has revealed new insights into the way early medieval objects were shaped, seen, perceived, and how they impacted on their environment. Being present is pivotal to the agency of things. Understanding the artworks discussed here against the background of a historical metanarrative, that is, the ‘Germanic’ Middle Ages, fails to engage with this ‘how’ of early medieval art. Often subliminally, the ‘Germanic’ heavily informs research on Merovingian Europe and its periphery. Interpretations are still permeated by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century categories. The most prevalent of such categories are Heilsbild (healing images), Sakralkönigtum (sacral kingship), and Gefolgschaft (retinue).1

The legacy and afterlife of Antiquity and especially the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages is an ever-recurring theme across medieval studies.1 This holds especially true for the political, ethnic, and religious categories and dichotomies scrutinised in the previous chapter. Therefore, Chapter 2 will substantiate this critique through detailed case studies of significant works of art from the early medieval period. In an article published in 2013, ‘The Fading Power of Images’, von Rummel argues that the great divide between Romans and barbarians slowly ceased to exist in the course of late Antiquity.2 In a clear reference to Zanker’s The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus,3 von Rummel argues that the powerful Roman ‘image’ of Romans juxtaposed against their barbarian adversaries slowly but steadily faded into oblivion. This chapter, however, is devoted to those images – figural, not figurative – that endured in late Antiquity, and continued to permeate post-Roman art and material culture. As case studies, I will mostly draw on widely discussed pieces that represent the transformation of the Roman imperial image from across early medieval western and northern Europe, including gold bracteates, the Niederdollendorf Stone, rider imagery from Hüfingen, Hornhausen, and Ennabeuren, the Trossingen lyre, and related images from the Vendel and Sutton Hoo helmets. I will especially scrutinise the scholarly discussions of these artefacts in light of the dichotomies outlined in Chapter 1 and also investigate the active role of the images found on these items in the post-imperial West. The main argument is that early medieval images played active roles in the transformations of post-Roman Europe. Before explaining this approach in more detail, the following section will scrutinise gold bracteates and their interpretation in German scholarship.