SURPRISING THOUGH it may seem, the study of Anglo-Saxon art does not feature with any great regularity in the history of western European art; in Britain only two or three universities include specialist modules on Anglo-Saxon art in their art history curriculum. In large part this is because the art of the Anglo-Saxons is (rightly) not considered to exist comfortably within the parameters of the classical tradition, the art emerging from the visual traditions of ancient Greece and – more usually – republican and imperial Rome. It is this that is prioritized within the canon of art history in the western European tradition, not only in and of itself, but because it is also considered to underpin the art of the Renaissances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that of the ‘Baroque’ of the seventeenth century, and to inspire the neo-classical revivals of the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. In other words, the art of the last five centuries articulated within a perceived classical tradition is that which, in effect, forms the canon of art history within the parameters of post-medieval western European art that is the focus of the discipline across much of Europe, North America and Australasia. This is not, of course, the tradition of art produced by the majority of cultures across the globe. But global art is also studied in only a very few art history departments in Britain, except in so far as it is deemed to impact on the art of Western Europe, as in the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century when the art of eastern Asia and that of continental Africa, perceived as exotica, influenced artists working in Europe.

In other words, Anglo-Saxon art plays as little a role in the canon of western European art history as it is studied today within the university as does any art produced outside that canon. This, of course, is also true of other arts emerging from the islands of Britain and Ireland during the early medieval period: those produced by the Scandinavian settlers in the region and by the ‘Celtic’ peoples of Ireland (and Scotland), so-called since the late eighteenth/nineteenth-century move towards independence from England by these regions.

When considering the ‘Rood’ of the later Middle Ages it is worth perhaps turning to the earliest forms of the monumental crosses that were erected both inside and outside church buildings in Britain and Ireland from the early part of the eighth century onwards. Unique to the region until at least the late eleventh, if not the twelfth century, these large-scale public sculptures have attracted considerable attention for some time, but increasingly so since the early twentieth century.

Given its distinctive ‘free-standing’ form, attempts to explain the emergence of this particular monument type have resulted in the general understanding of it as an innovation reflecting the amalgamation of a number of material cultural phenomena. Among these is the fact that they reflect the reinvigoration of the art of stone sculpture following the re-establishment of the Christian Church in early medieval England during the course of the seventh century when, as Bede records in his Ecclesiastical History, churches began to be constructed in stone and were decorated and furnished with carved stone work. In their design they also seem to represent the influence of earlier, late antique and early Christian monumental forms. These include the stone column, a form that was associated with the triumphal sign of the cross encountered in Constantinian contexts in the early Christian Mediterranean world: as in Jerusalem where a (triumphal) column is recorded as standing close to the Holy Sepulchre complex surmounted by a cross and carved with a Maiestas near the top. Although this monument is unlikely to have been physically encountered by Anglo-Saxons (other than Willibald whose travels to Jerusalem were recorded by the nun Huneberc in the eighth century), the forms of the triumphal and Jupiter column would have been familiar across Europe and in Rome. Together, associations and encounters with the circular columns of antiquity are likely to have informed that of the monumental columns supporting crosses that were set up at the turn of the ninth century in Northumbria and Kent, which also featured the Maiestas in the upper registers. Also influential was the form of the obelisk which is understood to have informed that of the slightly tapering, squared shaft of the high crosses, the obelisk shaft being surmounted by a cross-head in its rearticulated incarnation.

Introduction: Travel, Taste and the Antique

One of the many phenomena marking the ‘long eighteenth century’ in Britain was an increased interest and participation in travel with the concomitant activities of acquiring, describing and illustrating art and antiquities, and the production of publications catering for and encouraging these trends. To some extent, these interests were reflected in (and indeed energized by) the works of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works, published in German in 1755, discussed the ideal of ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’, an ideal that he identified with the Classical, and which he considered it necessary to imitate. The work was an instant success, being reprinted several times and widely translated. In Britain, it enjoyed popular- ity in artistic circles, with Henry Fuseli's translation being published in 1765, and a second edition appearing in 1767. For Winckelmann himself, the book allowed him to continue his studies in Rome, where he arrived in November 1755, and proceeded to devote himself to the study of Roman antiquities: his method of careful observation enabled him to identify Roman copies of Greek art, something that was less well known and therefore unusual at the time, and led to Roman culture being elevated to the status of the ultimate achievement of Antiquity. As Fuseli's English translation put it: ‘There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients.’ Imitation, of course, did not mean copying, for this was deemed to be ‘the slavish crawling of the hand and eyes, after a certain model’; rather, if handled with reason, it could result in that which was imitated assuming another nature and becoming something in its own right: ‘reasonable imita- tion takes just the hint, in order to work by itself ‘, for whatever ‘imitation produced, differs from the first idea, as the blossoms of a transplanted tree differ from those that sprung in its native soil’. The mimetic character of art that imitates but does not simply copy was, for Winckelmann, central to any interpretation of Classical idealism, and it is generally understood to mark the early stage of the transformation of Taste in the eighteenth century.