BECKWITH REVISITED: SOME IVORY CARVINGS FROM CANTERBURY
Pippin Michelli2003, 2003 “Beckwith Revisited: some ivory carvings from Canterbury”, Karkov, Catherine E., and George Hardin Brown, eds. Anglo-Saxon Styles, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003, 101–113
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Abstract
The material under consideration in this paper lacks the kind of associated information that allows scholars to address it in historical terms. The origins, dates and purposes of the objects are unknown, and their histories before they were acquired by various relatively late collectors are also mysterious. This, indeed, is probably why the material has tended to be neglected despite its potentially rich implications. Two notable and relatively early exceptions to this scholarly uninterest are the "corpus" scholars Goldschmidt and Beckwith, whose concept of completeness, in accordance with the values of their time, ensured these objects' inclusion in their work. The method they used to classify the material, which is the same method used perforce by any historian faced with objects (not texts) that have become divorced from all useful information pertaining to them, is stylistic analysis. It is perhaps unfortunate that stylistic analysis has become associated, in some scholars' minds, exclusively with the connoisseur's search for "great" works, and that the concept of greatness itself has come to be seen as undesirably elitist. Since the connoisseur and the great artist are both products of a Romantic consciousness which favoured the production of large scale, emotionally expressive works of a kind that did not, and could not, exist in the early Middle Ages, it is doubly unfortunate that this perception should undermine the most powerful and useful tool historians (not critics) have available to them, and that the use of this tool should now have to be justified for the benefit of critical theorists. In this paper, stylistic analysis involves the detailed analysis and comparison of form, iconography, and technology (where visible). The purpose is to demonstrate that the objects belong together in coherent groups, and that provenances can be suggested for these groups that throw new light on our understanding of the ivory trade, the transmission of ideas and ages, and the presentation of royal and institutional identity. The attempt to do so is justified, as I have
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Key takeaways
- If this paper successfully argues that the ivories under consideration here are not provincial Continental works (as suggested by Goldschmidt), but Anglo-Saxon ones deriving from Canterbury (as suggested by Beckwith) and possibly also Winchester (my suggestion), and that they belong to the eleventh century rather than the ninth and tenth (my suggestion), then it will have provided grounds on which to attempt a more valid reading of the international political positioning of Anglo-Saxon royalty and its monastic centres than has been possible before.
- As we know, the Utrecht Psalter was in Canterbury being copied at various times during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and it has always seemed strange to me that this manuscript should have influenced Anglo-Saxon drawing so strongly but apparently had no effect on Anglo-Saxon ivories.
- Whether these ivories are Anglo-Saxon, however, and to what date(s) they should be assigned are the next questions.
- Thus I suggest with Beckwith that these last ivories were produced at Canterbury, but I place them later than he did, sometime in the eleventh century.
- We also know that there was exchange of personnel between Winchester and Canterbury, and it looks as if these first ivories may have been transported to Canterbury some time during the eleventh century where several ( Figures 1, 3, 2) were speedily re-used to produce work reminiscent of Carolingian and Ottonian styles.
