From Charlemagne's court

Press, 12 November 1977, Page 17

From Charlemagne's court

Carolingian Painting. By Florentine Mutherich and Joachim E. Gaehde. Chatto and Windus. 128 pp. f $13.10.

A recent addition to a series of large-format, high-quality paperbacks devoted to the best in manuscript illumination, Eastern and Western, “Carolingian Painting” deals with the great efflorescence in culture centred on the court of Charlemagne (768-814) and his immediate successors, Charlemagne’s great cultural object was to revive learning and the arts in a society which had lapsed into barbarianism. This revival was to constitute a return to Classical standards, and to underline the political myth which Charlemagne strove to implant; namely that the Frankish kingdom was the successor to the Roman Imperium; though a Holy Roman Empire. In the furtherance of these ends, Charlemagne recruited scholars and

artists over the length and breadth of Europe, and the material finely reproduced in the book under review illustrates this eclecticism, with paintings reflecting not only a native Frankish element, but traditions as diverse as Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine. Fittingly, the collection of plates begins with illustrations taken from Godescalc’s Evangelistary, a work which can justly be described as epoch-making both in terms of manuscript illustration and of script. It ends with a Franco-Saxon Bible written for Charles the Bald about 873, less than 90 years later. The richness and intensity of the artistic and scholarly outpouring during this brief period cannot be more satisfyingly demonstrated than in a book such as this, which shows how brightly the light of culture shone at times during what for so long was ignorantly called the Dark Ages. — DAVID GUNBY,