 This is our third case study of rock crystal and we are moving to the Carolingian Empire. Carolingian means that we're referring to the Empire of Charlemagne and his heirs in the eighth and ninth centuries. Charlemagne and some of his predecessors managed to unify most of the Frankish lands into a United Kingdom and in fact they managed to take most of Western Europe as one single empire. What you see here is Charlemagne being depicted on a coin and he's shown in a very Roman manner with Latin describing him as Corulus Imperator Augustus referring to him very much like he's a Roman emperor and on the tiny equestrian portrait this is a small portrait of either Charlemagne or one of his descendants on horseback modeled after a Roman predecessor, a famous portrait of Marcus Aurelius. So what Charlemagne and his heirs were trying to do was they were trying to recreate the Roman Empire but in a new Christian context. I mentioned that Charlemagne and his heirs managed to unite much of Western Europe together. Charlemagne inherited the darkest area in blue that you see here and then he conquered the areas in a slightly lighter blue up to the year 814. He also through diplomacy and other means managed to have tributary provinces. Those are in yellow and he conducted talks with the Byzantine Empire in green. Now after the death of his grandson Charles or after the death of his son Louis the Pius, his kingdom ended up being split up between Charles the Bald, Lothar and Louis the German, his three grandsons. And so this Carolingian Empire doesn't live very long but it had a very tremendous impact on art and architecture as we'll see. The Carolingians prized gemstones and rock crystal interestingly enough was considered to be one of the most precious jewels by the Carolingians. And we're going to be looking at a couple of examples of large scale rounded gems that were in the possession of wealthy members of the Carolingian Empire. Probably bishops or landed nobility, perhaps even some of the kings themselves. Here's the first of the two gemstones we're going to study and it's roughly about the size of a computer mouse to give you some idea. It's a little bit more rounded than your typical computer mouse but about in that same scale. And you might recall from your readings the importance of symbolism in the Middle Ages for rock crystal and the fact that some scholars compared rock crystal to the body of Christ. That it was pure and heavenly in nature. So look back at some of those readings and this I think can explain the fact that many of these surviving crystals from the Carolingian period feature the crucifixion of Christ. You can see him here, he's flanked by the Virgin Mary, his mother on one side and on the other side by John the Evangelist. They're mourning at the base of the cross. You can see the serpent from the temptation curled up at the base of the cross and then the cross is flanked by the sun and the moon. Here's kind of an interesting close up that I took when I was at the British Museum examining this object. These are objects that are flat on one side and then completely rounded on the other side. So it's as if you cut apart, maybe cut an egg shape in half. And what's interesting is that it's the flat side that received the engraving by the Carolingian engraver and the rounded side simply reflects that engraving. What we're looking at here is the image of the engraving from the back of the stone coming through to the front here. And because of the nature of rock crystal and the curvature here, that flat image is actually magnified when we see it in the rounded shape of the crystal. And you'll be able to see that a little bit more clearly in the next slide. Here you're seeing our first rock crystal along with the one we're going to look at next. So that's my hand in a surgical glove holding the first one. And you can see it's about the size of like an optical mouse. And if you take a look at it, you can see in this view that the engraving doesn't actually fill the entire surface of this crystal. But when you see it with the curvature, it gives the optical illusion of completely filling that space. And you get the same effect on the much larger crystal that you see on the right. Here we're looking at a couple of pretty fascinating views. On the left, you're seeing the rock crystal from the front with the engraving that's on the flat side, the back, coming through and being magnified on the curved surface that we see. If you look on the right, we're actually looking here at the flat side, the back side of this crystal. And here you can compare these drawings side by side, these engravings, and see that on the back side, it's actually quite a good deal smaller. You don't have that magnification from the crystal that acts on the other side. You can also see some of the actual workmanship and some bits of chips here and there on the rock crystal. But I think you can appreciate the level of detail and really beautiful workmanship by the artists if you look at these two images. And we'll look a little bit more at technique in the next couple of slides. This is one of my favorite views of this piece that I took when I was at the British Museum. And here, again, we're looking at the curved side of the crystal. You can tell that very easily. But look at how the angle of the camera, the angle that we're looking at this from, has skewed the image and sort of moved everything over to one side. And that's that effect, that magnifying effect of the crystal working on it. We're back to the actual engraved side. And I want to point out a few things. First, you can see small scratches, particularly around the edges of the cross. And those are where the Carolingian artist who created this initially sketched in the design, probably using a tool that had a very sharp point, maybe a little chip of diamond embedded into a piece of wood or held very tightly in like metal tweezers and kind of bound in place. So we have those little lines here and there. And then to do the actual engraving, they used a bow drill, just like the bow drills we've been talking about with other works of art in this particular unit like the cylinder seals. But the difference was that instead of using a bow drill with a flat grinding wheel, that would have sort of cut lines in and had to be moved in order to create curvature, curved lines. Here we have a drill bit, a bit more like what you would see on a Dremel tool today with a rounded head. And they would use different sizes of rounded heads and use those to grind these sort of semi-circular grooves into the rock crystal. And if you take a look at Christ's body, for example, at his musculature in his arms and his chest area, you can see where different sizes of wheels have been used or different sizes of tips, excuse me, have been used and how they've been sort of moved around to give the overall impression of musculature. I want to finish with this particular image which shows me holding each one of these rock crystal gemstones. And objects like this might have been worn around the neck as amulets or hung up, but they're also of a size that really invites handling. These were meant to be held and touched and contemplated. And the reason I'm bringing in the views here where you can see the blue of the gloves that I was wearing is that when you pick up a piece of rock crystal, suddenly it takes on the color of whatever you're using to pick it up. So if you're using just your hands, your flesh, suddenly it becomes flesh colored. And remember in works like this, the subject matter is the incarnation of Christ, the flesh of Christ being sacrificed on the cross. Rock crystal was compared to Christ's flesh in its purity. And we have a second reminder of the flesh of Christ and his suffering and sacrifice in the crucifixion when objects like this would be picked up and suddenly take on the color and texture and even magnify the viewer's flesh for them.