 In this case study, we're going to be looking at garnets and their use in the early Middle Ages. And by early Middle Ages, I'm talking about a time period that really starts around the year 300 and ends around the year 1000. And within that period, we're going to be particularly interested in about the 5th to the 7th century CE. Now what you're seeing right now is a snapshot of some of the pressures that were affecting the Roman Empire as the Gauls began to increase in their power within Europe. And eventually, of course, Julius Caesar conquered the Gauls and conquered all of the territory that you see in green. But the Gauls never really went away and there were also migrating tribes and other groups that put pressure onto the Roman Empire eventually basically forcing the end of the Roman Empire as we will see. Here's the situation between about the years 100 and 500 as various tribes came from the east and from the north and spread throughout Europe and put a great deal of pressure on the western Roman Empire eventually leading to the end of that empire. And what's very interesting and what makes early medieval art very interesting about this time period is that this ushers in what a lot of people traditionally call the dark ages. As a medievalist I have a real objection to that term. Rather what we have is this clash of very different cultures with very different artistic traditions. And the traditions of these migrating peoples, these barbarians as the Romans considered them, these tended to be portable works of art so we can't think of monumental works of architecture and sculpture and painting but rather things that can be carried as these groups move and follow herds for example. They did have settlements, they did have fortifications but they also tended to move around and not establish permanent cities for example. Here's one nice example of the sorts of works of art I'm talking about. You see here on the left a reconstruction drawing of one of the Huns. Those are a tribe coming out of Eastern Europe and you can see that he is with his horse and on the right you can see some of the trappings for that horse. These are actually in the Walters Museum in Baltimore. And if you take a look we have a head piece and bridal fittings for the horse that are made of gold and then decorated with a number of semi-precious stones including garnets and carnelians. And garnets were heavily prized by these migrating tribes and we'll see that much of their artistic tradition consisted of very beautifully worked pieces of metalwork for personal adornment, for the adornment of their horses and then things that would adorn the sorts of things that moved with them. So wooden furniture that was really skillfully made that could be broken down and carried carriages, tents, textiles, things like that. So it's a very different artistic tradition from what is coming out of the classical world from Greece and Rome. Anyone who considers the age of these migrating peoples to be sort of the dark ages really hasn't taken a close look at some of the products that were made by these peoples. And of course I mean the population dark ages is also coming from this idea that the Roman, the classical world was sort of this perfection and that it was lost for this terrible period and then regained in the Renaissance. But I hope that over the course of this particular class, and if you ever take another art history class, you'll get a more complex understanding of the medieval period, the middle ages. Now back to what we're looking at, these are, this is two photos of the same object, a small shoe buckle. And this object is about one inch high, if you look at the top image and about one and a half to two inches wide. So really quite small and you can see that on the buckle there appears to be sort of a horse's head with little eyes that's on the left and then on the right hand side you see garnets that have been very thinly cut and placed into a framework formed by strips of gold. This is the sort of framework that was being discussed in the international framework video that you watched. And the level of skill required to make something like this is absolutely stunning and this is before dremel tools, this is before computerized heat regulation on furnaces, this is without all of the many types of technology that we have to help us in endeavors like this today. This is all handmade in a time of what we would consider to be relatively primitive technology. So how are objects like this made? Now here I'm showing you a pin that is very similar in form to that little buckle that we were looking at a moment ago. This is from a Frankish grave in Germany from along the Rhine, that's in the large photo. And then I have a diagram that shows you something about its construction and I want you to look just to the left of that diagram at what appears to be just a little scrap of something. That is a thinly cut piece of garnet and the garnet slices that were being used by these artists in the so-called Dark Ages were as thin as 0.3 or 0.2 millimeters in thickness. So we have to imagine them slicing these pieces of garnet and then very carefully polishing them and cutting them so that they could fit into the individual cells. Now the reason I'm showing you this relatively and somewhat damaged pin here is because it gives us a good idea of how something like this would have been made. I'm going to be showing you some much more gorgeous examples in a little bit but we oftentimes learn more from pieces that are broken and damaged or unfinished than we can from something that's sort of a perfect masterwork. Now take a look at this diagram. We have a framework set up with strips of metal and then we have some sort of cement material that brings that sort of fills up the largest amount of space in each of these cells and when I spoke to the folks in Mines who were researching objects like these and also did some other research I found out that the cement could be beeswax, it could be mud, it could be clay, it could be a mixture of different things basically you just want some sort of filler so that you have a thick piece of jewelry but you don't necessarily need to have a huge amount of metal in that void there. That would be a waste of expensive material. That metal is then topped with a piece of foil either gold or silver that has been cut with a pattern of geometric designs and this could be either cut into it sort of incised using a very sharp edge and the lines kind of drawn into it in a checkerboard pattern or we have also some evidence that in some workshops they used bronze stamps and they would strike this pattern into the metal kind of the way that you would strike a coin. So then you'd have that piece of pattern foil go on top and then one of these super thin slabs of garnet that at that level of thinness acts visually like a red glass so that you can see through it and I'll show you what that looks like in a better example in our next slide. Here we're looking at another piece that was discovered in the Rheinland made in the Rheinland in Germany and you can see we've blown it up many many times so that you're just looking at four individual five individual cells and the garnets in them and you can see that geometric patterning behind them that is impressed on the foil. You can also see that there's been some damage to this piece so that some of the gilding has come off of the copper or bronze framework and that silver appears to be used for the actual cells holding the garnets. Now when I first started studying these I always thought that the pattern had been scratched on to the garnets themselves but it is instead part of the goldsmithing process. Something else that's very interesting is that part of the reason that the international framework project knows that there was a problem with the garnet supply starting around the 7th century is that at that time we stop having garnets that are cut quite so precisely as these ones being found in works and it's clear that in the works being made after the 7th century that we have garnets that have been recut and reworked and they're not set as beautifully as they are here. Here we have a really precisely done really stunning work and I'm blowing it way up on a computer screen. What you're looking at is probably right around a centimeter worth of the piece in question. I mentioned the international framework project and one of the things that they did was they took a look at the garnets in pieces that they had and also garnets that had come out of works and did various types of analysis on them including high resolution scans and also looking at them with different types of imaging systems like XRF and then comparing them to garnets from different parts of the world and they did this with a whole selection of garnets and so on the left here in pictures 1, 2, 3 and 4 you're seeing garnets that came from works that were found in Germany and on the right you're seeing garnets that were collected from different areas of India and Sri Lanka as comparative examples and so by comparing these they were able to establish the provenance for most of these garnets that are in European jewelry of the migration period especially in the 5th and 6th centuries as coming from areas like Rajasthan and Sri Lanka and what's important about that is it means that there are trade routes that we can trace based on these garnets and as Susanna Greif said in the video that I shot interviewing her in minds garnets can be sort of a stand in for our understanding of other types of trade for example spices and textiles and other luxury goods that may not survive quite as well as these hard minerals. So the garnets that you saw in the last slide would be the types of garnets that would be inserted into works of art and here I'm showing you some examples of that pattern foil beneath the garnets and so what you see on the left in the drawing and then in the sort of multicolored image is a bronze dye that was actually used for stamping foils that were backgrounds for garnet jewelry and at the top right you see a high resolution detail of just a portion of that particular object and then down below you see another type of way of creating these geometric patterns and that is by incising the lines in with a pointed tool and this is based on some experimental work done in mines. The actual dye for stamping these was found up in Sweden and actually found an extensive jewelry making workshop from about the mid sixth century that has garnets, it has foils, it has tools for working with all of these things and it's being published little by little unfortunately not much of it in English. Here's another example just a close up to highlight what I was saying about the garnets and the foils and the beautiful detail. Here we have an actual scale measurement so we know that we're looking at something that's been magnified many many many times using special photographic equipment and you can see just the sheer amount of crisp detail and how perfectly the garnet fits into those individual segments made by the goldsmith. These truly are masterpieces in miniature and I mean some of the very largest brooches maybe get to about two thirds the size of a CD or a DVD so they're never that big and generally they're only about two inches in diameter for like a round brooch. Here's a selection of objects you're seeing here a sword from an Anglo-Saxon horde in Britain, this is one of the swords from the Sutton Hoo treasure. Down below are some grave goods again from the Rhineland in Germany, some in bronze, some in silver some in gold, some mixtures and then up at the top you're actually seeing a belt buckle that imitates garnet but in glass and I want to make the point that these garnets were high status stones they were hard to work with, they required a great deal of precision and care and skill for the part of the goldsmith, they and the stone cutter, they would have required a great deal of labor and if you're talking about a society that basically wears its wealth as a means of display for demonstrating their social standing and their status and their place in terms of the hierarchy of wealth, you know, high class, middle class, whatever the garnet and the gold settings become incredibly important and I can't emphasize this enough, these were generally so precious that they were buried with their owners, we have to imagine that some pieces also would have been handed down from person to person and perhaps also these garnets had magical properties associated with them, we don't know, I mean we know about the associations from the classical tradition with fire and with love and with coals but we don't really know what sort of associations there were coming from these so-called barbarian migrating tribes but certainly there is a love of these garnets and a real sense that these are what should be used and if you can't afford them you are imitating them as we see in our example at the top here I mentioned grave goods and here's an example of a female grave all laid out for you I believe this is at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany so again along the Rhine and here you can see this is the grave of a woman she has an ivory or bone comb close to her hand there are bead necklaces that were found close to her neck and also close to her chest there are clasps for clothing there are brooches the pair of brooches one of which is sort of up by her jaw and the other one down by her ribs were probably displaced at some point I would imagine that they would have been on either side of a dress or a cloak or something and you can also see the earrings that she would have worn but this gives you an idea of the kind of context in which many of these objects have been found one of the most spectacular finds that included garnet works of art like the piece that you see here next to the coin in 2009 with the discovery of the Staffordshire horde and this was one of the greatest discoveries of Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith work ever on the island of Britain it was found by a couple of guys in a farm field with metal detectors they had been interested in this particular field in the past and why this horde was buried we will never quite know but a bunch of works were dismantled and crumpled up and all buried in a fairly compact area within a field probably around the mid 7th century and the beginning of 2009 the Staffordshire horde made headlines all over the world and then it became sort of a puzzle for our historians, historians, conservators and others archeologists as well to figure out what all of this was and what it all came from and it's primarily weapons related it's mostly swords and sword fittings there's a spectacular helmet and then there are some mystery objects it's really a neat collection here's a close up view of some of the pieces from the Staffordshire horde prior to really detailed cleaning they've been just sort of removed from the earth, brushed off a little bit and then placed on display they kept up a blog during the whole process the public was invited to come and see conservators working on these pieces so it was also sort of a media event for the entire time that these works were being dealt with and now they're the collection is split between two museums in Britain and I've been to visit one of the two collections but you can see here just a selection of objects the sort of squarish and roundish kind of they look like buttons at the bottom the two in the center those appear to be kind of buttons to help keep your scabbard closed so that you don't accidentally draw your sword drawing your sword has to be a more deliberate act where you open it and then draw your sword kind of like a safety catch here's a closer view of one of those sort of safety catch buttons and then next to it is a strip that was engraved with text and you can see some of the other objects as well but I just want you to note how much we're zooming in on this piece this is a piece that's maybe an inch high and you can see just the incredible level of craftsmanship that not only do we have in many of these works just a flat surface covered by these garnets but here take a look at how the garnets have been shaped to fit the changing contours of this object there are garnets that are actually on sort of corners and curves with this decorative foil it's just insanely skilled craftsmanship I just it boggles my mind that something like this could be made I just the idea of the eye strain alone is kind of mind boggling I wanted to bring these in just briefly because I think they're really cute these are a couple of women's hair pins that were found in a Frankish grave in France these are in the Walters Museum but you can see that these same the garnets were used in all sorts of different circumstances and in all sorts of different objects the eye of the silver bird probably originally held a garnet we're going to finish now with one of the most spectacular examples of this so-called framework garnet inlay in art and this is the pair of shoulder clasps there are two of these from the Sutton Hoo treasure this is another British Anglo-Saxon treasure and these would have been sewn to a heavy cloak and then you could clasp them closed by using this hinge pin and so you can see the loops on the back kind of like button holes that would attach these to a cloak but I want you to look at the beautiful decoration that we have here and I'll walk you through some of it in a moment but there is interlacing which comes from Germanic and Scandinavian areas of Europe where there's the geometric designs with both garnets and also millefury glass that's glass that is made up of fused canes of glass in a pattern and then it's sliced they do some old fashioned candy that way you might be familiar with that and then there's also filigree work with tristed wire this is really a tour de force of excellent goldsmith work and it's believed that this belonged to a warrior chieftain or possibly a king in its day just the level of workmanship and the size and just how spectacular this object is and this is one of many pieces found in the same ship burial area animals tend to be a favorite design element in a lot of these so called barbarian works we've seen eagles, we've seen other predatory birds we see snakes and other creatures biting each other and one particularly powerful animal that shows up a lot is the boar or the razor back pig and here on this particular clasp you see two such boars so let me walk you through this it's a little hard to see so pay attention to my animations we're looking a little closer here is the head of the boar so you can see it's almond shaped eye you can see it's snout coming out and you can kind of make out sort of a tusk shape and an ear that's the razor back here's the hind leg and the curvy tail and then here you're looking at the front haunch the front shoulder in that blue millifiori glass and then the front leg the lower part of the leg and that razor back hog has a second razor back hog that is crossing over it so we have these two pigs these two boars that are overlapping each other and then in between in the wire work we have sort of snakes and birds and other creatures as well this is spectacular stuff it's not naturalistic but I think that you'll agree with me that it is incredibly refined and the product of an amazing amount of skill and practice