. Although members of the Carolingian dynasty ruled in France from 751 to 987, artistic production was concentrated between the last quarter of the 8th century and the end of the 9th. This period witnessed an explosive increase in artistic production in many areas, notably architecture, monumental painting, book production, ivory carving, and many forms of metalwork, and it can fairly be said that Carolingian art laid the foundation for later medieval developments. Little remains today of the monumental arts, although many literary sources describe buildings and their decoration, and considerable evidence has been recovered from archaeological investigation, so that the numerous and often perfectly preserved examples of the “minor arts” give the fullest and clearest picture of Carolingian art as a whole.
The very term “Carolingian art,” derived from the ruling dynasty, reflects a tradition of seeing the art of the period as primarily stimulated by centralized royal patronage, and indeed monarchs and ecclesiastical figures in the immediate royal circles were prominent and influential sponsors of artistic projects. On the other hand, much artistic production was spread widely throughout the kingdom, especially in the northern regions, and shows relatively little influence from courtly subjects or styles. Although the Carolingian monarchs clearly revived the ancient tradition of the ruler as patron and often subject of important artistic projects, the early-medieval tradition of artistic production being carried on in monasteries was also continued. Courtly and monastic patronage and production are often inseparable, with monasteries often producing works of art for or at the behest of the monarch.
For a variety of reasons, it seems that artistic production played an especially important role during the Carolingian period, often expressing contemporary political and theological circumstances, a phenomenon encouraged by the debate about the proper role of images in the Christian church, which from 726 to 843 dominated the Byzantine world. There, the conflict between those who favored the veneration of holy images, or icons, as central elements of Christian cult and those, known as Iconoclasts, who opposed such practices and sought to destroy such images or circumscribe their use called for a western and especially Carolingian reaction. In 792, Archbishop Theodulf of Orléans drafted the first of a series of lengthy Carolingian treatises devoted to religious art. His work, now known as the Libri Carolini and in fact the most extensive early-medieval text concerning art, was originally designed to express an official Frankish viewpoint that images should be neither venerated nor destroyed and that they could help to instruct the faithful. The emphasis on didactic art that could convey an important message became a leading feature of Carolingian art, sometimes joined with a growing ability to evoke personal empathetic responses to the image. Images thus assumed a place of special significance, enhanced by the tendency to make grand artistic works to mark special personal and political moments.
The first important Carolingian building in France was the new monastery church at Saint-Denis, begun at the death of King Pepin to house his tomb, and completed and dedicated by his son Charlemagne in 775. Excavations suggest that the basilican church had a large transept, a feature previously contained only in the apostolic basilicas of St. Paul in Rome, and thus announcing a major
Crucifixion. Upper cover of the binding of the Lindau Gospels, Morgan MS M1. Gold and jewels, c. 870. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
feature of Carolingian artistic production, the relationship to early Christian and papal Roman art. The feature of the transept seems to have become common, even standard, in later Carolingian basilicas. The great basilica built during the 790s by Angilbert at Saint-Riquier (Centula) in northeastern France, now known from extensive literary descriptions and from some postmedieval drawings, had not only a transept but also several massive towers. An outstanding source of information for architecture and many other subjects is the famous Plan of Saint-Gall, a detailed layout of buildings for a monastery in Switzerland designed ca. 820, and probably reflecting building ideas more widely current throughout France as well as other parts of the Carolingian world. Not all ecclesiastical buildings were basilicas. The famous octagonal palace chapel built by Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle in the 790s is not in France, but a contemporary central plan structure was erected by Archbishop Theodulf of Orléans at Germignydes-Prés, and Charles the Bald built a magnificent palace chapel in the Aix-la-Chapelle tradition at Compiègne, consecrated in 877.
Few Carolingian mural paintings survive in France, but the extensive decorations in Switzerland, Italy, and Germany support the evidence of the crypt of the church of Saint-Germain at Auxerre that mural painting was produced in large amounts and achieved a high level. A special feature of Carolingian mural decoration is the use of mosaic at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) and probably at Compiègne. The late 8th- or early 9th-century mosaic apse from Theodulf’s oratory at Germigny has an unusual subject, the Ark of the Covenant as described in the Old Tes-
A Seraph, superimposed on the text of the Sanctus, Drogo Sacramentary. MS lat. 9428, fol. 15. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
tament, with statues of winged cherubim. Such an unprecedented subject for treatment in a major apse surely reflects the contemporary debate about images in the Christian church and stems directly from the patron’s special interests.
Some of the most famous works of Carolingian art are illuminated manuscripts, which survive in large numbers and are often nearly perfectly preserved. Best known are the groups of books that can be closely associated with rulers, especially Charlemagne and Charles the Bald, and that appear to have been produced by scribes and painters directly attached to the royal entourage. The books for Charlemagne include the Gospel lectionary written by Godescalc (B.N. n.a. lat. 1203), datable 781–83, whose colophon employs one of the earliest examples of Carolingian minuscule script and which has elaborately ornamental frames for every page of text as well as impressively large portraits of Christ and the four Evangelists bearing many stylistic and iconographic connections with the 6th-century mosaic art of Ravenna. A slightly later group of books connected with Charlemagne and produced after the establishment of the royal court at Aix-la-Chapelle in 795 make a tighter group, including the Harley Gospels (B.L.Harley 2788), Soissons Gospels (B.N. lat. 8850), Abbeville Gospels, and Lorsch Gospels (Bucharest and Vatican Pal. lat. 50). Some features of the style, iconography, and layout of these books were followed by later groups associated with such monarchs as Charles the Bald, for example, the great Codex aureus from Saint-Emmeram of ca. 870 (Munich, Clm. 14000), and also by manuscripts produced at Reims, Fulda, Tours, and other monasteries, which from the second quarter of the 9th century produced luxury manuscripts in large numbers. With Reims is associated a dynamic and expressive, sketchy style of drawing whose greatest representative is the Utrecht Psalter; with Tours is especially associated a series of Bible manuscripts containing extended narrative sequences for scenes from Genesis, Exodus, and other biblical books.
Carolingian production of luxury manuscripts is most often associated with the great Gospels and Bibles but also includes a variety of other texts, some of which are of classical and early Christian origin, such as the comedies of Terence, the astronomical works of Aratus, and the Psychomachia of Prudentius; these clearly followed, to some degree, surviving ancient illustrated manuscripts. New pictorial schemes were developed as well. Several Sacramentaries received extensive cycles of illustrations for the first time, and the sequence of extraordinary acrostic poems written in the 820s by Rabanus Maurus of Fulda, De laudibus sanctae crucis, were designed from their inception for elaborate pictorial illustration and survive in several luxurious 9th-century manuscripts.
The altar was a preoccupation of Carolingian religious thought, which focused to a great degree on the eucharistic sacrifice, and it is therefore no surprise that architecture often made provision for multiple altars, each of which was required to contain at least one relic, and that a large amount of luxury art was produced for use on the altar. The great silver-gilt and enamel altar made by Vuolvinus and another artist for San Ambrogio in Milan in the mid-9th century probably draws upon French precedents and represents a type of altar decoration that must have been widespread. Altar books included not only Gospels and Psalters but Sacramentaries and prayer books, decorated with elaborate gold and jeweled or ivory covers of which one of the most spectacular is the cover with the crucifixion image of the Lindau Gospels, a work of the second half of the 9th century. Reliquaries were made in large numbers, still for the most part in the form of boxes or chests. A distinctive Carolingian type of object is represented by reverse-carved rock crystals, produced primarily in the general area of Lorraine. Generally decorated with the Crucifixion scene and clearly meant for the altar, the most spectacular of the group is decorated with eight scenes of the story of Susanna and appears to have been especially meant for the use of the king.
Although carved ivories were common in late antiquity, virtually none had been produced before the revival of the technique at the end of the 9th century in works generally associated with Charlemagne’s circle. Well over a hundred 9th-century ivory carvings survive, some close transcriptions of early Christian models but others strikingly inventive in style and iconography, as, for example, a superb group close to Charles the Bald that draws upon the expressive style of the Utrecht Psalter. The largest surviving group of ivories decorate a throne made probably in eastern France for Charles the Bald and now preserved in the Vatican as the Cathedra Petri, including a remarkable group of twelve Labors of Hercules.
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