Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West

This book explores early medieval visual culture of northern and central Europe. Rejecting earlier theories on the origins and meaning of early medieval art, it shows how the transformation of Roman imperial images and highly ornamental material culture produced an aesthetic that bridged various ethnic and religious identities.

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Scholarship often treats the post-Roman art produced in central and north-western Europe as representative of the pagan identities of the new 'Germanic' rulers of the early medieval world. In this book, Matthias Friedrich offers a critical reevaluation of the ethnic and religious categories of art that still inform our understanding of early medieval art and archaeology. He scrutinises early medieval visual culture by combining archaeological approaches with art historical methods based on contemporary theory. Friedrich examines the transformation of Roman imperial images, together with the contemporary, highly ornamented material culture that is epitomized by 'animal art.' Through a rigorous analysis of a range of objects, he demonstrates how these pathways produced an aesthetic that promoted variety (varietas), a cross-cultural concept that bridged the various ethnic and religious identities of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean worlds.