Peace Art 4

BRIEF HISTORY OF ART 4

Disclaimer: Due to the extensive subject matters inherent within this topic, efforts have been made to briefly represent significant movements throughout the history of art, from antiquity unto the current age. By definition, inclusion of all art movements would be impossible, and still remain brief. Please feel free to add missed art movements, such as presented here in a quasi-chronological order, as long as no damages are done to the pre-existing sub topics.

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Medieval Art

Migration Period

The Migration Period, also called Barbarian Invasions or Völkerwanderung (German for "wandering of peoples"), is a name given by historians to a human migration which occurred within the period of roughly AD 300–700 in Europe, marking the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.

The migration included the Goths, Vandals, Alans, Suebi and Franks, among other Germanic, Iranian and Slavic tribes. The migration may have been triggered by the incursions of the Huns, in turn connected to the Turkic migration in Central Asia, population pressures, or climate changes.

Migrations would continue well beyond AD 1000, successive waves of Slavs, Avars, Bulgars, Hungarians, the Turkic expansion and finally the Mongol invasions, radically changing the ethnic makeup of Eastern Europe. Western European historians, however, tend to emphasize the migrations most relevant to Western Europe.
excerpted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period

In the 3rd century the Roman Empire almost collapsed and its army was becoming increasingly Germanic in make-up, so that in the 4th century when Huns pushed nomadic German tribes westward, they spilled across the Empire's borders and began to settle there. The Visigoths settled in Italy and then Spain, in the north the Franks settled in to Gaul and western Germany, and in the 5th century Scandinavians such as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded Britain. By the close of the 6th century the Western Roman Empire was almost completely replaced with smaller less politically organized, but vigorous, Germanic kingdoms.

Although these kingdoms were never homogeneous, they shared certain common cultural features. Traditionally nomadic, they began to settle and become farmers and fishermen. Archaeological evidence shows no tradition of monumental artwork, such as architecture or large sculpture, preferring instead "mobile" art with a utilitarian function, such as weapons, tools and jewelry. The art of the Germanic peoples is almost entirely personal adornment, portable, and taken to the grave where it would act as an appeasement to dead spirits to protect the living.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period_art

top left: bronze idol representing a sacred bear. Perm Krai(Russia),6th or 7th c. AD - 'animal art'
top right: Polychrome style gold eagle fibula with garnet and cloisonne inlays, 500 A.D.
bottom: a Scythian tattoo, representative of 'insular art'

Migration Period art (aka "Barbarian art") is the artwork of Germanic peoples during the Migration period of 300 to 900. It includes the Migration art of the Germanic tribes on the continent, as well the Hiberno-Saxon art of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic fusion in Great Britain. It examines the different types of art including the polychrome style and the animal style. Migration Period art is one of the major periods of Medieval art.
http://www.crystalinks.com/migrationart.html

left: Book of Durrow, one of the earliest pieces of Hiberno-Saxon art, 7th century AD
middle: migration period Celtic high cross
right: migration period Celtic manuscript illumination

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Carolingian Art

The remarkable historical period now called "Charlemagne's renovation" - and energetic, brilliant emulation of the art, culture, and political ideals of Christian Rome - occurred during the late eighth and early ninth century. Out of the confusions attendant on the migrations and settlement of the barbarians, Charlemagne's immediate forerunners built, by force and political acumen, a Frankish empire that contained or controlled a large part of western Europe. Charlemagne, like Constantine, whom he often consciously imitated, wished to create a unified Christendom as a visible empire. He was crowned by the pope in Rome in 800 as head of the entity that became the Holy Roman Empire, which, waxing and waning over a thousand years and with many hiatuses. existed as a force in central Europe until its destruction by Napoleon in 1806.

Illumination showing Charlemagne and Roland in mythic status.
From the text 'The Song of Roland', 12th century

Charlemagne was a sincere admirer of learning and the arts. To make his empire as splendid as that of Rome (he thought of himself as successor to the caesars), he invited to his court at Aachan the best minds and finest craftsmen of western Europe and the Byzantine East. Although unlettered and scarcely able to write, he could speak Latin fluently, and loved the discourses he frequently held with the learned men he gathered around him. Charlemagne also must have admired the splendid works created in the scriptorium of the school he established in his palace. One of his dearest projects had been the recovery of the true text of the Bible, which through centuries of miscopying by ignorant scribes, had become almost hopelessly corrupt. Part of the great project, undertaken by the renowned scholar Alcuin of York at the new monastery at Tours, was the correction of the actual script used, which, in the hands of the scribes, had become almost unreadable. The Carolingian rehabilitation of the inherited Latin script produced a clear, precise system of letters; the letters on this page are descended from the alphabet renovated by the scribes at Tours.
Art Through The Ages, ninth edition, La Croix, Tansey, Kirkpatrick
(to be continued)
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