© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Art of the ‘Dark Ages’
Showing Merovingian artefacts in North American public and private collections
During the past century, North American institutional and private collectors have rarely considered early medieval artefacts as a mainstream component of pre-modern European art. Unlike their British and European counterparts, historians and art historians in the United States and Canada have generally characterized the Early Middle Ages as a bleak period marked by few artistic advances or aesthetic considerations. Even the museums that acquired significant numbers of objects from this period during the heyday of early medieval collecting in the early twentieth century infrequently devoted significant resources to displaying or publishing them. Beyond providing a survey of the private collectors and institutions that purchased or received early medieval artefacts from the 1890s to the 1970s, this essay explains how neglect of the ‘Dark Ages’ in North American public and private collections reflected late nineteenth-century academic conventions that prioritized the High Middle Ages. It also addresses the burgeoning antiquities market that made early medieval artefacts more desirable, and suggests how two world wars encouraged the presentation and interpretation of these so-called Germanic productions as evidence of a cosmopolitan or rootless civilization. The last section of this analysis assesses the long-term effects of these outlooks on the study of the Early Middle Ages in North America.
Address for correspondence Bonnie Effros, Department of History, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA. beffros{at}binghamton.edu