It was a very interesting exhibition indeed because containing some really fantastic exhibits. I went round it in about two and a half hours without noticing, which says something because my usual attention span for exhibitions is about the same as for films, and after an hour and a half I start wondering when the end comes.
But as well as the straightforward interest of the story it purported to tell, there was also the sort of meta-interest of the story it couldn't help telling, which was one of a particular sort of attitude to this period in the past. First there's the use of the word barbarians, which really is not a suitable word if you want to be taken seriously. (I'm guessing from the expensive multi-contributor catalogue which weighs a bit more than my Lewis and Short that this wasn't entirely a populist exercise.) The word "barbarian" not only started out as a term of dismissive abuse but is still used that way. (And if you do use it you need to define it in some way; the most obvious given its etymology would be by language, I suppose, and I'm guessing that in order not to be a barbarian you had to know Greek, since plenty of these barbarians spoke Latin. Other unspoken definitions were: the people who attacked some part of the Roman Empire, which was difficult because some of those people were sort of Romans; or, anyone who wasn't ethnically Roman for many generations.)
The exhibition starts with a good deal of background on the Romans. A fleeting reference is made to how they took over the torch of civilisation from the Greeks -- the impression is given that the Greeks, a bit tired of holding it after all that time, were really quite glad to hand it over. Then highly disciplined Roman armies march out achieving efficient conquests and civilising various peoples by introducing them to enlightened values. Everything is going rather well; Tacitus's "create a wilderness and call it peace" doesn't get a look in here. And then the people to whom the civilisation hasn't really stuck start attacking the empire, and oh, the humanity! Cue lots of nineteenth-century pictures of barbarians, who haven't invented clothes, pulling down beautiful statues and setting fire to things. I like a bit of antiquarianism in an exhibition, but you can't just give us nineteenth-century romanticised paintings as if they were fair reconstructions.
Once the barbarians are definitely on top the exhibition settles down a bit into a huge variety of barbarian artefacts, which are extremely interesting in their own right. I saw some excellent things, while at the same time getting thoroughly confused about which people were which. The fact that this sort of thing is on the periphery of my academic knowledge probably cuts both ways: on the one hand it means I may have been more interested in sorting it out than most visitors, but on the other it should have made it easier for me to do so. And if it is true that most people visiting don't care about the difference between the Huns and the Vandals, I think an exhibition like this ought to at least give them the opportunity to make that distinction. In the middle of a room full of fifth-century Lombardic grave goods I suddenly came across a bilingual glossary in several columns. Goodness, I thought, an early Lombardic glossary that looks just like Corpus 144! But it turned out to be the Épinal half of the Erfurt-Épinal Glossary, which is famous for looking just like Corpus 144. What an eighth-century English manuscript was doing there was not explained. (I'm not sure the Anglo-Saxons should have been included at all since they had very little do with the Romans, whose last legion supposedly left Britain before the Anglo-Saxons arrived. Even more so the Scandinavians.) I also came across very unexpectedly the Book of Mulling, which seemed pretty surreal to me -- I went to Venice and saw the Book of Mulling -- but the cultural assumptions that put it there took my breath away. It seems like a collusion in the casual anti-Irish racism of past years in Britain. I don't think it's acceptable for anyone dealing with this period not to know that the Irish had a complex and sophisticated civilisation, and after the decline of Rome were about the most learned people in Western Europe. They had never been subject to the Roman Empire, and they did not attack it in its decline, and they had a written culture that happily included Latin and some Greek, and Hebrew if they could get their hands on it. So where do you get off calling them barbarians? How can you just lump them in with the various peoples who sacked Rome? It's intellectual sloppiness, if it's not something worse.
I began to fear it was something worse when I came across a Byzantine enamelled book cover or reliquary panel, I forget which, labelled simply as eleventh-century Eastern work now in the collection of San Marco, Venice. From that description you have to do some very close reading between the lines to realise that this is loot from the Fourth Crusade. The Fourth Crusade was a pretty low episode even by Crusade standards. When the massing European armies got to Venice they didn't have enough money to take ship for the east, so the doge Enrico Dandolo suggested that the army could earn its passage with a bit fighting for Venice first, recapturing a lost Adriatic port. It ended up with a successful attack on Christian Constantinople, led by the blind 80-something doge who was the first to leap off the boats and charge against the defences. Venice got to claim from then on that it was the conqueror of a quarter and half a quarter of the Roman Empire, which was its official share of the spoils; it sent back home endless treasures, including the famous bronze horses of San Marco; Latin rulers deeply unsympathetic to their subjects held the imperial throne of Byzantium for over a hundred and fifty years; the split between the Western and Eastern churches received a further blow from which it may never recover in this world (some first tentative starts at apologies were exchanged about five years ago); and the last bulwark of Christianity in the east was fatally weakened against 1453. To put a piece of this loot in the exhibition as an example of barbarian art is a pretty amazing fudging of history. Surely by any possible definition the barbarians here were the Venetians, sacking the last surviving part of the Roman Empire. It's only the exhibit's later provenance, not its actual form, that could possibly make it relevant here. It would be hard to acquit the organisers of this exhibition of a belief that civilisation is what happens in Italy. Today is a national holiday in Italy to celebrate liberation from fascism. I don't think it would be very original of me to suggest that bad history played some facilitating role in the circumstances leading up to world war two. (But it's maybe a bit melodramatic of me to draw this link here.)
It's a shame because it was a real opportunity missed. Something that fascinates me, and which I do believe could be made more widely interesting, is how Christian peoples dealt with their non-Christian past, especially when that past was in itself pretty impressive. I suppose an analogy might be how we feel about the attractive older parts of cities like Bristol, knowing they were built on slave-trade money. The Anglo-Saxons referred to the Roman ruins that they found in England as enta geweorc, the work of giants. They knew perfectly well who the Romans were; it was a figure of speech, expressing mingled admiration and reservation. Giants in Anglo-Saxon literature were linked to the Nephilim, the offspring of liaisons between angels and humans, against whom the Flood was directed. In Beowulf, Grendel is related to these monstrous people, the implication being that some waterborne examples had survived far up in the cold north. One interpretation of Beowulf, the one that makes it for me a great work of literature, is that it's largely about what a Christian people feel about a heroic yet futile past. Rome itself is a bit disappointing to me in terms of medieval remains, because the medieval museum, the Crypto Balbi, gives no sense of how people felt to be living in the middle of the huge remains of a disappeared empire. I read a biography of Dante recently which gave his fascinatingly terrible take on the whole thing. According to Dante's understanding, when the crowd in Jerusalem demanded the release of Barabbas not Jesus, and cried out that the responsibility for crucifying Jesus would be on their heads and the heads of their children [Matt. 27:24-5], this related only to the Jews, not any other people. However, Pilate was acting as a representative of the Roman Empire. Dante's logic ran that for Jesus to die significantly he had to be condemned by a real authority; therefore the fact that he was sent to his death by Pilate was actually God giving a big rubber stamp to the whole Roman enterprise; God was saying here is the true empire with true legal authority on earth. So the crucifixion for Dante sent the Jews swerving to the bottom of the pile of peoples, while a very similar participation in the same events made the Romans top dogs, God's chosen rulers regardless of their religion. (Now I don't understand the whole Guelph/Ghibelline thing, and I wish someone, preferably John Julius Norwich, would write an elegant book about it, but I think Dante was probably influenced by turning from the Guelph (roughly papal) to the Ghibelline (approximately imperial) side of things after his long exile from his beloved Florence.) Anyway I think this is very interesting because he has managed to do away completely with the more endearing ambiguity that the Anglo-Saxons felt about their own past, and has elegantly positioned himself on the side of historical righteousness.
The Venetian exhibition took the simplistic line that the barbarians were impressed by Roman culture and aped it. (The implication in the display of many of the exhibits was that when beautiful things were produced this was largely due to Roman influence.) At this point the organisers started to need to define "Roman" as well; we no longer seem to be concerned with the Roman empire, which has gone East (and, it's implied, is now therefore itself a bit barbaric), but instead with the Christian orbit of Rome where the pope still stuck it out. One exhibit I found particularly interesting was one half of a ninth-century consular diptych showing a crucifixion. Underneath the foot of the cross the she-wolf suckles Romulus and Remus. This was presented as an example of the way that the barbarians happily referred with admiration to Roman legends. Now I'm not an art historian; but I struggle very hard to think of an example of something put under the foot of the cross which is meant to be seen in a positive light. Mary Magdalene clings to the cross, weeping; but underneath the cross is the skull of Adam, symbol of sin leading to death, or perhaps the devil in the form of a snake (Corpus has a nice example of this). Please correct me in the comments if I'm missing something (if anyone's actually reading this far...) but doesn't this position seem pretty condemnatory of what is after all a story of abandonment and fratricide? If you've read Augustine's City of God you know that the first eight or so books out of twenty are devoted to reasons why we shouldn't worship Romulus. (As I recall it gets interesting at about book 12.) An opportunity was missed here to look at what people thought about an impressive yet flawed past.
The exhibits on display were very interesting in themselves, but as an exhibition, given that an exhibition is supposed to bring exhibits into relation with each other in a thought-provoking way, I found this a failure with sinister overtones. The exhibition catalogue (at the front the list of names thanked is split into "Ladies", "Gentlemen", "Cardinals" and "Bishops") gives an interesting light on the exhibition's genesis. Apparently the Venetians, planning an exhibition on Rome and the Barbarians, discovered that Bonn was planning one on the peoples of the Migration era, a far far more sensible idea. It's an interesting question why suddenly everyone starts migrating at that date. Realising that they would need to borrow many of the same exhibits they joined forces, and the exhibition moves to Bonn when it has finished in Venice. I'm quite tempted to see if I can go to it. I bet the Germans do it better; there's a country that takes seriously the moral difficulties of the past. I still don't quite understand the Italian attitude to the second world war era; today's liberation from fascism day is just one big party, celebrating that the fascists have all gone in a way that seems slightly glib to me. Of course it's easy for us British to feel excessively pleased with ourselves about world war two, but then we do have post-colonial guilt, and as a nation we're all the better for it.
Also I do sort of have to acknowledge here that maybe the anger that this exhibition made me feel was a bit due to personal involvement; some of the people lumped under the one word "barbarians" are the people I study, and it saddens me to see them dismissed like this, as if they were nothing more than attackers and imitators of Rome when in fact their relationship to the Romans was both more distant and more complex.
PS I wish Italian museums would catch on to the potential of museum shops. I'm a complete sucker for earrings based on exhibits and there were some fantastic earrings on display. If I were rich I would design jewellery based on those garnet and gold designs that we barbarians were so fond of a millenium or so ago, especially the eagle-shaped ones, and have them made up by craftspeople.
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