Conclusion

 

 

 

This book has studied the acquaintance of the Middle Ages with

works of antique art and architecture by writing a `biography'

of surviving and rediscovered antiquities based on

written and archaeological evidence. Its obvious conclusion is

that much more antique material was available during the Middle

Ages than at any time up to the nineteenth century. If the

preoccupations of this book were to be extended into our own

day, the delicious irony of the giddy carousel of discovery and

destruction would be even clearer: antiquities were both

resurrected and, in re-use, hidden again in the population

expansion of the Middle Ages, while the antiquarianism of the

Renaissance and its influence ensured the protection of but a

few choice pieces (e.g. rarely mosaics). Antique remains in our

towns are today a rarity; in the countryside, they are visible

only to the practised eye, so that it seems strange that only

200 years ago Tozzetti could see so much in his native Tuscany

(Cristofani 1980, appendix with modern references to the sites,

and the material found at them).

 

 

Yet archaeology was born (or so we are told) in the middle of

the eighteenth century - since when, in the course of a

veritable population explosion, more material has been destroyed

than ever before. Even the feeding of an increased population by

changed agricultural methods assures the destruction of what it

pleases archaeologists to call our `heritage'; rescue

archaeology is the result. Little quantification has been done

for recent times and, naturally, none at all for the Middle

Ages; but the rate of destruction even of earth barrows is

alarming: Lawson (1981, 1) points out that of 923 recorded

barrows in East Anglia, no more than 468 survive. We may assume

a similar rate of destruction during the mediaeval population

expansion, and it produced similar results: particularly in the

economically active centres of N. France and N. Italy, old

enceintes were destroyed and new ones were built. Much was lost

in the process - as at Florence, which is alarmingly short of

ancient remains.

 

 

Progress destroyed antiquities before culture (one of the

fruits of progress?) sought to conserve them, and a topsy-turvy

world was therefore the result. For example, those Gallic

centres once rich in antiquities were generally in two

categories: those in a key strategic position but without

vigorous prosperity, such as Narbonne or Langres (both of which

retained their walls into the last century); and those centres

such as Toulouse and Bordeaux which have always been prosperous,

and where any antiquities have come from small remaining

sections of the enceinte: their richness underlines how many

antique pieces in re-use must already have been extracted in

earlier centuries. The great majority of important towns in Gaul

and Italy lost the remaining sections of their town walls in the

course of urban expansion during the nineteenth century, when

the need for defence and protection within them had passed for

good. For Gaul, indeed, the greatest part of our knowledge of

sculpture comes from material found in the course of such

demolitions, and now stored in immense quantities in the museums

of cities such as Narbonne, Sens and Langres. If Lallier's

publication (1846) of antiquities found in the walls at Sens is

any guide, then his interest was in a good, clean, modern town:

 

the old walls offer no more than ruins ... and, up to now,

new constructions have not found the secret of greater

attractiveness ... We no longer possess our old Gallo-Roman

enceinte, but nor yet do we have comfortable houses, with

several openings freely open to the air and light (1846, 36)

 

Similar motives may have prompted the great waves of

construction of the later Middle Ages when, for example at

Auxerre, the new work was presented as the removal of the

squalor of the old (Caviness 1973, 205 and n. 3).

 

 

The availability of antiquities to the Middle Ages does not,

however, necessarily mean that they were continuously admired,

studied or imitated: and it is doubtful whether the type of

evidence presented here can do more than suggest that artists

and architects had the opportunity to use actual examples of

antique work instead  of following only traditions. Indeed,

scholars deny the ready availability of antiquities even in

Byzantium: Kitzinger believes that it is `not necessary that

those artists had first-hand knowledge of works of art actually

made in the period between Alexander the Great and the emperors

of the Flavian dynasty' (1981, 667), while Mango states that

`Byzantine art does not exhibit a single instance of such

intimate contact with specific antique models as we find, though

transposed in subject matter, in the portal of Rheims cathedral

or in the work of Nicola Pisano' (1963, 71). Were Nicola and the

Rheims master exceptions, or can other examples of `intimate

contact' with the antique be found in the richer soils of Italy

and Gaul?

 

 

Whatever the answer, it is clear that the Middle Ages are of

crucial importance for scholars studying the interest in the

antique of later centuries, because it was mediaeval attitudes

to antiquities that governed what was available to the

Renaissance. Any investigation of mediaeval cities and their

approach to their own antiquities (which must be more detailed

than was possible in this book) would reveal at the very least a

suitable frame within which to picture the exertions of a

Donatello or a Raphael; it might conclude that the groundwork

for Renaissance appreciation of the antique had been prepared by

the Longobards, by Charlemagne and by Frederick II, and large

quantities of material made available by the population

expansion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.