Irish Art and Iconography c. AD 300-700

Project Description

Starting out from the premise that all art motifs (both form and applied ornament) are symbolic and meaningful, this research cluster focuses on two areas: (a) what has elsewhere been described as the ’social life’ of artefacts; and (b) iconography, on extracting meaning from symbol.

While there is enduring value in corpus studies and commentated catalogues; and indeed no shortage of object types available for study; modern approaches to artefacts also emphasise the fact that because they are culturally charged, objects perform, as it were, in social contexts. Thus every aspect of an artefact, its manufacture, distribution, decoration, form, function, etc, reveals something about the people who used them and the society in which they lived. As well as producing a corpus, Martin Jones’s consideration of Irish finger-rings, for instance, made reference to Roman sumptuary laws which addressed both the form of the ring and on what finger it should be worn. Bracelets and dress-fasteners are also susceptible to such conventions as demonstrated in Irish law tracts. Likewise, Dara Keane’s examination of the assemblage from Dunbell, Co. Kilkenny, revealed evidence, in the form of a very large collection of knives, of industrial activity at one of the ringforts which he has attempted to contextualise using Matthew Stout’s model of ringfort hierarchies. The very fine ornamental metalwork bespeaks a different lifestyle. Mags Mannion is working towards a classification of Irish glass beads of early Medieval date, and is also looking at issues as varied as manufacture, apotropaic functionalities, inheritance, and gender and class considerations in the ownership and wearing of beads.

Whereas, the foregoing observations refer to a kind of social iconography, among the assemblage of material from early medieval Ireland is sizable corpus of ars sacra, or religious art. Concentrating principally on Christian iconography, a review of the oeuvre indicates that scriptural and apocryphal thema are represented and explored across the Christian world using a finite range of symbols manifest in varying degrees of abstraction. Whereas the examination of Christian iconography in Ireland has tended to fix on the interpretation of figural or representational friezes, a considerable proportion is abstract and has not received the attention it deserves. Niamh Walsh examined, inter alia, how formulations of Ressurrection iconography occurring on some of the ampullae from Monza and Bobbio informed more abstract representations on cross-slabs in Ireland and the Western Isles of Scotland. Her analysis of the Marigold Stone at Carndonagh, for example, established the fact that the marigold, or more accurately the hexafoil, is a symbol of the Risen Christ, and demonstrated also the significance of Tree of Life iconography in Irish art. This led to the discovery that the same formulations occur on Irish brooches of the 6 ^th century AD, thus initiating a complete review of the symbolism surrounding zoomorphic penannular brooches.

Zoomorphic penannular brooches are a very sensitive barometer of change because they first appear in the later Iron Age and continue in production into the 7 ^th century AD, thus spanning the period of conversion from paganism to Christianity. Sandra Burke’s research emphasises the peculiarities of brooches produced in a totemic context that then bore witness to transformation into a monotheistic religion. Whereas there is some evidence of the ’christianisation’ of the brooches, it was not long before very sophisticated iconographies were being rehearsed.

Contact Details

Conor Newman ( Profile)

Department of Archaeology,

School of Geography and Archaeology, NUI, Galway

Contact: conor.newmannuigalway.ie

Funding Bodies

Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences

PRTLI 3

Links

Project Publications

2008. Notes on Insular silver in the Military Style. Journal of Irish Archaeology, 16, 1-10. (with F. Gavin)

2007. Iconographical analysis of the Marigold Stone, Carndonagh, Inishowen, Co. Donegal. In R. Moss (ed.) Making and Meaning: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Insular Art held in Trinity College Dublin 25 ^th -28 ^th August 2005, 167-184. Four Courts Press, Dublin. (with N. Walsh)

2002. Ballinderry Crannóg No. 2, Co. Offaly: pre-crannóg early medieval horizon. Journal of Irish Archaeology 11, 99-124.

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