From Shard to Powder: Aesthetics and Techniques of Glass Cloisonné between the 6th and 9th Centuries
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Cloisonné jewelry is one of the main artistic media involved in the “cumulative aesthetics” and jeweled style discourse. Rooted in Antiquity, it had a wide development and diffusion in the late- and post-Roman world, reaching the High Middle Ages. It was most employed on personal and military parade adornments, as proved by burial contexts – related especially to Germanic people settled in Central and Western Europe. Since the pivotal contribution by Birgit Arrhenius (1985), research questioned the interpretation of cloisonné as “barbaric” and anti-classic and focused chiefly on the provenance and processing of garnets, the most common cloisonné inlay. Nonetheless, other materials frequently flanked these gemstones: most commonly glass. Glass inlays are the subject of the present contribution, presenting the partial results of the GAČR project “Fragmented Images. Exploring the Origins of Stained-Glass Art”. The combination of the database gathering and the analysis of the production process development highlighted an important change. Cut glass or glass paste, widespread alongside and substituting garnets, was gradually replaced between the 6th and 9th centuries by enamels – fused glass powder. An aesthetic shift seems to have accompanied this technical change, towards a more complex iconography and chromatic appearance. The development of glass inlays should be seen in the background of the broader jewelry and artistic production. As for other techniques, cloisonné required the cooperation of differently skilled artisans – goldsmiths, gem cutters, and glass/enamel makers. Thus, productive centers were characterized by the cooperation of different artisans – e.g., blacksmiths producing tools for goldsmiths. Therefore, could the various materials within cloisonné jewels pinpoint a productive reality fostering and developing the “cumulative aesthetics” and the jeweled style beyond the jewelry itself? If so, may the technical and aesthetical shift in cloisonné jewelry be related to a similar evolution in other types of artistic production? |