Some aesthetic principles in the use of colour in Anglo-Saxon art

Abstract

In a paper in Anglo-Saxon England 3 N. F. Barley has drawn attention to the richness of Anglo-Saxon colour vocabulary, which, he suggests, emphasized the light–dark axis of colour perception to a greater degree than does our own, in which hue is differentiated and then qualified adjectivally, pale, dark, etc. It is interesting to examine actual Anglo-Saxon artifacts with his observations in mind. The main sources for our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons' use of colour are the illuminated manuscripts of which the earliest surviving are of the seventh century. We have only one small fragment of wall-painting, the recently discovered mural at Winchester datable to c. 900. There is a considerable amount of metal-work and jewellery, of which the Sutton Hoo find, a seventh-century burial hoard, is the most spectacular, and there are some embroideries of the early tenth century found in the tomb of St Cuthbert, now at Durham. There are also literary descriptions of works of art, especially church furnishings. The paucity of surviving material and the lack of descriptions of identifiable objects are obvious disadvantages. In addition there has to be considered the extent to which the use of colour changed and developed over the period c. 650–1050. In this paper some examples of manuscript illumination will be discussed.