The Right Hand's Cunning: Craftsmanship and the Demand for Art in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Abstract

Si oblitus fuero tui, Jerusalem, oblivioni detur dextera mea. When Jerome commented on Ps. 136(137).5, he interpreted the passage allegorically. Sitting in exile by the waters of Babylon, the Israelites had hung their harps on the willows and, in a foreign land, would not sing the songs of Zion. Yet they refused to forget their origin, preferring, as King James's translators put it, that right hand forget her cunning. Jerome observes that this is always the hand whose work remembers the Lord.1 Yet clearly, by the early fifth century, the idea of manual dexterity had become a trope, a figure in some higher argument. Augustine compares the lower gods, reduced to performing menial tasks in the administration of the universe, to workers in the silversmiths' quarter through whose many hands a vessel passes before it is finished, even if it could have been perfected by any skilled member of their team.2 Slightly more pragmatically, Justinian's Digest mentions a piece of silver plate, brought on approval to a client's house by a uascularius but then inadvertently destroyed, as an instance actionable under the laws of contract.3 It is the shadow cast by such translations to a higher plane that is my topic: artifacts in their own right and diversity, the way that they were made, and their significance for the cultures of which they were a part tend to be obscured when they are treated either as similes in their own time or as the undifferentiated output of artisans whose social situation, rather than whose production, is the object of modern scrutiny. The legal and economic status of craftsmen4 has been investigated in a body of literature so vast that there is no need to rehearse its conclusions here.5 But it is worth remarking that the results of otherwise invaluable inquiry