Sometimes we are so obsessed by blockbuster art shows that permanent museum collections get overlooked. The masterpiece count is very high in the new “Sir Paul and Lady Ruddock Gallery of Sutton Hoo and Europe AD 300-1100” in Room 41 at the British Museum. In fact, it’s much higher than in the Vikings exhibition elsewhere in the museum, into which crowds are currently surging.
The period covered in this beautifully-lit and arranged display is enormous, and slightly mysterious: the European era in which the Roman Empire slowly ebbed and the culture of the Middle Ages emerged. Despite the efforts of generations of scholars, much about those centuries — especially in Northern Europe — remains shadowy.
That’s true of the fabulous array of objects from the 6th and 7th centuries discovered on the east coast of England in the late 1930s: the treasures of Sutton Hoo. These extraordinary artefacts are understandably front and center in this exhibition.
Among the most celebrated items from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo is an ornate helmet with metallic nose, moustache, and garnet-embellished eyebrows. Clearly, this is more of a ceremonial mask — or portable artwork — than a piece of military equipment. Indeed, it is a British equivalent to the mummy case of Tutankhamen: it gives a face to an entire era.
Visually, the Sutton Hoo hoard gives a sense of a lifestyle both warlike and luxurious — then the mists of uncertainty descend. We do not know the name of the ruler who wore that helmet, nor anything about him except that he lived in the late 6th or early 7th century, and was evidently rich. His possessions came from Scandinavia to the north, the Frankish kingdoms of what was to become France across the sea, and the shrinking Roman Imperium of the Mediterranean.
It was an era of porous boundaries. The Sutton Hoo ship burial contained splendid silver bowls from the Eastern Mediterranean, decorated with crosses. The owner probably wasn’t a Christian, however, but just liked elegant imported tableware.
A superbly ferocious wooden ship’s figurehead found in the mud of the River Scheldt is another example of how easy it is to misread works from what used to be called the “Dark Ages.” This is carved in the form of a vicious serpent with gaping mouth, glaring eyes, and jagged teeth.
In fact, it looks so much the way a Viking sculpture ought to look that it used to be assumed that was exactly what it was (in Kenneth Clark’s television series “Civilization,” it symbolized of the barbarian threat to classical society). But carbon dating shows it actually dates from the time of the “civilized” Roman Empire.
The figurehead may have been carved by Germans or Gauls living under the rule of Rome, or perhaps the Romans had a taste for fierce dragons themselves. No one really knows. This was a time of cultural blurring in which many of the nations of modern Europe began to coalesce (Anglo-Saxon England is one example). And, as often, the fusion was artistically fertile. Since many of the objects on display in Room 41 are small in size, it’s hard to move a foot or two without encountering something fantastic.
