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Friday 8 August 2008

Brave new world

Rome and the Barbarians

All empires eventually bite off more than they can chew. Rome and the Barbarians, the latest exhibition under the new management at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, suffers from the same syndrome. It aims to cover the entire first millennium of the Christian era by displaying more than 2,000 artefacts, from 200 collections in 23 countries, the material remains of Greeks, Romans and scores of barbarian peoples, from the Alamanni, Avars, Franks and Huns to the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals and Vikings.

There are some fine things here: a number of good Roman sculptures; wonderful ivory diptychs from Aosta, Florence, Novara, Rome, Paris and Liège; exceptional silverware, including the late 4th- to early 5th-century ‘Achilles Shield’ platter (fished out of the Rhône in 1656); the magnificent first-century Hildesheim Treasure from Berlin, and the ‘Meerstadtplatte’, with its exquisite engraved and gilded roundel of a port city, from Switzerland; glittering gold cloisonné ornaments and jewellery from sites scattered across Europe; rare books, from a 6th-century Arian text ‘On the Trinity’ to an 8th-century Irish gospel.

The exhibition is enlivened by colourful late 19th-century French history paintings of half-naked Germanic savages, marauding Huns, feeble and decadent royal courts, and noble Gauls and Romans. Entertaining though these allegories are, they tell us more about the aftermath of the Franco–Prussian War and fin-de-siècle politics in France than about anything that happened a thousand years or more earlier.

At the same time the show advances a tendentious political agenda. Gibbon described the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as ‘the greatest, perhaps the most awful scene in the history of mankind’. The present exhibition is subtitled ‘The Birth of a New World’. Only the ‘Brave’ is missing in introducing a narrative that proposes, in both the show and its catalogues — although the exhibition itself is often so opaquely presented that this conclusion emerges fully only in the main catalogue — the revisionist view that the destruction of the Western Roman empire has until now been seen in an exaggeratedly negative light, given it actually led to the creation of the harmonious united Europe that we inhabit today.

More articles from: Roderick Conway Morris | this section

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