Dark Ages come to light

The marble relief carved on the “Portonaccio Sarcophagus” depicts a Roman squadron – clean-shaven, armoured and securely mounted on muscular steeds – massacring a force of bare-headed, bearded enemies. Above the battle, a frieze depicts peaceful scenes of imperial life: a mother is handed a baby; a young woman takes an art class; and a bearded man kneels in submission in front of a seated Roman.

Carved in 180AD, the sarcophagus depicts the recent victory of Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s army over the Marcomanni. This Germanic people – one of the so-called Barbarian tribes – lived on the far side of the Danube but made regular incursions into Roman territory.

A century later, such a robust expression of imperial omnipotence would have lacked credibility. The death of Marcus Aurelius in 180AD – whose image is immortalised here by an all-gold bust, one of only three still in existence – marked the end of the Pax Romana, the 200-year period that was the heyday of the Roman Empire.

The exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice – Rome and the Barbarians: The Birth of a New World – is concerned with what happened next. Through a collection of 2,000 objects from more than 23 countries, it shines a spotlight on the period of European history that saw Germanic tribes – Saxons, Goths, Vandals, Marcomanni, Franks – make aggressive incursions into the western Roman Empire before colonising it completely.

Traditional historical narrative would have us believe that the 500 years that followed Rome’s fall in 476 were a stagnant void, popularly known as the Dark Ages. But this exhibition aims to show a rich, creative fusion of imperial and Barbarian cultures that formed the root of modern Europe.

Certainly the pure classicism of the “Portonaccio Sarcophagus” is not the shape of things to come. Instead, objects such as jewels, weapons, coins, decorative crafts, tools, manuscripts, textiles and household goods testify to the hybrid, porous, multi-ethnic nature of the society in which they were crafted. From 2nd and 3rd-century Roman Gaul, for example, come two funerary steles – typically classical structures yet here carved with figures whose awkward, foreshortened forms and barely delineated features clearly adhere to a local aesthetic.

Another stele from the same epoch is decorated with an image of Epona, the Celtic goddess of horses and mules appropriated by Roman mythology. Among objects excavated from a 2nd-century AD Czech tomb is a Mediterranean-style bronze bowl decorated with male busts sporting a Germanic ponytail above their forehead. Gold amulets from 5th-century Sweden are thought to be Roman coins re-elaborated with the image of the Nordic god Odin.

Fruits of a fertile cross-cultural exchange, these pieces also prove that Rome’s relationship with foreign tribes was far from purely conflictual. One of the most significant works is the “Claudian Tablet”; a bronze plaque dated 48 AD that documents Claudius’s decision – against the wishes of the Roman ruling classes – to permit Gauls from Lyon who were already Roman citizens the right to sit in the senate.

An attitude of pragmatic openness was an imperial characteristic. Under pressure from Germans and Goths during the 3rd century, Rome settled friendly tribes within its borders and employed their men as soldiers to fight off the invaders. One room is dedicated to the story of Stilicho, a 4th-century general who was the son of a Vandal father and Roman mother and who married Emperor Theodosius’ daughter, before marrying his own daughter to Theodosius’ son Honorius – their wedding is commemorated here by a tiny but stupendous gold jewel studded with emerald and rubies.

Perhaps the most compelling rooms are those devoted to the centuries following Rome’s fall, when the Barbarians – a word that, as Plato pointed out to its ancient Greek originators, has a dangerously homogenising tendency – were masters of their own societies. As it turns out, the cultural osmosis continued. From the Ostragoth kingdom in Ravenna, for example, comes a 6th-century ivory pentadiptych carved with the figure of an Ostragoth queen, whose dress and sceptre are typically Byzantine. Fragments from an acque-duct in Ravenna and a thermal bath in Tunis reveal that, contrary to myth, the new rulers (the Ostragoths and the Vandals respectively) at times chose to restore Roman architecture rather than abandon or destroy it. The presence of manuscripts – a Lombard version of Roman codified law, for example – shows how once oral cultures embraced writing.

Textual production was also vastly increased by the spread of Catholicism. The preponderance of Christian artefacts include Gospel manuscripts, jewelled gold crosses and ivory relics and diptychs carved with religious scenes. Earlier reliquaries, such as the 7th-century Swiss “Casket of Teuderic” – a fabulous example of cloisonné jewellery work – display a fusion of local form with Christian function. However, later works, such as the “Rambona Diptych” of the 9th-10th century, which blends Byzantine and Gothic iconography, are clearly part of an emerging medieval European aesthetic.

The sheer wealth of material from a historical period that is too often invisible makes this a show not to miss. Certain exhibits are truly stellar. The recently found “Palatine Sceptres”, for example, are the only objects in existence known to have been touched by a Roman emperor, probably Maxentius.

Similar recent exhibitions in Turin and Speyer have focused on individual Germanic cultures. The decision by Palazzo Grassi to embrace the bigger picture is a brave one that permits broad, important historical points to be made. But an exhibition of this scale requires more in the way of explanatory text panels and better labelling. There is an informative catalogue but, at 700 pages, its weight may daunt luggage-conscious tourists to the city born precisely because its first inhabitants fled into the lagoon rather than succumb to the Barbarians.

‘Rome and the Barbarians: The Birth of a New World’, Palazzo Grassi, Venice until July 20 www.palazzograssi.it