A Short History of the Middle Ages Fourth Edition

who made these pieces valued decorative elements divorced from natural forms. The

Jerusalem coffer plays with formal, solemn geometrical patterns of light and shadow.

The tombstone flattens its figures, varying them by cutting lines for folds, hands, and

eyes. Any sense of movement here comes from the incised patterns, not from the

rigidly frontal figures. Even the Venus from Britain, though clearly based on a

classical model, was created by an artist in love with decoration. The “landscape”

consists of wavy lines; the faces are depicted with simple incisions.

Plate 1.5: Venus and Two Nymphs, Britain (2nd or early 3rd cent.). This relief was originally made to
decorate the front of a water tank that stood before the headquarters of the Roman fort at High Rochester
(today in Northumberland). This was an “outpost” of the Roman army, a fort on the road to Scotland.
Compare the depiction of Venus here with that of Venus in Plate 1.1 to see the very different notions of the
human body and of beauty that co-existed in the Roman Empire.

There may be something to the idea that such works of art were “inferior” to

Roman products—but not much. The artists who made them had their own values

and were not particularly interested in classical notions of beauty. The Venus from

Britain is clearly the work of a sculptor who wanted to show the opposite of human