attached to the royal entourage. The books for Charlemagne include the Gospel
lectionary written by Godescalc (B.N. n.a. lat. 1203), datable 781–83, whose colophon
employs one of the earliest examples of Carolingian minuscule script and which has
elaborately ornamental frames for every page of text as well as impressively large
portraits of Christ and the four Evangelists bearing many stylistic and iconographic
connections with the 6th-century mosaic art of Ravenna. A slightly later group of books
connected with Charlemagne and produced after the establishment of the royal court at
Aix-la-Chapelle in 795 make a tighter group, including the Harley Gospels (B.L.Harley
2788), Soissons Gospels (B.N. lat. 8850), Abbeville Gospels, and Lorsch Gospels
(Bucharest and Vatican Pal. lat. 50). Some features of the style, iconography, and layout
of these books were followed by later groups associated with such monarchs as Charles
the Bald, for example, the great Codex aureus from Saint-Emmeram of ca. 870 (Munich,
Clm. 14000), and also by manuscripts produced at Reims, Fulda, Tours, and other
monasteries, which from the second quarter of the 9th century produced luxury
manuscripts in large numbers. With Reims is associated a dynamic and expressive,
sketchy style of drawing whose greatest representative is the Utrecht Psalter; with Tours
is especially associated a series of Bible manuscripts containing extended narrative
sequences for scenes from Genesis, Exodus, and other biblical books.
Carolingian production of luxury manuscripts is most often associated with the great
Gospels and Bibles but also includes a variety of other texts, some of which are of
classical and early Christian origin, such as the comedies of Terence, the astronomical
works of Aratus, and the Psychomachia of Prudentius; these clearly followed, to some
degree, surviving ancient illustrated manuscripts. New pictorial schemes were developed
as well. Several Sacramentaries received extensive cycles of illustrations for the first
time, and the sequence of extraordinary acrostic poems written in the 820s by Rabanus
Maurus of Fulda, De laudibus sanctae crucis, were designed from their inception for
elaborate pictorial illustration and survive in several luxurious 9th-century manuscripts.
The altar was a preoccupation of Carolingian religious thought, which focused to a
great degree on the eucharistic sacrifice, and it is therefore no surprise that architecture
often made provision for multiple altars, each of which was required to contain at least
one relic, and that a large amount of luxury art was produced for use on the altar. The
great silver-gilt and enamel altar made by Vuolvinus and another artist for San Ambrogio
in Milan in the mid-9th century probably draws upon French precedents and represents a
type of altar decoration that must have been widespread. Altar books included not only
Gospels and Psalters but Sacramentaries and prayer books, decorated with elaborate gold
and jeweled or ivory covers of which one of the most spectacular is the cover with the
crucifixion image of the Lindau Gospels, a work of the second half of the 9th century.
Reliquaries were made in large numbers, still for the most part in the form of boxes or
chests. A distinctive Carolingian type of object is represented by reverse-carved rock
crystals, produced primarily in the general area of Lorraine. Generally decorated with the
Crucifixion scene and clearly meant for the altar, the most spectacular of the group is
decorated with eight scenes of the story of Susanna and appears to have been especially
meant for the use of the king.
Although carved ivories were common in late antiquity, virtually none had been
produced before the revival of the technique at the end of the 9th century in works
generally associated with Charlemagne’s circle. Well over a hundred 9th-century ivory
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