20 AUGUST 1977, Page 25

The discreet charm of filthy lucre

Marina Warner

It is our ignorance that has kept the Dark Ages dark, not their lights. Between the year of the Peace of the Church in 312 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, the history of the Roman Empire consists for most people of a few bold curving arrows on the map of Europe, marked 'Vandals', 'Goths',. 'Other Barbarians'. Most of us know next to nothing of the centuries when Byzantium emerged in all its sophistication and splendour. Illuminating the decline of Rome's authority and the shift of the empire to the east, the British Museum has now mounted a scrupulously documented exhibition of the silverware in daily use, and the coinage in circulation and golden objects of adornment.

Hoards of vessels, plate, ingots, money and jewellery have been unearthed, as recently — some them — as 1975, and often on the very perimeters-of the Roman world or even beyond, in Ireland, Scotland, Russia. This treasure trove, as it is still officially designated, provides some insight in to the way of life of men in the years 300700 AD. But the insights do not always give the lift that confronting a great, but previously neglected culture can inspire. The Wealth of the Roman World is a sobering exposure of Roman values, because they so much resemble our own.

The theme is mqney: how much men wanted it, identified with it, how they held on to it and used it. Huge dishes of silver turned on the lathe were presented by an Emperor to his officials in order to pin down their loyalties. Licinius I, large-eyed, heavy-browed, looks out from the centre of one of these largitio plates (largesse', indeed) made to celebrate five years of his rule. The reason the dish has survived for us to gaze at now is that Constantine fought his co-emperor Licinius and overthrew him. Like the inhabitants of Saigon rolling up the old flag and unfurling the colours of the Vietcong in 1975, the official recipient of the plates then buried them. Thus the liquid wealth of the Roman world— its silver —died twice over: immobilised in objects to win men's love, interred in the earth to avoid their anger.

Silver is a cold medium; it is a metal that bounces light back in hard glints, does not absorb it and then gleam with the subtle warmth of gold or bronze. It therefore suits many of the objects in this show, because theirs is a cold purpose: the display of power. The famous casket of Projecta from the Esquiline Treasure, and its accompanying silver cosmetic box with fitted bottles and domed lid were part of the dot of a young Christian girl from a good family marrying a pagan old enough to be her

father. Both caskets are decorated with scenes from classical myth: Venus gazes at her own pinpricked reflection in the glass. They celebrate the kind of vanity that can afford to be greedy with the kind of artistry whose first aim is ostentation. Projecta might have left her wedding list at Asprey's: the craftsmanship is excellent, but the inspiration. . .

It is surprising how little Christianity appears to have affected images current in the late Roman world, until the sixth and seventh centuries, when Constantinople was fully established and a new impetus to art came from the near east. The BM exhibition uncovers what Professor Peter Brown has called 'the unrepentant secularity' of society in late antiquity. Belief was poorly focussed, at least by the standards of fervour in the Middle Ages. One silver dish, illustrated in the catalogue but not on display, reveals lack of rigidity in the conversion of the Empire.

The survival of pagan motifs continued far into the Christian period. One silver dish shows fat Silenus capering with a Maenad. It is marked with five control stamps of the Emperor Heraclius, and therefore dates from the very time when the fall of Jerusalem to the Sassassians moved that very Christian ruler to wage a holy war. It is Heraclius who flew the image of the Virgin from the masts of his ships in battle, and he was right to do so, for the art of the silversmiths at least shows that the mana had departed from the old gods. The poverty of. inspiration is striking when one compares late Roman conceptions with the work of the peoples who, on the edges of the Empire, were influenced by Rome's expertise and grandeur to undertake similar objets d'art themselves. The BM are exhibiting finds from these islands, as well as from Persia and Russia down the right hand side of the show, and a most interesting counterpoint they make to the mainstream in the centre.

The acute and passionate pastoral observation that heightens so much of the literature of the classical period has no counterpart in the art of the centuries of decline. Animals, birds, fish, vines, flowers appear, but they look as if they have been copied from a pattern book rather than created by craftsmen using their own eyes. Also, the drive towards symbolism in late antiquity, compared to the barbarians' representation of life, even if visualised as idyll, empties the imagery of its vitality. For instance, the famous Chalice of Antioch, once thought to be the Holy Grail itself, is intertwined with a delicately wrought vine, at which birds and locusts peck. Bishops on

the cathedrae intersperse the branches, for the design's main function is symbolic, to Illustrate the True Vine of the apostolic succession. But the image is curious, and to my eyes incoherent, compared for instance to the Sassanian silver vase of the sixthseventh centuries, also decorated with a vine and birds. The vine is more formalised than on the Antioch Chalice, but, because, the figures playing between the tendrils are naked young boys gathering grapes in paniers strapped to their backs, the composition as a whole has the appeal of things seen as opposed to things merely conceptualised. Of course the Chalice is a more serious piece it celebrates a sacred institution while the Persian vessel just hymns foie de vivre for its own sake.

The vigour of the barbarians' adaptations of Roman techniques often gives a buzz the late imperial silver itself fails to do. Each of the Sassanian emperors wears his own distinctive, preposterously tall and emblematic Crown, together with fleecy trousers, frilled tunic and splendidly adorned scabbard, While long tasselled scarves flutter behind him. On dish after dish, these oriental despots hunt down leapards, lions, gazelles, and wild boar with a true energy of line and eye; while the Persian delight in douceur de vivre places lute-players and dancing girls in the gardens represented on other plates. The Romans only dance in ritual frenzy.

Once Christianity had achieved a firm hold, the early functional materialism became sweetened by a more pleasureloving, aesthetically inclined mood. Gold jewellery for girls appears, for instance. And all reservations about the Western tradition have to be withdrawn when it Comes to the last showcase, in which the Second Cyprus Treasure is displayed. It depicts the life of King David. These nine dishes are not just resplendent demonstrations of the might of the emperor Herachas, whose stamps they bear, not just shiny boasts of the empire's wealth, They breathe, as Kenneth Clark has pointed out, the air of pure classicism, such as Mantegna breathed. The craftsman -or the workshop knew how to drape the folds of Michal's tunic over her gently rounded stomach, how to suggest the might of David's shoulder as he prepares to swing the sling through the swirling drapery of his counterbalancing arm, how to show the braced power of Goliath's lunge in his toes curling in to the stony ground. The set may commemorate Heraclius victory over the general Razatis, Whom he beheaded in single combat in 627. SO, the event roused the imperial craftsmen to the invention and vision married to skill that can give life to chilly silver. The Wealth of the Roman World is not an umnediately accessible exhibition, and the atalugue, with full notes and introductions .te each section therefore repays study tbeforehand, if possible. I have only one cri„leism: I should have liked a case displaying itLe tools and methods the metalworkers used. As it is, their accomplishment seems miraculous.