The St Andrews Sarcophagus: A Pictish masterpiece and its international connections.

BAILEY, RICHARD N.

SALLY M. FOSTER (ed.). The St Andrews Sarcophagus: A Pictish masterpiece and its international connections. 287 pages, 78 figures, 15 colour plates. 1998. Dublin: Four Courts Press; 1-85182-414-6 hardback 39.50 [pounds sterling]; 1-85182-415-4 paperback 14.95 [pounds sterling].

It was in the 1936 volume of ANTIQUITY that Cecil Curie (then Mobray) first drew the attention of an international audience to the extraordinary iconographic interest of the St Andrews Sarcophagus. Sixty-one years later this remarkable sculpture featured prominently in the 1997 British Museum exhibition, The heirs of Rome. In preparation for that display the sarcophagus was dismantled, cleaned, photographed and re-drawn. Historic Scotland and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland then jointly sponsored a symposium on the carving. This sumptuously illustrated and academically exhaustive volume presents the proceedings of that meeting and is appropriately dedicated to Curle's memory.

At the book's core is Isabel Henderson's full description and extended analysis of the history, decoration and iconography of a sculpture which is crucial to our understanding of insular art; her paper is surrounded by essays which set the monument in its British and European contexts. The sarcophagus emerges, despite its lack of Pictish symbols, as a fully Pictish work of the late 8th century whose artist had access (as Curle first hinted) to a range of Mediterranean models. These he manipulated, in a highly individual manner, to express the interdependence of Church and State and the individual's need for salvation.

Henderson opens the book with a catalogue of the surviving remains, illustrated by Ian Scott's sensitive drawings. This is followed by Sally Foster's study of the context of discovery and the tangled tale of subsequent reconstructions. Three times since the War the sarcophagus has been re-assembled, its lid subsiding in successive stages from high-pitched gable, through hipped slab, to the present arrangement which dispenses with any cover but allows access to details of the internal construction. Foster also points to the reliance of earlier scholars on a series of misleading casts whilst Richard Wellender's conservation report usefully alerts the reader to the presence of fine surface detail which is often masked by the clay plugs and applied coating which remain from those casting processes.

Henderson's main chapter is a brilliant analysis of the form and meaning of the ornament. Here we have a full statement of ideas which she has been developing over many years. The monument has often been seen as lying outside the mainstream of Pictish art but Henderson convincingly argues that this view is based on an over-narrow, symbol-based concept of that tradition: the sarcophagus uses motifs which appear elsewhere in Pictish sculpture whilst the organization of its ornament reflects widespread Pictish practices. Curle had identified exotic models as lying behind the Davidic themes; Henderson re-defines those models and sees them as indicators of the far-flung contacts of a powerful patron whose sculptor combined and re-worked his sources to produce a sophisticated Pictish response to imperial themes. Significantly Henderson now accepts that the highly modelled nature of the carving, which at points is cut clear of the ground, suggests that some of the models were in ivory.

Among the flanking essays, Charles Thomas expands on his earlier studies of post-and-panel shrines, usefully now distinguishing their origin and form from those of the Irish tent-like structures. Stephen Driscoll argues that the sarcophagus provides part of the evidence for a change in Pictish statements of power in the course of the 8th and 9th centuries. More provocatively Dauvit Broun returns to the issue of Pictish and Dalriadic kings in the years around 800. Whilst acknowledging the uncertainty of our source material for the period, he shows convincingly that there is no need to accept the conventional picture of a dynasty of Pictish kings of Dalriadic ancestry ruling in the east from 789 to 839. Instead he suggests that three Fortriu kings were intruded into Dal Riata lists and that these kings were associated with the foundations of St Andrews and Dunkeld. In effect, when the sarcophagus was carved St Andrews was under Pictish, not Gaelic, rule.

Doug McClean, Steven Plunkett and Nancy Edwards examine the stone from Northumbrian, Mercian and Irish perspectives. Their chapters supply valuable summaries of current scholarship on the sculpture of those three regions, Plunkett's essay in particular giving us a taste of his long-awaited work on eastern Mercia. What clearly emerges from all their papers is that other artists in Britain were contemporaneously pre-occupied with similar themes and techniques to those being exploited at St Andrews -- and were drawing on analogous eastern and metalwork models. All can point to material from their areas which is in some sense related to the art of the sarcophagus but none, sensibly, attempts to argue for any dominant influence from their region on the St Andrews carving; the seeming links are often best explained in terms of similarities between the cultural contexts from which the carvings emerged. In a similar vein Edward James' analysis of the Continental evidence shows that, whilst the sarcophagus belongs within a general tradition of European burial practice and sculptural art, it remains a highly original piece without any direct inspiration from the stone carvings of the Continent.

The book will undoubtedly prove an essential reference work for all concerned with the study of early medieval art in Britain; the sponsors and editor are to be congratulated on its wide-ranging content and its commendably rapid production.

RICHARD N. BAILEY University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne