Literature and art

The early Middle Ages produced relatively few complex literary works; the elaborate educational system of the Roman Empire depended on a level of aristocratic wealth and a style of civilian culture that did not outlast the Gothic wars, and the ecclesiastical educational traditions that succeeded it were not well rooted in Italy outside Rome until the 9th century. Italy’s—and antiquity’s—last great philosopher, Boethius (died 524), had no successors, nor did Pope Gregory the Great (died 604) in the field of theology. Hagiography, an important early medieval genre in Francia, became almost unknown in Latin Italy after Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. The writing of history too was only rarely practiced in this period: Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, dating from the 790s, is far shorter than Gregory of Tours’s history of the Franks or Bede’s of the English, and it had few parallels except for episcopal histories in Rome, Ravenna, and Naples. Nor did the Rule of St. Benedict, written by Benedict of Nursia (died c. 547) for his monastery, Montecassino, have immediate successors, and as yet it indeed had relatively little effect on Italian culture: 8th-century monasteries did follow it, but the Rule owes its international importance to the Anglo-Saxons and to the patronage of the court of Louis the Pious in Francia.

Italy did not lose all of its cultural traditions, and it developed new ones around the emerging centres of political power of the early Middle Ages. Rome maintained a level of intellectual life owing largely to its links with the Greek culture of the East; it experienced a flowering of new writing in the 9th century around international figures such as Anastasius the Librarian (died c. 878), who had contacts with both Constantinople and the courts of the Frankish kings. Pavia, for its part, developed a largely secular court culture; Paul the Deacon, who was a poet and an orator as well as a historian, was partially trained there, and later so was Liutprand of Cremona (died c. 972), whose Antapodosis is a florid but highly literate satire of the kings of the first half of the 10th century. Charlemagne’s court drew Italian intellectuals to it and away from the peninsula, but Carolingian patronage returned to the cities of northern Italy in the mid-9th century, and systematic literary education began to develop in several of them. Tenth-century writers included not only Liutprand but also Atto of Vercelli (died 961), who wrote his denunciations of contemporary society in a Latin so difficult that few have ever understood it. The major intellectual activity in early medieval Italy was, however, law. The lawyers at Pavia were already a big group in the 9th century; in the 10th century they undertook a large-scale compilation of Lombard law and its Carolingian updatings, usually called the Liber Papiensis. This text was the source for 11th-century glosses and expositions and juristic arguments over legal theory that led directly to the 12th-century revival of Roman law at Bologna. The study of law in the Lombard and Carolingian capital may have been early medieval Italy’s major contribution to the development of intellectual life in Europe.

The visual arts showed a more obvious continuity. The architects of Ravenna’s monumental mosaic churches and secular buildings from the Ostrogothic kingdom and the years following the Byzantine reconquest developed new styles, but they did so as an expansion of late Roman ideologies of public buildings along Byzantine lines. In Ravenna the great period had ended by 700; in Rome, however, the same tradition continued, if at a reduced level, throughout the early Middle Ages. Sixth-century popes were builders, and their 7th-century counterparts, though less ambitious, were at least rebuilders; from Adrian I onward there was an intense revival reaching its height with large, richly decorated constructions such as the church of Santa Prassede built by Paschal I (817–824). Rome’s surviving early medieval buildings are mostly churches, which is not surprising given its rulers; here as elsewhere, however, one must reckon with secular buildings that have not survived and, of course, with a continuous occupation and reuse of the huge array of Classical monuments.

In Lombard Italy, building on a monumental scale continued as well, notably in the royal palaces at Pavia and at Monza outside Milan (these do not survive, but Paul the Deacon described parts of the latter). This type of monumental architecture may have incorporated a fairly strong tradition of decorative figured stonework, with central European analogues, that survives best at Cividale del Friuli. What has been excavated or otherwise studied in the north, however, is strikingly small in scale, such as the urban monastery of San Salvatore (shortly thereafter renamed Santa Giulia) at Brescia, set up by King Desiderius about 760; the late 8th-century chapel at Cividale del Friuli; and the tiny frescoed church of Santa Maria at Castelseprio, which may date from the early 9th century. It may be that the Lombards, including their kings, had lost the rhetoric of size that the Romans had had (and that the early medieval Romans kept). The late Roman tradition that survived best was an emphasis on internal decoration, and Italy had many separate schools of fresco painters (as well as, more rarely, mosaicists) by the 9th century. However, 9th-century buildings could be large, as was the case with the monastic buildings of San Vincenzo al Volturno on the Benevento-Spoleto border, which were excavated in the late 20th century. They were sumptuously frescoed in both northern and southern Italian artistic styles during the first half of the 9th century. Building techniques declined in sophistication in the early medieval period, and older materials were frequently reused. However, artisans apparently continued to cut and make good-quality stone and brick in a Roman tradition. It is likely that there were far fewer builders than during the empire but that they continued ancient traditions in major cities. A price book for northern Italian builders from the early 8th century shows that they could make sophisticated private housing. Urban excavations now reveal, however, that more buildings were constructed of wood than would have been the case under the empire.