EXHIBITIONS Renaissance

As if an eclipse had blotted out civilization between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the term Dark Ages lingers to describe the beginnings of Europe. Things were not all that black, modern scholars have discovered, and the great Renaissance was presaged by several baby ones. One such regeneration began with the reign of Charlemagne.

On Christmas day in the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne a Roman Emperor. Philosopher Oswald Spengler dismissed Charlemagne's rule as "a surface episode without issue." H. G. Wells labeled it a poor copy of the Caesars. Although Charlemagne did not impress some modern historians, he did inspire the craftsmen and artists of his own era. This summer a mammoth exhibition of 700 Carolingian art works is on view in Aachen, Germany, the Emperor's historic seat of power.

Fleshing Out Saints. Until the late 8th century, Western art lay largely under the influence of Byzantium, whose hovering saints were stripped of flesh, transcendentally vaporous, symbols of life beyond death. So otherworldly was Byzantine art that by the time Charlemagne was crowned, images of the sacred figures had been banned for 74 years. Eastern iconoclasm had emphatically blotted out the Greco-Roman exaltation of living man. The new Carolingian Emperor personally set about to change the art of his times.

He imported scholarly monks and artisans from Italy, Spain, Ireland and England to convert Aachen into St. Augustine's Civitas Dei, the divine city, in the barbarian heartland of Europe. He encouraged one monk, Alcuin, to make script more readable; Carolingian minuscule is still the foundation for the text type used in present-day printing. He built an octagonal chapel that still stands in Aachen, along the lines of the mosaic-coated San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. He even stole marble columns from Ravenna to make his church more authentic.

Cartooning the Gospels. Before Charlemagne, the barbarian art of Europe was a welter of interlace -a primitive, restless filling of space that spread tendrilous patterns across armor, manuscripts and utensils. The worldly, warring Emperor, who inspired the epic Song of Roland, brought back the three-dimensional image of man. Carved in ivory book covers, illuminated on paper (see opposite page), the human form struggled through spaghetti-like barbarian curlicues and unearthly Eastern symbolism. Carolingian images of Christ are distinguishable from Eastern icons by the absence of a beard, the presence of youthful muscles.

Into Carolingian manuscripts crept the idea of narrative illustration rather than static devotional icons, the better to teach the word of God. The famous Utrecht Psalter abandoned elaborate gilding to accompany the Gospels with cursive, pen-and-ink cartooning. By the time the Carolingian Renaissance subsided in the late 10th century, art was no longer the same as religion, only its handmaiden. As the Libri Carolini put it in the late 8th century: "The sacrament is nourishment for the soul. Pictures are food only for the eyes." So the Carolingian renaissance opened the way for the later, greater Renaissance to depict the deeds of mortal man without fear of God.

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