The job of art historians is to discover the origins of artwork, but when it comes to art from early medieval periods, historians find themselves in a world shrouded with mystery.
"We've got objects, but no fancy story to attach to them," said Sigrid Danielson, in her lecture titled "Art History and the Early Medieval Artist" at Elon University Tuesday evening.
Historians saw the names of artists as "signifiers of ethnic identity and geographic origins of the object's creator," Danielson said.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, schools of art history responded to the lack of information about early medieval art by focusing solely on the artist, specifically his or her ethnicity. This resulted in the artist's work being used simply as evidence to back up the conclusions historians drew about the artist's background.
Danielson, who, in conjunction with Evan Gatti, assistant professor of art history, is currently working on a collection of essays regarding the art and writings of early medieval times, said she believes that by spending so much time and energy on the artist and not the art itself, the actual role the work played in society is lost.
"I don't think knowing where this guy was born, or what he called himself ... helps us understand the work or interpret the work in light of what we know about larger medieval artistic production and culture," Danielson said. "It's like thinking about if your entire goal was to find out if Abraham Lincoln was American, you miss all of that other stuff."
Yet scholars disregarded an artwork's place in culture entirely and kept their focus tight on the ethnicity of the artist, believing that was the key to better understanding the art, she said. Usually, scholars took the names of artists to be clear indications of their ethnicities, which, by default, dictated their artistic styles.
But, as Danielson points out, names can often be random and people can identify with several different groups that aren't directly connected to their ethnic roots or location, especially given the fluid nature of boundaries and national identities in medieval Europe.
It wasn't until the late 1980s that art historians started to reexamine how they looked at artists from a fixed style and identity perspective, and began to study the reasons that may have led an artist to change styles and adapt identities.
Danielson said she is personally interested in "the idea of thinking of objects as both reflections (and) influencers within the social sphere."
Her studies of early medieval art seek to understand how the objects interplayed with the world around them using a variety of sources from the period, as well as the importance of how earlier scholars approached the subject.
"It may indeed be true that attempts to determine the ethnicity of these individuals is a futile exercise, but how art historians have used concepts of ethnicity is worth knowing," Danielson said.