Translated material
Cultures are together, but laws are apart
"The Age of the Merovingians" at the Museum of Fine Arts
The main idea of the exhibition, prepared with phenomenal diligence, on the theme of the first page of the life history of European peoples, is to show that culture is indivisible, that we have a largely common past, and iron borders are a barbaric and outdated concept. An exhibition on which an entire army of museum workers from the A.S. Pushkin Museum worked. Pushkin, the State Hermitage, the Historical Museum, the Museum of Ancient and Early History of the State Museums of Berlin, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, is called “The Merovingian Age - Europe without Borders”. Since 410, with the invasion of Rome by the Visigoth army of Alaric I, ancient civilization was rapidly moving towards the finish line. In the bloody child of the great migration of peoples, at first it was impossible to see the beginnings of a respectable European civilization. The first kingdoms on the ruins of the Roman Empire can hardly be called states - rather, tribes ruled by wild, bloodthirsty warriors roamed the steppes, whose well-being depended on the formula “rob yourself or be robbed.” Among all the less sane barbarian kingdoms scattered across the territory from Crimea to Normandy and from Scandinavia to Sicily, the Merovingian state, which in the 6th century occupied the territory of modern France, Belgium and Germany, successfully performed the function of translatio imperii, the successor of the ancient empire. Civil rights and belonging to the Catholic Church helped the Merovingian kings (the most famous was Clovis, who was baptized, united the disparate tribes of the Franks, defended the Roman traditions of statehood on his territory) to hold the country until 751, until the new dynasty of the Frankish state - the Carolingians - took over the kingdom.Cultural boundaries in this dark era of the Merovingians were very mobile: there were many burials of the Huns, for example, in the Northern Black Sea region, Goths from Scandinavia reached the Danube and Crimea - archeology preserves traces. The Slavs, as part of the Hunnic hordes, carried out military raids on Byzantium: in addition to military trophies, the tribes received knowledge about the latest innovations in the field of fashion and decoration of horse harnesses. Throughout Europe of the Merovingian era, products in the style of cloisonné inlay and Kerbschnit chisel ornament were popular. On brooches, buckles, and handles there were images of birds beloved in Merovingian times: warlike predators promising victory - eagles, wise ravens, owls.
The exhibition shows one and a half thousand similar objects from the “united Europe” of the era of early chivalry. Thanks to the successful design project of the long-recognized adherents of avant-garde form-making - the Theater of Architectural Form (TAF) studio Alexander Ermolaev, all objects in glass display cases are installed not as antique melancholy, but as modern living art. The design of glass boxes allows you to create a spectacular light and spatial image, to find the expected rhymes with objects of modernist art.
The paradox is that preparing such an exhibition about a single cultural space today can be equated to a feat. In the 21st century, Russia is still not ready for a full-fledged partnership in the cultural sphere. We are talking about the notorious restitution. After all, many items from the Merovingian era provided to the Pushkin Museum are “valuables moved from Germany after the Second World War.” And therefore, according to the federal law adopted in 1998, they became the property of our state. At the opening of the exhibition, the Minister of State under the Federal Chancellor, Commissioner of the Federal Government for Culture and Media, Mr. Bernd Neumann, honestly said that the project, brilliantly prepared by scientists and museum staff, does not ignore the topic of trophy art. And if the exhibition goes to Germany (which, of course, will not happen - after Moscow it will go to the Hermitage), then there may be problems with the return of those Merovingian daggers and brooches that Russia made its trophy. Mr. Neumann referred to the Russian-German treaties on good neighborliness of 1990 and cultural cooperation at the level of international law obligations of 1992; expressed the conviction that the Russian law on transferred valuables contradicts these agreements.
The fact that the policy of isolationism in the field of culture is collapsing is precisely confirmed by the very fact of holding this exhibition, where they clearly demonstrate to us that for archaeological collections, division means certain death. Only when objects are collected together (brooch to fibula, buckle to buckle) is full systematization and cataloging possible, reconstruction of history in precious detail. In addition to the exhibition, this axiom was confirmed by a grandiose, six-hundred-page folio catalogue. The cultural landscape of early medieval Europe is described there in truly microscopic detail.