Animal Iconography

Pagan Germanic art had favoured the representation of animals and invested it with apotropaic qualities. The new Christian animal iconography (Evangelists’ symbols, doves, peacock, the fauna in the vine-scrolls, etc.) was accepted and integrated into a tradition which saw it not as purely decorative, but as a potent symbolic image. It is not surprising that, just as in contemporary sculpture, manuscripts, metalwork, and embroidery, many of the reverses of the Secondary series show animals, real or fantastic. These representations must be analysed in the context of the culture of the time, and therefore as potential for metaphors. Whilst the gold coinage, following Merovingian numismatic prototypes, had crosses as reverses, the Primary coins of Series B introduced birds to this iconography. Birds will indeed dominate amongst the reverses of the whole of the early Anglo-Saxon coinage, and their importance can be understood in a Christian context. Several groups of coins sharing the iconography of a bust or head with diadem and spiky hair on the obverse, and of a bird surmounting a cross on the reverse, are gathered under the classification of Series B. Some issues have unintelligible legends on both sides, cordoned by a torque of pellets, sometimes snake-headed, and though they differ in details, their iconography is consistent (Fig. 4.1). Rigold regarded the coin iconography of the bird on a cross as original Anglo-Saxon, rejecting any Merovingian numismatic precedent. Conceptually close models may have developed in imitation of Roman and Christian standards or sceptres. Coptic bronze lamps present us with several examples where the reflector above the handle is in the shape of a cross topped with a bird (Fig. 4.1c), and there is also an interesting bronze lamp in the shape of a ram with a cross and bird on its head. Following Early Christian precedents, the bird on the coins can be identified as a dove, in a Christian context a symbol of the Holy Spirit, appropriately set on a cross. In Insular metalwork there are two three-dimensional dove-shaped mounts that may perhaps have similarly topped crosses.