Sculture datate dell'Alto Medioevo nella Langobardia Maior. Una sintesi e qualche riflessione

The difficulty of placing most artefacts in a precise chronological order is one of the problems in the study of early medieval sculpture. Having overcome the initial tendency to provide generic dates (e.g. “8th-9th century”), as studies have continued, a greater knowledge of the lexicon and syntax of sculpture has been achieved, allowing more precise dates to be advanced. Nevertheless, there is still a need to find elements among the thousands of sculptures, almost always de-contextualised and fragmentary, that can be anchored to indisputable chronological terms. Although it is very difficult to find sculptures dated ad annum, cases in which the chronological coordinates can be restricted to a few years or a decade are not rare. Here we examine some sculptures, mainly from the 7th and 8th centuries, that have secure chronological coordinates, as they are linked to monuments or well-known personalities. The aim is to test to what extent the possession of certain dating elements can endow the sculptures with a function, so to speak, of “fossil-guide” – e.g. the sculptures of the so-called “Liutprandian renaissance” – for the dating, albeit approximate, of entire groups, more or less large than other sculptures that instead lack objective chronological coordinates, and whose dating can only be proposed on the basis of formal or stylistic analysis