THE creation of a narrative style was the greatest
service that Carolingian artists rendered to the culture
of northern Europe. It was of decisive importance
that a people who had originally known no repre-
sentational art should have learnt how to embody
their strong native dramatic sense of an event in
scenic form. But this was not the only achievement
of the Carolingians as heirs and transmitters of the
antique tradition to medieval Europe; an equally
significant act was their decision to take over the
single figure, the cult-image, the effigy from Medi-
terranean art. This artistic genre is quite distinct
from the pictorial composition, both historically and
aesthetically; and it would be misleading to confuse
the two conceptions by treating their simultaneous
apparition in Carolingian art as a single and indivisible
event. The isolated figure is considered here in its
widest, yet exactest, aspect as an effigy, since this term
will include both the portrait proper, or likeness of
a contemporary historical personage, and the ideal
type of Psalmist or Evangelist; and from this the
concept may easily be extended to include the figure
of Christ himself.

The portrait proper, as we understand the word,
was an invention of the Hellenistic age which found
its fullest expansion under the Roman Empire. The
Hellenistic portrait was the ideal reconstruction of a

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