The Art of the Picts marks a lifetime’s collaboration between George and Isabel Henderson, not least on the scholarly front. Isabel became the leading scholar of Pictish art, while her husband George frequently returned to the same subject in his own more wide-ranging studies. Having retired from Cambridge, the Hendersons now live within walking distance of the greatest Pictish cross slab at Nigg, Ross and Cromarty, where they continue to wrestle with the originality and frustrations of Pictish art.

For those long steeped in Pictish studies, this joint effort is remarkable for what it does not do. The maps show regional names used in the text, sites associated with specific works of art in Britain and Ireland, locations of major collections of Pictish sculpture, the find-spots of Pictish metalwork and moulds, Pictish sites with cross-marked stones, and sites with relief sculpture on monuments other than slabs. One looks in vain for the traditional approach: maps showing Pictish sculptural sites and Pictish place-name elements used to delineate Pictland. The existence of the Picts and the attribution to them of their distinctive art are accepted without excuse or explanation at a time when we are promised a forthcoming publication arguing that Pictish symbols are not necessarily “Pictish” at all (cited by the author as “in prep” in Ross Trench-Jellicoe, “A Richly Decorated Cross-Slab from Kilduncan House, Fife: Description and Analysis,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 135 (2005): 505–59 (559)).

The Hendersons also abandon one of the mainstays of Pictish studies—the classification system advanced by Joseph Anderson and John Romilly Allen in The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1903; reprint Balgavies: Pinkfoot Press, 1993). Class I comprised undressed stones bearing incised Pictish symbols. Class II incorporated Pictish symbols in the decoration of relief cross slabs. Class III dispensed with symbols while still carving in relief. Anderson and Allen largely ignored simple cross-marked stones of the type found throughout Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, so much so that Isabel once proposed a Class IV to accommodate their presence in Pictland. But the Hendersons now reject the chronological implications of the classes, lamenting the tendency of the “Heritage industry” to treat Pictish symbol stones as pagan, despite the inclusion of symbols on relief cross slabs, while the symbol-bearing Nigg cross slab is a close contemporary of the magnificent St. Andrews Sarcophagus, which has none.

Unlike their contemporaries in Anglo-Saxon England or the Gaels of Ireland and western Scotland, the Picts left virtually no surviving written records of their own, other than a handful of inscriptions and some late medieval copies of lists of Pictish kings. However, Picts are frequently mentioned in contemporary sources, including Adomnán’s Life of St. Columba, the Lindisfarne Life of St. Cuthbert, Stephen’s Life of St. Wilfrid, Bede, and the various Irish Annals, some of which depend upon sources originally compiled at Iona or, as Isabel established, at the Irish foundation at Applecross, facing the Isle of Skye in the old Pictish western province, lost to Scottish Dál Riata before the end of the seventh century. Attempts to identify particular Insular manuscripts as Pictish have not been accepted. Isabel Henderson told me over twenty years ago that Kathleen Hughes invented the term “Pictomaniac” in response to Julian Brown’s suggestion that the Book of Kells might have been made in Pictland (“Northumbria and the Book of Kells,” Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972): 219–46; reprinted in Janet Bately, Michelle Brown, and Jane Roberts, eds., A Palaeographer’s View: Selected Writings of Julian Brown, London: Harvey Miller, 1993, 97–120), although Hughes was more respectful in print (e.g., David Dumville, ed., Celtic Britain and the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Scottish and Welsh Sources by the late Kathleen Hughes, Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1989, viii, 11, 23 n. 8). With no indigenous texts to defend it, Pictish art is often treated as a mere adjunct, reflecting Anglo-Saxon or Irish “influence.” It is this imbalance that the Hendersons seek to redress.

The first chapter reviews major developments in Insular art into the eighth century, noting correspondences between metalwork and manuscript illumination, while alluding to subsequent developments in relief sculpture. The second chapter, “Pictish Participation in Insular Art,” begins by repeating Isabel’s convincing arguments against R. B. K. Stevenson, who held that incised Pictish animal symbols depended upon early Insular Evangelist symbols, such as those found in the Book of Durrow or the Echternach Gospels. The Hendersons demonstrate instead that the greater naturalism of Pictish animal symbols was modified by the illuminators. The chapter continues with sections on features of Pictish relief sculpture, including interlace, zoomorphic ornament, spiral ornament, and the raised boss, key- and fret-patterns, plant forms, and human figural ornament. The authors largely avoid direct discussion of chronology, but those familiar with Pictish art will recognize the progression from the lower relief of the Glamis, Eassie, and Aberlemno churchyard cross slabs to the higher relief of Nigg and the St. Andrews Sarcophagus, on to monuments usually thought later, such as Rosemarkie No. 2 and “Sueno’s Stone” at Forres.

The Hendersons hit their stride in the third chapter, “The Pictishness of Pictish Art.” The preceding chapters cross-reference objects from other Insular cultural areas, but the focus is now on Pictish art alone. Pictish symbols, both animal and geometric, are discussed in terms of their artistry and their arrangement on symbol stones and cross slabs, noting that

the study of the Pictish symbols has been dogged by a numerical approach, and as a concomitant, the habit of representing each symbol by a visual stereotype, so that the masterpiece and the hackwork are flung in together, the actual quality of the design counting for little. The discipline of art history, with its much maligned element of connoisseurship, offers a useful antidote to this cavalier blurring of the visual evidence. (75)

Art historians working in other fields may be unaware of the extent to which Insular historians and archaeologists routinely disparage the efforts of Insular art historians. But the Hendersons’ connoisseurship becomes apparent in their remarkably detailed visual analysis of “naturalism and fantasy” in the Picts’ depiction of animals, particularly in the numerous ways they constructed fantastic animals, an originality revealed by combinations unknown in other Insular areas. The Picts’ ready adoption of the classical griffin, centaur, and hippocamp comes as no surprise, to say nothing of the occasional monkey or camel.

The fourth chapter covers Pictish metalwork, which may be divided into two major phases: an earlier group of silver objects with some enamel decoration and a later group employing a variety of techniques, including cast interlace, spirals, and animal ornament with filigree and glass insets. The earlier group includes the problematic massive silver chains, two of which have red-enamel Pictish symbols on their terminal rings, but the find-spots of the majority of the chains are in southern Scotland, outside Pictland proper. We are on firmer ground with the plain silver objects and enameled hand-pins and plaques from the Norrie’s Law and Gaulcross hoards, although the silver sheet with repoussé Celtic spirals from Norrie’s Law has been variously dated from the Iron Age to the seventh century. Of particular interest, and set apart from the two major groupings, are the close correspondences between a hanging-bowl escutcheon mould excavated at Craig Phadrig, Inverness, and a surviving escutcheon found on the West Highland coast at Eilean Tioram Castle: the Picts were involved in hanging-bowl production. The Hendersons follow David Wilson’s identification of the fully developed Pictish penannular brooch type, paying particular attention to hybrids that combine Pictish and Irish features, adaptations that could have been reached in Pictland as easily as in Ireland.

The fifth chapter covers Pictish figurative art, divided into sections on the hunt, David iconography, the cross and related themes, holy men and angels, and clerics and judgment imagery. The discussions of hunting and David images could have benefited from recourse to Catherine Herbert, Psalms in Stone: Royalty and Spirituality on Irish High Crosses (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1997). The Hendersons’ section on the cross emphasizes “related themes,” including the Eucharist, visual contrasts between the Old and New Testaments, and intimations of Christ the Good Shepherd. “Holy men” include the apostles, evangelists, and their symbols, with the most remarkable angels being the two who mourn or pray alongside the cross on the Aberlemno roadside cross slab. Clerics have long been identified in Pictish art, but Isabel pioneered the detection of Pictish depictions of hell and judgment, extended here with a possible Pictish forerunner of Romanesque portrayals of the parable of Dives and Lazarus.

Two chapters are devoted to the form and function of Pictish sculpture. Cross-marked stones in northern Pictland are more likely to reflect manuscript types than those in the south. The authors critically assess the possibilities advanced for the meaning of Pictish symbols and the social function of the symbol stones, noting that they provide “evidence for a common cultural understanding of specific signs, which need not necessarily bring along with them political cohesion” (172). As works of art, the cross slabs serve as intellectual constructs, closer to “a Christian literary text than to a documentary record,” but they are “essentially unhistorical and only in a very simplistic way to be regarded as tracking historical accommodations between church and state” (180), a conclusion as dismissive of some archaeologists working in the field as they have been of art historians. Ringed crosses on Pictish cross slabs have no need to depend upon freestanding Irish ringed crosses, since the type was available in Insular art as early as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Remains of a few freestanding Pictish crosses do survive, but would have been particular targets of the Scottish Reformation. The inscription on the Dupplin cross in Perthshire names a Pictish king who died in 820, although some see it as retrospective, much as the damaged runic inscription on the Bewcastle cross that might name the seventh-century Alcfrith. More disparate sculptural types include recumbent grave covers, shrines, carved panels perhaps from screens, architectural sculpture, fittings, and furniture.

The Hendersons are at pains throughout to distinguish between fact and informed speculation. Isabel herself has proposed that relief Pictish cross slabs emerged in the second quarter of the eighth century, following the presumed acceptance of the Pictish King Nechtan’s (or Naiton’s) request for the loan of Jarrow stonemasons skilled in building “in the Roman manner.” But here the Hendersons make it clear that such a possibility is not a demonstrable fact. At the same time, such speculation is one of the attractions of Pictish art, and the Hendersons piece together the likely appearance of a Pictish Gospel book—containing features of the Echternach Gospels (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 9389), Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 197B and Durham Cathedral Library MS A.II.17—under the possible aegis of the Anglo-Saxon Egbert, who spent much of his career at Rathmelsigi in Ireland, whence he sent off Willibrord’s mission to Frisia, which founded Ecthernach, worked among the Picts according to Bede, and was instrumental in Iona’s adoption of the Roman method of the dating of Easter. The chapter on “losses” notes documentary evidence of ancient manuscripts not seen since the Reformation, along with other evidence for lost metalwork and sculpture.

This is not a book for beginners, nor should it be used as a textbook by anyone not already conversant with Insular archaeology, historiography and hagiography, contemporary secular literature, Insular exegesis, and place-name studies. It is to be taken for granted that anyone teaching in this period will already be trained in Early Christian and Byzantine art, the Great Migrations, Ostrogothic, Visigothic, Lombardic, Merovingian, and Carolingian art. But I have sat squirming in the audience while some ill-informed American graduate student delivered a pointless paper on Pictish symbols, only to hear Sally Foster of Historic Scotland mutter sotto voce, “No supervision!” Such embarrassments will continue as long as the American art-historical establishment continues to ignore the truism enunciated by the Hendersons at the beginning of this book: “The Insular style is the first comprehensive professionally planned and executed mode of artistic expression to appear in Europe in the post-Classical period” (15). The Art of the Picts provides loving testimony to the grandeur of the Pictish contribution to that enterprise.