So, this week for Curators Cornered, we put two curators against each other and asked them
the very simple question: What's the best ostentatiously decorated otherwise mundane object
that you're in charge of and Gareth Brereton, curator of Ancient Mesopotamia and Sue Brunning,
curator of the Early Medieval European collections came up with incredibly different answers. To tell
you what their answer was here is Sue...
Buckles. We've all got them, they fasten our belts, our bags, our shoes,
and they're just really useful objects.
They're a good example of: if it ain't broke don't fix it.
So, you can come to the Museum and you can see a buckle
that's a thousand years old and it'll look a lot like the same types of buckles that we have today.
So really really useful but I think also that their ubiquity and their, you know,
hyper functionality makes them a little bit mundane
and it used to be the same in the early middle ages
because buckles are probably one of the most common finds that we have from graves of this period.
We find them with men, with women, with children and even with animals
and this basic principle of having a loop with a tongue that you pass your strap through like so
tongue goes through a little hole you've made your fastener
and even if you put on a few lockdown pounds your buckle is still going to work for you.
So you really don't need to have any extra bells and whistles,
any fancy designs for this thing to work really really well.
But nobody told the maker of this buckle.
This incredible buckle was found at a cemetery site dating to the early 7th century
at a place called Kingsfield in Faversham and it was called Kingsfield because basically the graves contained so much gold.
Now, the first thing to say about this buckle is just that it's so small.
So I have my lovely little vintage pineapple brooch here which is exactly the same size,
about three centimetres in length, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in decoration.
So, first of all and very obviously the buckle is made of gold which in the early 7th century,
just the same as today, was a prestige material and that suggests to us that the owner of this buckle
was of some significant status or at least was buried as if they had some kind of significant status
but it's actually the decoration on the buckle that I'd really like to focus on today,
because it really has been lavished with the most ornate decoration
some of it actually even, kind of, microscopically detailed.
First of all, we can look at the shape of the buckle and you
can see that it's made by the heads of a pair of birds at the top and at the bottom
and these look to be birds of prey based on the curved beaks that they have.
So they look to be representing either an eagle or a type of hawk, something like that,
and the eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that these look a lot like the birds
that we see on the metal work at Sutton Hoo and because they're birds of prey, they're predators,
these birds are very fierce they seem to tap into these kinds of qualities that are valued at the time.
It's a very martial warlike society.
Now look at the necks of the birds you can see that they're decorated with rows of braids made
with gold wire really densely decorated and I think that that gives it a bit of a feathery effect.
Now moving across to the centre of the buckle, we can see that this decoration is a pair
of serpents and their bodies are made from beaded wire. Now, the way that this wire was made was,
you would take a length of straight wire and you would have a tool that had some teeth inside it
and you would take that tool and just roll it repeatedly all the way along the length
of the wire in sections until you had a whole strand that was this kind of beaded effect and
that's what's been used to make the bodies of the serpents,
but look even more closely and you'll be able to see that the bodies of serpents
are not just one strand they're actually three so we have a strand in the centre,
that is a thicker strand and that is flanked on the outside by even finer lengths of this beaded wire
and that really makes the snakes pop from the surface of the buckle.
Research has shown that these wires are typically less than a millimetre in diameter
and some of the finest ones could go all the way down to 0.2 millimetres.
So to give you a sense of just how tiny that is, it's about the diameter of a medium bristle toothbrush.
So, there's one more cool thing about the wire that I want to talk to you about before we move on.
Now, look at the serpent's heads they're basically a little u-shape so they're very very stylized
but can you see how the maker has sliced through the beaded wire kind of on the diagonal there,
which I think is a deliberate thing in order to make the jaws kind of more jaw-like, and it's
not an accident because if we look at all of the serpent's heads across both of the buckles, that
same feature is there. This is something that has been made completely deliberately in order to kind
of increase the serpent-ness of those serpents and although these things are very stylised,
they're not so stylised to become completely abstract and totally meaningless.
Thought we were done with the snakes? We're not done with the snakes.
Can you see how they're slightly three-dimensional, kind of raised up from the surface?
That's because the maker has worked the gold sheet that the snakes are attached to
in order to raise it up kind of in the same area where the snakes are,
so you've got these raised ridges you put your filigree wire onto the top,
voila you've got 3D snakes and who doesn't love 3d snakes?
So, why should you vote for the Kingsfield buckle?
Well, I think the fact that I've had so much to say about something that's so tiny
and just so ordinary and functional, actually says it all.
So, we can think about how much time it took to create this little masterpiece,
collecting all of the gold that was needed, fabricating all of the parts;
so the gold sheets, working the gold sheets so that it has that repousse design,
creating all of the different wires, also that decoration is on such a small scale,
as I mentioned before- it's almost microscopically detailed,
most people would never get the opportunity to appreciate it
beyond a mere flash of gold from across the room
and if you're watching this video on your phone,
the buckle that you can see there on your screen is still much bigger than it actually is in real life
and the only reason that you're able to see the decoration
that you can see is because we've zoomed in so much.
Sometimes, I wonder if what we're seeing here is the goldsmith, kind of flexing,
leaving little Easter eggs for us to find when we scrutinize their handiwork
and let me remind you that we're talking about a buckle here,
something that's really, really ordinary and something that all of us have,
there's something else about the buckles that I want to mention
and that's that we have two of them which brings into my mind
the bag is something like a satchel the most utilitarian of all kinds of bags
and the choice of school children and librarians everywhere, which I think is kind of amazing.
It's very interesting to look at these prestige objects and wonder what the point of them is,
what's the point of having all of this decoration adorning your body
or your possessions or anything like that
and one thing that I've been thinking about is the kind of the contradictions in those ideas
so on the one hand on the surface we might think about it as displaying all of your wealth
and showing how important you are, because you were able to acquire all of these amazing dress accessories
and wear them on your body and and sort of strut around and show off
but also I wonder on the flip side if by showing them on your body you're kind of compensating
for something a lack of power or a lack of confidence and something that this can kind of make up for.
So, it's it's very interesting to think about the meanings of things
and the fact that there isn't always one meaning or one answer,
there are lots of different meanings and answers depending on the person who's wearing it,
depending on the context that they're wearing it in,
depending on the type of situation that that particular community
and then that particular group of people is in at the time.
However, in this particular instance, I feel pretty sure that what we're looking at here
is the most ostentatiously decorated mundane object
for my own purposes so that I can win this competition.
That was Sue's best ostentatiously decorated otherwise mundane buckle
if you thought that that was an irrefutably best object, give this video a like-
that's how the voting system works-
if you haven't yet watched Gareth's video- it's right here.
If you have and you've come back to this one, I'm assuming that you want to vote for this one
but you can also watch this one and vote for this one
and to be honest with you I don't mind if you vote for both of them,
the likelihood of a tie is incredibly small.