The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought
<i>&gt; The true “dark age,” of course, was the early 1940s when, simply as a side effect of industrial killing, great swathes of the past disappeared. One small yet major example—the extraordinary series of paintings of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, made in the 1170s either by the saint herself or under her supervision, disappeared in the general catastrophe that unfolded in Dresden in early 1945. We only know what they looked like (except from black‐and‐white photos) through accurate and beautiful copies painted by a group of nuns, by sheer chance, in the 1930s.</i><p>This feels like a weird argument. Yes, the paintings were lost. But we have tons of documentation about them! We have records of their creation by Hildegard of Bingen. We have photographs and reproductions to tell us (imperfectly, but still) how they looked. We know they were taken to Dresden, and we know when -- 1945. We know that Dresden suffered a devastating firebombing by the Allies in February of that year, and we know that nobody has been able to locate the paintings since that firebombing occurred. In other words, we may not have the paintings themselves anymore, but we can construct a pretty reliable history of them -- what they were, how they were created, and when they were (sadly) destroyed.<p>That&#x27;s a very different situation than we&#x27;re in regarding post-Roman, pre-Carolingian Europe. There are hundreds of years in there where we have practically no documentary evidence for <i>anything.</i> Kingdoms rose and fell, wars were won or lost, languages and faiths adopted or abandoned, and we can&#x27;t even begin to tell any of those stories today, because nobody was keeping records. Who can say how much art was created and then destroyed in this period that we&#x27;ll never even be aware existed? Who knows how many geniuses there were whose insights have been lost forever?<p>None of this is to say that what happened in Dresden in 1945 isn&#x27;t a tragedy; it absolutely was, and for lots of reasons beyond just the loss of some paintings. But the loss of something that we <i>know existed</i> (and can even look at photographs of!) is very different than destruction so total that it even obliterates the possibility of remembrance.