Unmoored Treasure: Style and the Stakes of Attribution

Although Art History has moved away from stylistic analysis as its central method, style remains the dominant tool for attributing works of art that lack archaeological or historical context. In such cases, style often provides the only grounds for contextualization. Portable luxury objects, once relegated to the category of ‘decorative’ or ‘minor’ arts, form a particularly rich corpus through which to examine this problem. This paper takes as its point of departure the Guarrazar treasure, a cache of gold and jewel-encrusted crowns and crosses unearthed near Toledo in 1858, and the debates surrounding its origin. Early interpretations of the treasure reveal how stylistic attribution was mobilized as a form of cultural possession: a means of inscribing unmoored objects into modern national genealogies. The earliest French publications cast the pieces as northern in character, likening them to Frankish fibulae and buckles, and thus claimed them for the French cultural orbit. Spanish scholars, by contrast, defined them as “Latin-Byzantine” in a style native to Visigothic Spain with Byzantinism as its distinctive feature. Alois Riegl later classified the treasure as East Roman, while more recent scholarship has advanced a Constantinopolitan attribution on the tenuous grounds of hierarchy and style. Revisiting this historiography, my paper considers how the language of style has repeatedly been deployed to claim ownership of unmoored objects—and how such attributions, in turn, risk affecting cultural erasure.