Belt Buckle (c. 525–560): Art, History and Details

Belt Buckle (c. 525–560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The art of the European Migration Period (3rd-7th centuries AD) is almost exclusively one of personal adornment-a portable art that followed men and women to their graves. Belt buckles with large rectangular attachment plates have been discovered in cemeteries across the Iberian Peninsula-now occupied by Spain and Portugal-from the period of Visigothic occupation (about AD 412-711). Their decoration varies. Finer examples, like this one, are distinguished by brilliantly inlaid semi-precious stones and colored glass. Garnets were especially prized in Visigothic society for use in cloisonné jewelry. The technique involved the fitting of carefully cut pieces of polished garnet into an intricate grid of compartments, or cloisons. This buckle is so densely inlaid with garnets that it presents a virtual "carpet" of red to the eye. These large Visigothic buckles are strikingly uniform in shape yet endlessly varied in surface design, perhaps a sign that they expressed the personal identities of their original owners. Grave excavations have shown that belt buckles of this type were made for women.

Object facts

• Title: Belt Buckle
• Date: c. 525–560
• Culture: Visigothic, Spain, Migration Period, 6th century
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: bronze with garnets, glass, mother of pearl, gold foil, traces of gilding; bronze and glass
• Dimensions: Overall: 7.1 x 2.7 cm (2 13/16 x 1 1/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Migration Period
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 2001.119

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ariadne Galleries, and Meadows Museum. Spain: A Heritage Rediscovered 3000 BC-AD 711. New York: Ariadne Galleries, 1992.
• Fliegel, Stephen N., "Wearable Wealth", Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 42 no. 04, April 2002
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Holger A. Klein. Sacred Gifts and Worldly Treasures: Medieval Masterworks from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2007.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.