Unlike Figure I, Figure II (below) is a is large, domed and intricately ornamented oval brooch made from Copper. The piece can be dated to the 8th century, 2,000 years before the first recorded use of gold in Viking jewelry. In conjunction with Figure I, this piece shows how the sophistication of metalwork, detail, and material have developed. The animal forms in the artifact are momentous: “[the] early representations of lions or other beasts derived from Roman art, which in the hands of northern craftsmen assured strange shapes, and gradually, through copying, lost their identity” (Curle, 241). The Vikings were able to take some geometric form and ornamental detail from Romans. Both were known as barbaric fighters showing that art in the zoomorphic style stands as a rich resource for the study of evolution within art and culture.

Figure II: Oval Brooch, Copper-alloy. Viking, 900-1000. Metropolitan Museum of Art. …show more content…
In many pieces, legs, wings, tongues, beaks and bodies with strict adherence to the rules of interlacing (Hull, 63). Stokand writes, “the art is more than a barbaric display of illogical, entangled forms; its animal imagery has an underlying logic that can be decoded and thus read as an intricate problem in visual dynamics” (Stokand, 172). In Figure II , there is an eye of an animal or the beak of a bird and the animals are represented in a semi-naturalistic form. The piece displays an abstract pattern, rich in light-and-dark effects and enlivened by gilding. The absence of humans tells us Vikings were concerned with animals not people when it came to art; the animals representative of primordial forces of nature, strength, power speed-spirit and energy. This properly reflects their barbarian, animalistic qualities which were so essential to their