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At the height of its power, Rome stretched into the far northern reaches of the European continent and the British island, but for the Vikings, Saxons, Celts, and other groups who remained outside of its empire, distinct artistic and cultural traditions existed side-by-side the Greco-Roman "mainstream" culture of antiquity. It's rarely a viable objective to begin a course by defining anything for what it is not (or we might say in this case, what is no longer - or what never was!), but in the case of the European lands which belonged to the Roman Empire at various points of time in antiquity, this becomes perhaps the most convenient way to describe the vast expanse of territories inhabited by diverse ethnic groups who made their own distinct contributions to the visual arts. For centuries, these people warred with Rome, made treaties with Rome, traded with Rome, and internalized different aspects from the culture of Rome; in many ways, familiarity with what was Roman certainly led these diverse ethnic groups to be able to articulate what was indigenously theirs, and thus new identities and ruling dynasties came to power with a new sense of who they were, and who they were not. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, experienced at different times in different provinces, a great power vacuum came to be filled by new groups which had previously been considered to be Romans, in the broadest sense of the citizen granted to the inhabitants of its territories. However, in a sense, every group of "non-Romans" left behind after the withdrawal of Rome's soldiers and bureaucrats of empire was prompted to consider themselves in relation (either in opposition or in alliance) to that Roman identity. In these various, broad cultural groups- the Vikings, the Iberians, the Gauls, the Anglo-Saxons, the Hibernians, etc.- we can discern the ancestor-identities of many of Europe's modern nation-states.

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