Ottonian art

Ottonian art, painting, sculpture, and other visual arts produced during the reigns of the German Ottonian emperors and their first successors from the Salic house (950–1050). As inheritors of the Carolingian tradition of the Holy Roman Empire, the German emperors also assumed the Carolingian artistic heritage, the conscientious revival of late antique and Early Christian art forms (see Carolingian art). Ottonian art later developed a style of its own, however, distinct from the Carolingian tradition, particularly in painting, ivory carving, and sculpture. Ottonian illuminators were less concerned with naturalism and more with expression through sober, dramatic gesture and heightened coloration (see illuminated manuscript). Ivory carving continued to be produced for liturgical purposes; as can be seen in scenes from the ivory plaques of the “Magdeburg Antependium” (c. 970), carvings have a characteristic restraint and the narrative is conveyed through simple gestures and enlivened by an original kind of decoration such as that in the strongly patterned background. An important development in Ottonian art was that of large-scale sculpture. Stone sculpture continued to be rare, but wooden crucifixes such as the over-life-size Gero Crucifix (before 986; Cologne Cathedral) and wooden reliquaries covered with gold leaf began a return to sculpture in the round. Bronze casting, an antique art practiced also by the Carolingians, flourished. Its most impressive manifestation was in relief-covered bronze doors commissioned by Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (d. 1022) for his cathedral.

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Ottonian architecture was more conservative, expanding and elaborating Carolingian forms rather than developing a new style. The westwork (a fortresslike construction with towers and inner rooms through which one entered the nave) and outer crypt (chapel complexes below and beyond the eastern apse, or projection at the end of the church) were retained and enlarged; the Carolingian double apses (projections at each end of the nave) were elaborated with double transepts. Ottonian architecture was more regulated than Carolingian, with simple interior spaces and a more systematic layout. St. Michael’s (founded c. 1001), Hildesheim, exemplifies this regularity, with two crypts, two apses, and two transepts, each with a crossing tower. The achievements of Ottonian artists provided background and impetus for the new monumentality distinguished as Romanesque.