Who is the most beautiful woman in art? The choices are innumerable: Botticelli’s Primavera or Titian’s purity figure in Sacred and Profane Love? Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring or Jacques-Louis David’s Madame Récamier? The girl in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss or John Singer Sargent’s Madame X?

The choice for Umberto Eco, however, was easy. In On Beauty (2004) he wrote:

“If you ask me which woman in the history of art I would go out to dinner and spend an evening with, the first would be Uta from Naumburg Cathedral.” If Uta couldn’t make it, he confessed he would accept Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine as a consolation companion.

What was seemingly unusual about Eco’s predilection was that Uta von Ballenstedt was a woman of the eleventh century who was depicted in the thirteenth century. Feminine beauty — at least to modern eyes — is not a regular feature in medieval art. Generic female figures tend to have pot bellies, domed foreheads and invisible eyebrows; witness the women in the Limbourg brothers’ early fifteenth-century illuminations for the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry or the Madonnas of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.

What’s more, Uta was not memorialised in a painting but in a sculpture, making Eco and her many other admirers into would-be Pygmalions, wishing their inert inamorata into life.

For all the naturalism on display the sculptures are historical reconstructions

Little is known of the original Uta. She was born around 1000 and died in 1046, her parents belonged to the provincial aristocracy of the Holy Roman Empire, and in 1026 she was married off to Eckard II, one of the most loyal supporters of Henry III, the future Emperor. Eckard later became Margrave of Lusatia (after killing his sister’s husband) and then Margrave of Meissen.

The couple remained childless, however, and with his death in 1046 the Eckard margraves died out. Uta lived conventionally in her husband’s shadow and no record remains of the temper of their marriage or of her beauty, personality or deeds. Uta died shortly before her husband and at her death he donated a large portion of the dowry she had brought to the union to the convent of Gernrode in her native Saxony-Anhalt.

The reason she is memorialised at Naumburg Cathedral, however, is because Uta and Eckard were among the most generous donors at the building’s institution. They and the other ten most open-handed benefactors — related local nobles, albeit across two centuries — were memorialised in the years between 1243 and 1249 in the church they made possible.

The group of twelve Stifterfiguren (donor figures) — life size, carved in sandstone and painted — stand in a semi-circle around the choir and are integral to the ribs that rise up behind them. So, although they look to be freestanding they are in fact works of high relief. The grouping of such non-royal and non-clerical figures, eight men and four women, was unprecedented.

Not all the figures are identifiable. What they cannot be, however, is portraits. For all the naturalism on display — Eckard’s double chin; the smile (itself an extremely rare motif) of Reglindis, daughter of the first Polish king Bolesław Chobry; the beard and speaking mouth of Count Syzzo — the sculptures are historical reconstructions.

A photograph taken of her in the 1920s became a sensation and in the 1930s she was the belle ideal of National Socialist aesthetics

About their maker, the Master of Naumburg, almost nothing is known. It is traditionally held that he was a German craftsman who trained in France, probably at the Cathedral of Reims, the coronation church of the French royal family, before returning to his homeland and working at Mainz and then Naumburg. This, however, rests on readings of stylistic similarities.

The sculptor’s nationality became a live issue in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century when, with the rehabilitation of the Gothic, the donor figures started to receive serious attention and became co-opted into Germany’s growing nationalist movement.

It was Uta who played the starring role. A photograph taken of her in the 1920s became a sensation and in the 1930s she was the belle ideal of National Socialist aesthetics. Porcelain manufactories further spread her likeness through homes across the country.

Wilhelm Pinder, the pre-eminent Nazi art historian and co-author of the 1933 Vow of Allegiance to Adolf Hitler was just one scholar who promoted Uta as an example of perfect Aryan womanhood — beautiful, constant, moral and charitable.
She was presented as a contrast to the figure of Reglindis opposite her in the cathedral, whose smile was seen as a flighty reflection of her Polish ancestry. In 1937, a photograph of Uta was exhibited to counter the un-German works in Hitler’s “degenerate art” exhibition.

The attention led to Uta becoming an exceptionally popular name among German girls in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, every two years, Naumburg Cathedral holds a Uta Meeting, a three-day festival where women named Uta gather to enjoy regional music, food and wine and celebrate their namesake.

Outside Germany, Uta is familiar for a different reason. In 1937, Walt Disney responded to her appropriation by the Nazis by making her the model for the malign stepmother queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

It seemed he kept his options open though; remove Uta’s headdress and dramatic cape and soften her features and she has a marked resemblance to Snow White herself. As a dining companion, however, neither incarnation is even half as appealing as the enigmatic beauty of Naumburg Cathedral.

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This article is taken from the August-September 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.