This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Across the open Westphalian basin of pluming steel stacks and wide estuary, the distinctive spires of Aachen Cathedral disrupt the skyline of the region Karl Marx called “the coal and steel heart of Germany”. But at one time, it was from here that the Emperor Charlemagne commanded his empire in Western and Central Europe. An abundance of religious objects in the cathedral treasuries at Aachen and Essen, and an important museum of Russian icons, confirm the Eastern origins of a spiritual programme that manifested itself in the Carolingian and latterly, Ottonian, Renaissance.

Charlemagne’s adoption of the imperial project led him to the fallen empires of classical antiquity, but also to the living one of Byzantium whose Greek language and religious differences had shielded it from Western influence for over 400 years. No Eastern emperor had visited Rome in the 300 years before Charlemagne arrived to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800. 

But Charlemagne’s return via Ravenna and the Byzantine church of San Vitale pre-empted the completion of his octagonal Palatine Chapel at Aachen in the Byzantine style. From 936 to 1531, it witnessed the coronation of 31 Germanic “Kings of the Romans” on Charlemagne’s soberly carved throne that some archaeologists assert was made from slabs of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. 

The absence of ornamentation belies the symbolic intention: deliberate ratios express the Heavenly Jerusalem in numbers, whilst its secretion in the gallery — invisible from the sanctuary and its replica mosaics below — follows the Solomonic and Constantinople models. It befit a ruler, referred to as “David” at court, who claimed unconditional regency of a Christian world empire. Napoleon nearly sat on it (officerly deference prevailed); Goebbels was allegedly less reverent. 

Charlemagne’s empire stretched from Denmark to the Adriatic and amassed jewels, marble, patterns and forms from all over the known world to which the treasuries of the Ottonian art that followed are testament. 

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These objects — reliquaries, processional crosses, embellished books, ivories — can be inadequately summarised as elaborate exercises in craftsmanship and religious devotion. These they certainly are, but not only: they also prove the highly elastic artistic, even cultural, licence within the medieval framework of God’s unified creation; the modern world is, contrastingly, conformist in its inconsistency to which the “Christian imagination” and traditional school pose a self-conscious reactionary challenge. 

A good example of this is the Cross of Lothair (c. 1000) at Aachen, a golden cross covered in precious gems and filigree work in the centre of which is a cameo of the Emperor Augustus, positioned at the head of Christ and staring intently into the Aquila of the long-fallen Roman Empire. Below is a signet stone depicting the Christian emperor, King Lothair. Both are surrounded by cut stones, each mounted so as to look like temples on arcades — the heavenly Jerusalem — and it confirms Otto III’s desire for a renewal of the Roman Empire. 

Crosses in Essen Cathedral Treasury — masterpieces of Ottonian goldsmithing — make for interesting comparison: an enamel of a Persian simurgh, personifications of the sun and moon and even a cameo of Medusa in sardonyx are all involved into the central Christian narrative without spiritual or cultural contradiction, yet retaining their foreign integrity without need of “Christianisation”. A rock crystal cup and saucer set into the pulpit next to depictions of Poseidon, Isis and Pan with his pipes at Aachen confirm this. This was neither a conscious, nor a critical view: the world was varied and culturally disparate, but all of it was a part of God’s creation. 

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Recklinghausen, 100 miles south of Aachen in the Ruhr valley, is an unlikely place for Western Europe’s largest collection of Russian Orthodox icons. Beyond the 14th-century Gothic church and half-timbered houses, it became a centre for coalmining and it finds a counterpart in the historic market town of the English Midlands. The Ikonen-Museum, founded in 1956 by a German industrialist and enthusiast for eastern Orthodox icons, initially composed of several important German collections, now holds over 4,000 icons and ecclesiastical metalworks from the Christian East — Russia, Greece, Coptic Egypt and the Balkans. 

Here too, we see a comparable artistic and spiritual programme to that exercised in the cathedrals and their treasuries, but produced thousands of miles east of the North Rhine: the images are (for the most part) anonymously produced and if not in direct execution, are the product of the huge collaborative effort that came with monastic life in the East. 

The subjects — the Apostles, Eastern saints, Christ — imagine man, suspended from chronology, in his most divinised nature, or theosis. Landscape and buildings are reduced and abstracted to architectural quotations, as in the arm reliquaries at Essen, whilst the human subject seems to reveal the entire structure of the Christian cosmos — it is in man that the spiritual battle is fought. An obvious contrast is the ease with which images were and are liturgically used in the Christian East — a testament to the waves of iconoclasm in the early medieval West — but both the monastic brush and artisanal hammer are unified by the purity of material and harmonious mode of vision. 

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Today we can see but the reflection of this medieval mentality, beamed across the millennia in the shimmer of gold. The extraordinary Ottonian reliquaries and crosses, the solemn imperial throne at the Chapel, the Byzantine icons of Orthodox Russia, were all necessary conductors and actuators in the system of liturgy — that which transmitted the energy of God’s divine love and the Christian Apocalypse to the parishioner. In these terms, Aachen and the great temples of medieval Europe seem more like vast spiritual power stations, transmitting the pulse of an age throughout Christendom. 

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The painterly advances and centrist humanism of the Renaissance, the aesthetical theories of the Enlightenment would have all been incomprehensible to the medieval artist, as would the feats of technology and modern medicine under our contemporary cult of scientific progress. Albrecht Dürer’s exclamation, recorded in his Netherlandish travel diary, of seeing “glorious delight” at Aachen well expressed the transition in thought of which we are now the direct inheritors: that world, “the likes of which no one living amongst us has seen”, was already as foreign to an engraver in the German Renaissance as it is for us now.