An Evangelist in a storm
The Evangelist Matthew does not sit calmly at his desk. He leans forward, eyes wide, pen in one hand and inkhorn in the other, as if he can barely write as fast as the words are being dictated to him. At the top right, tiny on a hilltop, an angel holds out the scroll. Everything in the picture is moving: the robe in pale, flickering strokes, the hills behind, even the plants at the edges.
The image comes from a Gospel book painted at the abbey of Hautvillers near Reims, around 816 to 835, for Archbishop Ebbo. It shows how freely Carolingian painters handled their ancient models. They took the type of the seated, writing scholar from Late Roman books, but filled it with an agitation art had not seen for a long time.
A renewal of Rome
On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charles emperor in Rome. For the first time in more than three hundred years there was again a Roman emperor in the West. Charlemagne took this as more than a title. He brought scholars from all over Europe to his court, among them the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin of York and the Visigoth Theodulf, had old texts collected and copied, founded schools and required monasteries and cathedral chapters to teach reading and writing.
Historians therefore speak of a “Carolingian Renaissance”. The term is disputed, because it implies a rebirth where the main concern was church reform and correct texts. Yet it captures something: the art of these years deliberately seeks out antiquity, its forms, its columns, its sense of space.
Ravenna in Aachen
Around 792 Charlemagne began building a chapel at Aachen, where he had hot springs and a palace. Its model was San Vitale in Ravenna, Emperor Justinian’s octagonal church. Columns of marble and porphyry, his biographer Einhard reports, were brought from Rome and Ravenna. The chapel was consecrated in 805. Up in the gallery a plain throne of marble slabs still stands. Here, near Charlemagne’s tomb, German kings were crowned until 1531. In 1978 Aachen Cathedral became the first German site on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Books in gold and purple
What the Carolingians prized most were books. At court, Gospel books were made on purple-dyed parchment, written in gold and silver. The Coronation Gospels, painted at Aachen around 794 to 800, show the Evangelists in white robes before open landscapes, so antique in light and drapery that scholars think of painters from Byzantium at the court; a Greek name in a margin, “Demetrius presbyter”, supports the idea. According to tradition, Emperor Otto III found the book in Charlemagne’s tomb in the year 1000; later kings swore their coronation oath on it. Today it is in the Imperial Treasury in Vienna.
At Reims, around 820 to 830, the Utrecht Psalter was made, a book with neither gold nor colour. For each of the 150 psalms several artists drew in brown ink scenes full of small, nervous figures who run, fight, pray and make music, 166 drawings in all. Around the year 1000 the book reached Canterbury, where it was copied several times. In 2015 UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World register.
The covers were works of art too: carved ivory panels after Late Antique patterns, or boards of gold and gems. The Codex Aureus of St. Emmeram, written in 870 for Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald, is covered by a gold plate set with sapphires, emeralds and pearls, with Christ in Majesty at its centre.
A picture without a face
One of the most unusual works of the period is in a village on the Loire. At Germigny-des-Prés, Theodulf, Bishop of Orléans, built a small church, consecrated on 3 January 806. Its apse preserves a mosaic, one of the very few from Carolingian times. It shows neither Christ nor Mary, but the Ark of the Covenant with two angels hovering above. Theodulf was a determined opponent of the veneration of images that Byzantium had just reaffirmed; at Charlemagne’s court he probably wrote the treatise that allowed images as decoration but rejected their veneration. His mosaic is therefore often read as a statement: a sacred scene with no face to worship.
The script we read
Yet the Carolingians’ most far-reaching achievement is not a picture but a script. In the late eighth century the scriptoria developed Carolingian minuscule: small, round, clearly separated letters with spaces between the words. It replaced a tangle of regional hands and made texts legible across the empire. When Renaissance humanists rediscovered it in old manuscripts in the fifteenth century, they took it for the script of the ancient Romans and imitated it. Our lowercase letters descend from it, including the ones this text is set in.
Why it still matters
Many ancient texts, from Caesar to Ovid, survive only because Carolingian monks copied them. The Palatine Chapel at Aachen became a model for churches throughout the empire, and the union of gold, ivory and book shaped the treasury art of the Middle Ages. After Charlemagne’s death his empire broke apart under his grandsons. His art lived on, first under the Saxon emperors, the Ottonians, who saw themselves as his heirs.
Further reading
- Florentine Mütherich, Joachim E. Gaehde: Carolingian Painting (1976).
- Rosamond McKitterick: Charlemagne. The Formation of a European Identity (2008).
- Exhibition catalogue Karl der Große. Macht, Kunst, Schätze, Aachen 2014.