OTTONIAN, ART. - "Ottonian art" is the name given to the German art of the 10th century and the first twenty-five years of the 11th century and, with many qualifications, to the art influenced by it in the territories in direct contact with the Germanic world.
It coincides with the first formation of a German national state and with the period in which the three Ottos and then Henry II of Saxony wore the crown as kings of Germany and emperors. Ottonian art is therefore linked chronologically on the one hand to the diffusion of the most advanced forms of Carolingian culture and art and on the other to the decisive establishment, in the individual territories, of the characteristics proper to Romanesque art. As already with Carolingian art, the major centers of the development of Ottonian art were above all the great monasteries in direct relation with the court. However, Ottonian art, unlike Carolingian art, which together with the contributions of Byzantine art forms its richest cultural substratum, does not have an exclusively courtly character. In it, in fact, there appears as an essential element and as a catalyst of those earlier and refined cultures, above all the vivifying impulse of the young energies of new peoples who enter the world of the Christian civilization of the West with a fresh wealth of enthusiasm that spontaneously leads to violence of expression. This is clear not only in the plastic and pictorial forms but also in the architectural ones, since in the German territories the increase in the number and size of buildings was very rapid, especially in Saxony, in the territories along the Rhine and, though to a lesser degree, in southern Germany. Almost all the sacred buildings that arose in this period were subsequently enlarged or transformed; nevertheless, their primitive characteristics are often legible, at least in the plan. Among them are remembered in southern Germany St. Erasmus of Regensburg, the three churches on the island of Reichenau and the church of St. Michael at Hildesheim; in the Rhineland the collegiate church of Essen, the cathedral of Trier and the capitol of Cologne, while the cathedrals of Würzburg, Bamberg, Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Strasbourg belong, at least in their oldest cores, to the Ottonian period.
The works of painting and sculpture of this period are rather scarce. Testimonies of Ottonian pictorial activity are found in the frescoes of the church of St. George on the island of Reichenau, to be assigned to the beginning of the 11th century, in the paintings of the choir of the church of Goldbach near Überlingen and in other later ones that are already decidedly Romanesque, such as the Last Judgment of Burgfelden in Württemberg. At Reichenau there also flourished at that time a school of miniature painting of great importance that created capital works such as the Codex of Egbert, now at Trier, the Evangelary of Otto III, that of Henry II and that of Echternach (Gotha). Other important centers of miniature painting at that time were the monasteries of Trier and Regensburg. The scanty testimonies of a plastic activity of the period are marked by the same characteristics evident also in contemporary painting, such as the sculptures of the portal of Hildesheim and various works in bronze, especially in northern Germany.
Bibliography6 works
Emilio Lavagnino