Hildesheim's Medieval Splendor

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 521: Special Exhibition)

Hildesheim's Medieval Splendor 

by Robert Edward Bullock, Special to the Sun

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Twelfth-century Europe was a complex and varied culture of often overlapping religion, politics, and private life. This is reflected in the arts of the period, a high-water mark of imagination and craftsmanship. Like other cultures of deep and widely held faith, Medieval Europe - Christendom - created precious objects that, born of such high sentiments, were like prayers rendered in gold, silver, and precious stones.

Works of art delivered the Christian message by glorifying the Holy. Just as in the Torah, where God instructs the Jews to use "the purest gold" in the temple, the most precious materials were appropriate in the service of the Catholic Church. In his “De Consecratione,” the twelfth-century abbot of St-Denis, Abbot Suger, praised the working of gold and silver and precious stones to "conjoinest the material with the immaterial, the corporeal with the spiritual, the human with the Divine". 

Sparkling like King Solomon's mines, "Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim" is the Metropolitan Museum's dazzling new exhibit of church furnishings and treasures from Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany's Lower Saxony region. Consecrated in 872 and designated a UNESCO world cultural heritage site in 1985 along with Saint Michael's Church in Hildesheim, its collection of .....

(read the full review at The New York Sun)

Reichenau Gospel Lectionary and Collectar, ca. 1010–30 (Dombibliothek Hildesheim; Photograph by Lutz Engelhardt)

Ringelheim Crucifix, ca. 1000 / before 1022 (Dom-Museum Hildesheim, on loan from the church of Sts. Abdon and Sennen, Salzgitter- Ringelheim)

Reliquary of Saint Oswald, ca. 1185–89; partly restored 1779 (Dom-Museum Hildesheim; Photograph by Lutz Engelhardt)