An Omen of Life Under the Cross and the Crown

What, pray tell, was all that trembling, quaking and tearing of the hair about? When the calendar was set to tick over to the year 1000, only those Christians who took their New Testament bibles literally thought the big meltdown was at hand. Their dread, fueled by prophecies in the Book of Revelations, had been growing for a couple centuries--and for naught.

If only they’d read their St. Augustine. He had condemned a literal interpretation of John the Evangelist as far back as the 5th century. In Book 20 of “The City of God,” Augustine insisted that the evangelist “used the thousand years as an equivalent for the whole duration of the world, employing the number of perfection to mark the fullness of time.” The millennium idea was poetry, in other words, not a datum for the bean counters.

Who says art is frivolous? A wide embrace of poetry could have saved a lot of people a lot of aggravation.

Otto III knew that--and he was just a kid. In 997, the teenage German emperor commissioned from his scribes a royal gospel book. It was complicated and lavish enough to take almost three years to finish, just in time for Y1K. Needless to say, Otto’s confidence that neither he nor his gospel book were about to be incinerated is made manifest in its knockout illustrations.

The most important was an extravagant portrait of Otto (natch), shown seated on a red and purple throne receiving homage from assorted clergy and nobility. The artist--and I’ve got to find out who among those otherwise anonymous daubers over at the scriptorium was responsible for this authoritative image--has gotten rid of the soft, illusionistic brushwork that was the stylistic favorite of Otto’s hero, Charlemagne (768-814).

In doing so the artist took a risk. When Otto III ordered Charlemagne’s tomb at Aachen opened in the year 1000, it’s said they found the old emperor’s coronation gospels laid out on his knees. The book was filled with little paintings that relied on naturalistic motifs endowed with classical calm and solidity, a humanistically rendered world of flesh and blood that survived from ancient Rome.

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Otto III was ruling under a very different set of circumstances from Charlemagne, though, and he and his art0ists apparently knew they required something pictorially different. Charlemagne’s empire had survived him by less than 30 years; his three grandsons made a political mess of things, as assorted Vikings, Magyars and Saracens took turns invading. The church was corrupt and disorganized. Weak kingdoms were sprouting up all over. The teenager’s forebears--Ottos I and II--were somewhat successful in getting the family emperor-business back together, consolidating fiefdoms; but their authority was regularly challenged.

For Otto III, a courtly style of serene classicism just wouldn’t do, given the tense, factionalized power struggles underway all around. Instead, blunt theatrical gestures were essential.

The portrait page from his royal gospel is small for a painting but large for a book: about 14 inches high and 10 wide. Speaking of size, the artist has used it to make a subtle but inescapable point. The ruler is shown seated; if he decided to stand up, he’d be almost twice as tall as anyone else in the picture. In the power game, bigger is better.

Big Otto is portrayed holding an orb inscribed with a cross in his left hand and a royal sceptre in his right. His two-fisted power is universal, as an emblem of church is balanced by an emblem of state. And it can’t be accidental that the church emblem is being thrust squarely in the face of two noblemen to his left while, conversely, the state emblem is planted firmly before two clergymen. Otto III was obsessed with reviving the Christian Roman Empire, so he had himself displayed here as the larger-than-life intersection of church and state.

Back off, boys, the picture says. I may be just 18, but Big Otto is in charge here.

Clergy are useful and so are barons, the gorgeous illumination implies, but neither one will get the upper hand. Otto was nobody’s fool.

The son of a Byzantine princess, he had cleverly moved his court to Rome so that he could take on the imperial trappings of that ancient town. They’re symbolically written all over the manuscript picture, from the red-tile roof of the canopy to the foliate columns holding it aloft. And the colorfully patterned two-dimensionality of the shallow picture recalls a Byzantine mosaic, further extending the emperor’s belief in his historical legitimacy all the way to Constantinople through his maternal line of descent.

The guy’s got a sense of humor, too. The gilded heads of a couple of yapping dogs decorate the arms of the emperor’s throne. They snarl at the attendant nobles and churchmen, who ogle Otto from the wary corners of their eyes. The beasts offer a witty echo of the emperor’s symbolic warning to his rivals to keep at bay.

Color is also used to remarkably good effect. The red-tile roof above the assembled court is countered by the green carpet beneath their feet. In the drapery behind the monarch, wide green borders set off a field of red. Otto is dressed in an emerald cloak draped over a burgundy tunic, with a bit of royal purple showing at the hem.

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Since illusionism has been dispensed with, replaced by flat areas of solid color and shapes outlined in black, these chromatic tricks are essential to give the painting life. Complementaries are paired in a riot of red and green that fairly vibrates in your eye. Gold, which will catch the light and give the page dazzle, is liberally distributed.

Otto III forged on successfully and with confidence right through the year 1000 and beyond--though not by much. He died at 22 in 1002. Still, the tense rivalry between church and state that finds temporary equilibrium in his gospel-book portrait stands as an amazing document of millennium No. 1. Described within a relatively few square inches is a core dilemma that could divide Europe for centuries--maybe even to the brink of millennium No. 2.