Two Small Twelfth Century Crosses Made at Cologne

Abstract

IN Germany the twelfth century was a period of tremendous activity and expansion in the working of metals, and especially in the production of champlevé enamels on copper. Of the great centers of that activity, none is better known to us through its surviving products than Cologne, with its great Benedictine Abbey of St. Pantaleon. Although to the ateliers of that abbey in particular were formerly attributed many of the pieces which have come down to us,¹ of late years not only have such attributions become less specific, but even the existence of a great monastic goldsmiths' workshop at Cologne has been denied.² The Cologne workshops appear to have concentrated upon important objects,³ and in them the goldsmith's art—as taken in its wider sense, to cover fine metal work in the baser metals—and especially enameling developed in an unexampled manner. From them came a whole series of the finest extant champlevé enamels, made by a few great craftsmen and their followers, now mostly in the church treasuries and the museums of Germany, but represented also (notably by the fine reliquary attributed by von Falke to Fridericus, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum)⁴ in public and private collections in other countries. The production of the lesser enameled objects, such as crosses, book-covers, small reliquaries, and the like, seems for the most part to have been left to other workshops than those in which these great pieces were made. It is therefore, I think, of peculiar interest to find two small crosses, one with almost a minimum of enameling, the other with none, of very minor importance as compared with the large works above referred to, whose style and ornamentation seem to proclaim them both to be products of Cologne, and closely associable with some of those works.