The rare publication of an English monograph on Ottonian art is always cause for celebration. Still too little known, the art produced in the Germanic realms in the forty years on either side of 1000 CE is among the most sumptuous and complex of the entire Middle Ages. Although not a survey of the period, Eliza Garrison’s Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture: The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II is a fine demonstration of this claim, and Ashgate is to be congratulated on producing a handsome book whose mostly full-page illustrations do justice to the beauty and power of the objects under discussion.

As the title makes clear, Garrison’s focus is on two successive rulers, each of whom was first king and then emperor, whose patronage of art and architecture was an important mechanism for articulating legitimacy in the present by forging connections with the past, with an eye toward an eternal future. As she states at the opening of her conclusion, “This book began with a simple proposition: that the liturgical artworks created for the emperors Otto III and Henry II had the capacity to recreate aspects of their official presence both during their lifetimes and after their deaths” (165). Over the course of a snappy historical introduction and three richly analytical chapters, Garrison conveys the complexity behind this deceptively simple claim as she explores the multiple ways that each ruler manipulated art to further his political and spiritual goals. Of course, the agency of Otto III and Henry II (like other medieval rulers) in the creation of the bejeweled crosses, golden altar frontals, and illuminated liturgical manuscripts that carried their images has long been disputed, but Garrison deftly parries the position of such scholars as Ludger Körntgen, who gives credit for these pictures to local ecclesiastics. Even though we do not presume that the ruler was in the workshop, there is ample reason to accept that the representations of Otto and Henry that appear in precious objects given to their favored institutions at Aachen and Bamberg had the rulers’ imprimatur. In any event, the connection between the crown and the church was so intimate among the Ottonians that there is little to gain from distinguishing between the two with regard to these imperial images. That is not to say that we should avoid parsing subtle differences between individual motivations and aspirations: Garrison is at her best when peeling away the many levels of these imperial commissions. She reveals, for example, the marvelous visual and ideological dialogue between representations of Otto in the Aachen/Liuthar Gospels (Aachen, Cathedral Treasury) and the Otto Gospels (Munich, Bavarian State Library, Clm 4453), which articulated Otto’s Christomimetic and imperial impulses at Aachen, or the way Henry II appropriated both images and objects associated with Otto to co-opt his predecessor’s memory as he substantiated his own rule and eventually his new diocese of Bamberg, which carefully reconfigured the relationship of the ruler to Christ and served as a new locus for Henry’s memory.

The complexity embedded in these objects nonetheless motivates us to ask for more precision about the mechanics of their creation. For example, Garrison spends several pages describing the so-called Star Mantle of Henry II, a spectacular embroidered silk with Christological imagery, zodiac signs, and constellations, which survives today in the Bamberg Diocesan Museum. Several inscriptions help localize the object: one expresses the hope that Emperor Henry expand his empire and rule forever and another says, “peace be to Ishmael, who commissioned this,” a reference to Melos of Bari, who unsuccessfully challenged the Byzantines in Apulia before finding refuge with Henry in Bamberg. Scholars generally agree that stylistic indications suggest a Regensburg provenance for the cloak. Garrison situates the cloak in a tight nexus of political and spiritual aspirations that coalesced in Bamberg in the year 1020. We learn that the pope himself came to Bamberg in that year to celebrate a highly orchestrated Easter ceremony that simultaneously equated his arrival in the city on Holy Thursday with that of Christ’s and provided him with an opportunity to strategize with Henry and Melos about a military counteroffensive against the Byzantines. Garrison reminds us that cloaking the ruler in the cosmos was a tradition from the Roman period and suggests that here it signified not only Henry’s universal and eternal rule, but also Bamberg’s status as a new Capitoline temple, as well as Melos’s personal subordination to Henry. Alas, Melos died only six days after Easter and any plans he may have had came to naught; the cloak “is likely one of the only remaining artworks from this long series of [Easter] liturgical and political festivities” (122). Yet Garrison’s rich discussion of the cloak as an effective prism with which to view ideas about Henry’s reign skirts the central question of agency; we are left wondering how the cloak was made and who, really, was responsible. Should we attribute its conception to Melos, the putative donor who in Garrison’s account remains mysteriously in the shadows? Would this Italian nobleman have known about the rich iconographic history of such a “cosmic” cloak and its use by Charles the Bald and Otto III? How would he have commissioned it from Regensburg? Was the cloak, which presumably would have taken some time to make, commissioned specifically for the Easter ceremonies of 1020, and how far in advance would Melos or Henry have known about Pope Benedict VII’s plans to be in Bamberg for the holiday? While it may be impossible to answer such questions, skirting them makes one wonder about who, really, was responsible for the ideas that Garrison imputes to the rulers themselves without much consideration of the ecclesiastics who surrounded the Ottonian rulers. Bernward of Hildesheim, for instance, rates a mere three mentions.

The book’s three central chapters are structured to link each ruler with a particular place—Otto’s “encounter with the divine” at Aachen, Henry’s subsequent “remaking of the Aachen treasury,” and Henry “pictured for all time” at Bamberg—which is an effective way to demonstrate how important issues in Ottonian theopolitics were articulated in and through key sites. It is difficult, however, to parse some of the specific assertions made by Garrison, who relies on thick descriptions that layer multiple observations about individual artworks with relatively well-known ideas about Ottonian kingship, not all of which completely cohere. For example, Garrison has a keen eye when she discerns how Otto’s portrait in the Aachen/Liuthar Gospels is informed by that manuscript’s evangelist images, all of which prominently feature a scroll that “clothes” the figures—evangelists and ruler alike—in the Gospels. Comparisons between the ruler image and several of the Christological narratives are also suggestive, and although I do not see the connection between the frames of these miniatures and the structure of the palace chapel at Aachen (a connection largely based on unpublished work by Otto Karl Werckmeister, her dissertation supervisor), Garrison would be more convincing if she extended further the implications of this provocative idea. At the very least, one would have expected some engagement with the (controversial) thesis by Henry Mayr-Harting on certain New Testament images in the Otto Gospels serving as reflections of events in Otto’s own life. Similarly, Garrison is astute when she underscores the prominence of crowns and the recurring Hand of God in the Sacramentary of Henry II (Munich, Bavarian State Library, Clm 4456) as a way to communicate the divine favor Henry will receive in this world and after his resurrection in the next. Yet the comparison between the Sacramentary’s standing ruler image and that of Henry the Wrangler in the Niedermünster Rule Book (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek Msc. Lit. 142) seems forced, despite the fact that Garrison is correct in saying that the Rule Book, with its picture of Henry II’s father, was of great importance to the emperor, who transferred it to Bamberg.

Such disagreements about the reading of particular images should not obscure the contribution Garrison has made to our understanding of Ottonian art, especially its ruler portraits (and I, at least, am not troubled by the fact that she does not theorize the notion of the portrait, which here is simply shorthand for sanctioned images of the ruler that would have been understood by contemporaries as representations of that ruler). Garrison clearly demonstrates how central art was to the creation of a “material historical narrative,” which was forged through a “spoliating imperative” that collapsed past, present, and future for an audience comprising equally the rulers themselves, the people around them, and, above all, God. Readers familiar with Ottonian art will find much in this book to admire and ponder further, while those turning to the volume as an entrée to the period will find Garrison a clear guide to the intricate ways the Ottonian rulers used lavish art to communicate their place in the world and in the Christian cosmos.