The plastic arts experience a great revival…

The plastic arts experience a great revival under concerted royal and ecclesiastical patronage by Germany’s Saxon Ottonian dynasty.

The relief-covered bronze doors commissioned by Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim for his cathedral are the most impressive manifestation of Ottonian bronze casting and the first bronze doors to be cast in one piece in northern Europe.

Bernward has door wings decorated with typological images in parallel, scenes from the Old and the New Testament; the force of the gestures and the use of unadorned surface as dramatic interval in the episode of Adam and Eve reproached by the Lord has no precedent in the history of art; this creation establishes a sculptural tradition of historical narrative that distinguishes Romanesque and later bronze doors.

The figures spiraling around the shaft of the so-called Christ's Column at St. Michael's, Hildesheim, evoke the triumphal columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.

Much can be surmised of Byzantium’s relationship to art in this era from the fact that one of the great creations of fourth century BCE sculptor Lysippus, the colossal bronze seated Heracles at Tarentum, later sent to Rome and then to the Hippodrome at Constantinople, is in 1022 melted down.