ABSTRACT
In the Carolingian renaissance representational forms of art were imposed on a culture whose aesthetic traditions were almost exclusively abstract and ornamental. Moreover the commentaries on the Six Days of Creation published by Origen and his contemporary Hippolytus were the first notable Christian contributions to the Hexaemeron literature. Similar shifts of emphasis also distinguish the most important early commentaries of the Six Days of Creation which show at the same time how clearly these different versions of the Genesis story in art express the church’s changing attitude to nature. In Germany, where the Ottonian emperors continued to commission the sumptuously illustrated type of liturgical books favoured by their Carolingian predecessors, the hieratic images in those books were increasingly adapted to the northern taste for two-dimensional patterning. The philological approach to the letter of the Scriptures was first developed in the school of Antioch, in opposition to the allegorical approach of Origen and the Alexandrian school.
