ABSTRACT
North Sea art and architecture demonstrate again that pattern of religious and artistic confrontation, which so often occurred as Christianity supplanted pagan belief. The artist literally combined rather than reproduced elements from different sources: a Carolingian ivory from Metz, surrounded by Byzantine and Ottonian enamels. Ottonian artists created a new imperial style by combining and reinterpreting elements of Roman, Germanic, Byzantine, and Carolingian art. Dressed in imperial purple and seated in a royal hall in front of a magnificent cloth of honor, Otto recalls in this portrait earlier images of power, such as the Missorium of Theodosius. Faster and cheaper than painting and gilding, drawing suited active monastic scriptoria that were not sustained by an imperial court. The painters, profoundly affected by Carolingian art but at the same time the heirs of the strikingly different Hiberno-Saxon pictorial tradition, created two kinds of illustrated manuscripts: those with fully painted illuminations and those with colored drawings based on the Utrecht Psalter style.
