The Xanten Purple Leaf and the Carolingian Renaissance

Abstract

The search for the actual prototypes of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance will long remain one of the foremost tasks imposed on the historian of Carolingian art. He must ask himself where and when these prototypes were created and how they may have looked. The question as to what stands behind these remarkably great and strange creations of Carolingian painting must be raised for each of its compositions and for every single motive and figure produced in its various schools. If, however, it becomes possible to answer this question, the answer will probably differ in every individual case. For the Renaissance tendencies of Carolingian art did not manifest themselves in a conscious reversion to one definite style of the past, as in the case of the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but rather in drawing from the vast, heterogeneous repertory of forms and content which had been left by all the preceding centuries, both in the West and in the East.