July 2001 - Nr. 7
Radiologist to Save Essen’s "Golden Madonna"
TWIG - The tenth-century Golden Madonna of Essen is so fragile that art experts decline to touch it for fear of the damage that even the slightest of movements might cause. But modern medicine is about to come to the relic’s aid. "Computer tomography is going to tell us how the statue is doing inside," explains Alfred Pothmann, the custodian of the Essen cathedral treasury. A team of conservators will then decide whether the statue - worth an estimated DM 200 million - should be fitted with a wooden core or reinforced instead with a ceramic filling.
Art restorers have already tried to save the linden wood core of the Golden Madonna many times. In 1904, they tried stabilizing it with a paste made of chalk, wood and glue. In the 1950s, they reinforced with plastic, but that, Pothmann laments, "did more harm than good." Recently an expert opened part of the statue and found its insides had become a gray crumbly mass. Now Hajo Jennissen, a radiologist and physicist in Cologne, has been asked to do a more thorough diagnosis. "I’ve already experimented on a wooden stake covered in gold leaf," says Jennissen. "It works - the rays go through the metal. You could even count the rings on the wood."
The Golden Madonna, so called because it is draped with a quarter-millimetre-thick layer of gold, is the oldest known sculpture of the Virgin Mary in Western Europe. It was commissioned by Abbess Mathilde of Essen in 990, when the city consisted of little more than a cloister for unmarried noblewomen and the craftspeople they helped support. The Golden Madonna is the centrepiece of the Essen cathedral’s extensive collection of medieval art, much of which was acquired through the cloister’s close connections with the German imperial families.
