Ottonian Architecture

Ottonian architecture is the building style of the Holy Roman Empire under the Ottonian dynasty in Germany during the tenth and eleventh centuries, a deliberate revival and development of earlier Carolingian forms. Its defining monument is the Church of St Michael in Hildesheim, built between 1010 and 1033 under the patronage of Bishop Bernward, who had served as tutor to the young Holy Roman Emperor Otto III before his own appointment to the bishopric. The church introduced what became a hallmark of the style, an alternating rhythm of piers and columns marching down the nave arcade, known as the Saxon alternation system, together with a monumental fortified west end called a westwork, itself inherited from Carolingian building. Ottonian churches such as St Michael's were also designed with a striking bilateral symmetry, carrying a second, matching apse and transept at the west end to mirror the one at the east, a plan that gave the building two liturgically active ends rather than one, and the style's forms directly shaped the Romanesque architecture that followed across the empire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.