WARNING: this is a long post, and I chose to include an unusually large number of pictures.
Today was a THREE museum day, because someone inherited their mother’s love of museums.
We visited the Germanic Roman Museum, the Schnütgen Museum of Mediaeval Art, and the Cologne City Museum, effectively transporting us from Cologne’s earliest settlements to present day.
We expected to be visiting the Germanic Roman Museum in its large purpose built building right beside the Dom.
The museum’s location was was chosen because that is where a huge Roman mosaic floor was excavated. That excavation obviously cannot be moved. Unfortunately, in 2019, very suddenly the fire department realized that the building was not safe and closed it to the public. Movable exhibits are now in the Belgian House and will remain here until the museum can be renovated. The docent at the new location mentioned that the city simply does not have the money to do it and there is therefore no expected completion date. Sadly, the magnificent Roman mosaic floor is only visible on the images printed on the hoarding around the site .
It came to light in 1941 – in the middle of the Second World War – during the construction of an air raid shelter.
It is still in its original location today. Maybe someday I’ll be back to see it.
Instead, the museum is “temporarily” located in Belgium House.
On the walk to the new location, we passed a whimsical memorial to Cologne native singer/songwriter Jupp Schmitz, who penned many beloved nonsense songs that have become part of the German sing-along lexicon.
Because of the small number of exhibits that were able to be moved into a much smaller gallery space, our museum visit, which we had thought would take up an entire morning, really only lasted about 90 minutes. That was disappointing, but nonetheless, we saw some very impressive artifacts.
While the museum is focussed on Cologne’s Roman history, there is one corner that talks about the fact that there were certainly people here long before the Romans. Around the middle of the sixth millennium BCE in the Stone Age there were farmers living here, and archeological evidence has been found to verify their existence in the area
The museum’s collection comes with a caveat:
“In its heyday, Roman Cologne was a pulsating metropolis on the edge of the empire with about 40,000 inhabitants.
The citizens liked to call themselves Agrippinenses after the empress Agrippina. It did not matter whether one came from a remote province or was born in Cologne. The archaeological evidence creates a colourful picture of the city’s society.
Free, freed, slaves, craftsmen, merchants, artists, soldiers, priests or city councillors give a small insight into their lives with their stone inscriptions . And yet some of the inhabitants are missing, because the poor left no traces.”
As expected in a museum of Roman artefacts, there were quite a few marble busts.
I’m choosing to blame Emperor Hadrian, depicted in this 2nd century bust, for #1’s look. Hadrian was the first emperor to grow a beard, probably in honour of the Greek philosophers.
The Roman army erected an unknown building on behalf of Emperor Nero. After his death his memory was destroyed; the inscrip-tion stone was built into a sewer!
Lorraine limestone (reused stone material from Roman antiquity)
While statues and stele and mosaic floors are nice, it’s the trash of daily existence that tells archeologists the most about a civilization. In this case, the lack of oxidization allowed the ancient inscriptions on stoneware shards to be read.
That, and known characteristics of items coming from other countries, helped generate a map of trade through Cologne. Cologne was a flourishing trading metropolis with the Rhine as its economic lifeline. In par-ticular, Cologne was the hub of trade with Britain. Merchants transported regional products as well as goods from the Mediterranean region to Britain and salt and oysters to Cologne.
The large portion of a grave monument (below) shows the deceased as a sailor.
As Germany has become more and more secular after WWII, football (soccer) has become the new religion for some.
Roman rule did not last. In the middle of the 5th century, the Franks took over Cologne, eventually absorbing it into the Frankish Empire of King Clovis.
Christians by that time generally regarded earthly objects as inappropriate for the afterlife. Through the influx of Frankish groups, however, the grave-goods custom experienced an up-swing. Even if they were Christians, the Franks gave goods like precious jewellery, weapons and vessels to their dead, according to old custom.
A highlight of Cologne’s Roman -Germanic Museum is its worldwide largest collection of Roman glass.
There was a good representation of items from the balance of the museum’s holdings. I took pictures of a few of my favourites.
After our immersion into Colonia (Roman Cologne), we were ready for a Kaffee und Kuchen break at the nearby Mezernich, one of a chain of excellent bakery cafes. They feature dozens of kinds of bread, available sliced and sold by weight, rolls, sweet goods, cakes, sandwiches, and more. Of course, they also offer excellent coffee.
The bees showed no interest in our delicious PflaumenSchnitten (plum slices) or Milchkaffees ( café au lait).
Refreshed, we walked over to the Schnütgen Museum of Art of the Middle Ages.
No explanation.
The new museum with the brick and glass facade is attached to the Romanesque Cäcilien Church, which is used as gallery space.
The foundational collection here was donated to the city in 1906 by Alexander Schnütgen, who was born in Steele an der Ruhr in 1843, and ordained a priest in Cologne in 1866. Shortly afterwards, he was appointed cathedral vicar, and in 1887 he became a cathedral canon, a special position for clergymen. Over several decades, he collected thousands of works of sacred art, mainly from the Middle Ages. His collection was one of the most important of its kind at the time.
The first things we saw, located in the entry where museum brochures could be picked up, were stained glass windows.
Cologne, c. 1530
Normally when we see mediaeval stained glass windows panels, they are so high up in churches and cathedrals that all we can do is admire from afar. The collection here at the Schnütgen has panels from 16th century stained glass windows mounted close enough to touch. The detail is really quite incredible.
Master of St. Severin (?), c. 1505-1520
and Cologne, c. 1520-1535
The next space we entered contained the work of stonemasons. In the Middle Ages there was plenty of stone in Cologne from the old Roman buildings. It could be repurposed or re-carved. There were dozens more than just the 3 examples be.
Brauweiler, last third of the 11th cent.
Master of the Laach Samson, c. 1220
Then we were back to stained glass.
Cologne, c. 1250-1260 (close-up detail below)
Above one of the gallery alcoves was more repurposed Roman stone: two segments of a Romanesque portal frame, Cologne, c. 1200-1230CE
The galleries were made even more interesting by the inclusion of smaller items.
Bronze
Within the museum’s stained glass collection one of the most moving exhibitions is the stained glass that was transferred here from Kyiv in the Ukraine. Although Schnütgen and the couple in Kyiv who collected the glass there began their collections almost simultaneously in the 1870s, there was never an original intent to bring the two collections together. However, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022 created the necessity of safeguarding the Ukrainian pieces (stained glass is especially vulnerable to vibrations, like those created when bombs explode). Bringing those works to Cologne to combine with the collection that resided here was a logical choice. The result is the amassing of some truly incredible works of mediaeval stained glass.
Cologne or Lower Rhine, c. 1520-1530
After the galleries of vibrant colour, we moved into a less well lit room containing vestments and liturgical items. We’d seen so many magnificent examples in the Dom’s Schatzkammer that it was easy to spend less time in this section of the museum.
One of my favourite items in the room was an 18th century nativity scene from Naples, where artists developed a special tradition of dressing the figures in real textiles and then arranging them in theatrical scenes in scenic and architecturally designed sets with detailed accessories. In this example the oriental dress of the kings and their entourage was particularly fascinating. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but the scene was quite large -probably about 1.2m/4 ft tall, and a metre wide and deep.
Two other pieces in the room drew my attention: the life-sized portrait of Alexander Schnütgen, and an ivory comb supposedly owned by St Heribert.
We then moved through an exhibit of memento mori (macabre depictions of the dance of death and carved skeletons) on to my favourite part of the museum, not least because its galleries were located in what had once been a church. The massive Romanesque space was the perfect setting for a collection of large carved and sculptural works of mediaeval art created for the city and churches of Cologne.
There was little separation between the mediaeval church and state, so figures that appeared on the cathedral could just as easily appear on the Rathaus (city hall) portico. The crowns of the three biblical kings and the symbols of the 11,000 companions of Saint Ursula (somehow magically multiplied by 1000 from the original 11 virgins) were incorporated into the city’s coat of arms.
The religious aspect and control changed a bit in 1396CE with the first Cologne city constitution. From then on, a city council and the mayor were elected by the citizens entitled to vote, instead of the city being ruled by the archbishop. The voters were organised into twenty-two Gaffeln, basically guilds in which merchants and craftsmen joined together.
Nonetheless, while there may have been fewer saints added to buildings, there were lots of “prophets”. Semantics?
These figures from the Old City Hall date to about 1450CE.
It’s always fascinating to me to realize that when we see things now that look fairly monochromatic they didn’t start out that way. Our first exposure to that was when Ted and I visited the Parthenon in Athens and realized that the beautiful white marbles did not start out white, but in fact were painted to be polychromatic and indeed very brightly colored.
The set of statues from the prophets door of the old City Hall now look like shades of brown wood. They didn’t start out that way, though, and there is a wonderful interactive display screen that shows the various ways that they were painted over the centuries. While I think that in the context of modern European sensibilities they look quite lovely, they certainly would have been much more eye-catching in their original 15th century bright white robes and vibrant colors, with gilded trim.
Over the centuries they were repainted many times.. How do they know about the various changes in colour? Radiographic imagery combined with very careful scraping of layers in inconspicuous places.
In the late 19th century they were at their gaudiest.
Since the Romanesque space was so open, large pieces could be easily displayed, and there was lots of room to walk around each item and get a really close look.
Among the smaller pieces (each only around 0.6m/2ft tall) were about a dozen Carrara marble sculptures from the high altar of Cologne Cathedral, c. 1310. They would originally have been gilded.
I chose four favourites.
I’ll admit to being absolutely fascinated by the mediaeval reliquaries. We learned that there was such a clamour for religious relics that during the Crusades the motto was “the more the better”. Hence, I suppose, St Ursula’s 11 martyred virgin companions not being enough. Certainly a lot of blind faith was needed to assume that a nail found in 1069CE was verifiably from the true cross.
As #1 noted in reaction to the notes we read about St Denis, lopping off the tops of one’s head isn’t necessarily a great headache cure.
One of the larger wood carvings on display was this life sized depiction of Christ on the Palm Donkey made in Cologne around 1520 CE of limewood on a softwood base with wheels, and colourfully painted.
Another limewood piece from about half a century earlier was this statue of St Jerome as a Cardinal. It was acquired in 1918 from the church in Lövenich near Erkelenz and was particularly well restored in 2024 with the support of the Friends of the Schnütgen Museum. Restorations like this are both time consuming and expensive.
There were some truly impressive and amazing things in this museum. We spent about 2 1/2 hours and could certainly have spent more than that.
We took a short break for cold drinks: an Apfelschorle for me (half unsweetened apple juice/ half carbonated mineral water) and a Spezi for #1. Spezi, and similar brand called Mezzo Mix, is a very popular German carbonated drink that is half cola and half orange soda, although in Germany orange sodas (like Fanta) are a formulation that is less sweet and less brightly coloured – closer to carbonated orange juice than North American orange pop.
I also needed to quickly charge my phone to allow me to take more photos, so we made a 20 minute pit stop back at our hotel.
I feel as if I should preface the next section with Monty Python’s “and now for something completely different”.
Our third exploration, at the Cologne City Museum, gave us some insight into what it’s like living here today. Focussed around multiple themed areas like “What Do We Love?”, “What Moves Us?”, “What Connects Us?”, and “What Scares Us?”, the interactive exhibits (all in both German and English) look at events and ideologies that have created modern Cologne.
A lot of pride is exhibited, but also humility and the acknowledgment that this is not a perfect city, no matter how beloved.
The museum is really about getting to know not the physical city, but its people.
I’ve made my notes in the order that we visited each area. There’s no “correct” way to experience the exhibits. What they all gave in common is an area where visitors can listen to the voices of actual Cologne citizens talking about an aspect of their city.
One resident’s response to “what makes you afraid?” was “Cycling in Cologne is no walk in the park.”
But most of the city’s people legitimately fear things they’ve seen happen in the past and worry could repeat.
This was a really fun area, with lots of examples of the city’s music culture, traditional stories, iconic brands, and civic pride.
1711 may be “The World’s Most Famous House Number”
In 1714, Johann Maria Farina moved from Italy to Cologne and joined the company his brother had established in 1709. Here he produced a perfume that he named “Eau de Cologne” in honour of the city. The Farina brand was soon in high demand as a global luxury product. Its customers included Goethe and Napoleon.
It is shaped a little like a carriage and earned its name – Vis-à-Vis – from the arrangement of the seats. Its four-stroke engine has 6-8 horse-power. It features two enclosed candle bulbs, a carbide lamp and an oil lamp at the rear.
While this area focussed largely on Cologne’s media, it also tied into the adjacent area that included food, since food and language tie people together as much as do shared values. Like most German states, many of which were once independent principalities, Cologne has its own dialect. The tone is cheeky. We’d been noticing funny sayings on all off the city’s public waste receptacles, but not understanding all of them.
Because I speak and read German , I knew that the English translations on most of these “Cologne philosophies” were boring paraphrasing and explanation of the meaning behind the saying without actually translating them, so I’ve done my best…
1. It is what it is.
2. It goes the way it goes.
3. It’s always gone well before.
4. What’s done is done (often seen on waste bins!)
5. Nothing stays the same.
6. Don’t understand it, don’t need it, done with it!
7. What’s can you do?
8. Do it all, but not too often!
9. What’s this nonsense?
10. Drink one more?
11. Laugh yourself to bits
Food. Fun. Sex. Cologne is, in contrast to its religious physical appearance either do many incredible churches, at heart an unabashedly sensual city.
It was fun to learn the names of common foods in local dialect by using interactive games, and also fun to get a better understanding of local idioms.
Cologne is home to Europe’s biggest and arguably most outlandish Carnival parade on Rosen Montag (Rose Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras). The floats here lean heavily toward political commentary, and are often very rude. Carnival itself dates to the Middle Ages here.
What majestic people here angry and frustrated?
Scandals, whether political, religious, or financial. In fact, major and minor scandals have been so frequent over the centuries that Cologne came up with its own unique word for nepotism: Klüngel!
Social injustice and gender-based violence.
Transportation and infrastructure issues.
The things that make people angry here sound pretty familiar.
There’s a cautionary tale retold here about what happens when ideology replaces religion.
It was a very full day that deserved a pre-dinner German version of an aperitivo in the cathedral square: cold Kölsch and Mett Happen (mett is pork tartar, in this case spread on crusty rolls – a delicacy all over central snd northern Germany).
We returned to our hotel fir a couple of hours rest and then had a late dinner on the river at RheinZeit, where we completed our goal of eating each of Cologne’s specialties, this time Himmel und Äad (Himmel und Erde/Heaven and Earth): sliced and fried blood sausage with puréed potatoes and apple compote.
Tomorrow we head to Bremen and the port of emigration.
Rose and Ted’s Excellent Adventure 