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Updated: June 21, 2025
No bishop ever deserved sainthood more, or made a more practical contribution to the Church. Pope Celestine III. canonized him in 1194. Bernward came of a noble family. His figure may be seen as near an approach to a portrait of this great worker as we have among the bas-reliefs on the beautiful choir-screen in St. Michael's Church in Hildesheim.
This wide culture was unusual in those days; it is quite evident from his active life of accomplishment in creative art, that good Bishop Bernward was not to be numbered among those who expected the end of the world to occur in the year 1000 A. D. Of his works to be seen in Hildesheim, there are splendid examples. The Goldsmith's School under his direction was famous.
They are made of a metal composed of gold, silver, and iron, and are wrought magnificently, into a mass of animal and floriate forms, their outline being well retained, and the grace of the shaft and proportions being striking. They are partly the work of the mallet and partly of the chisel. They had been buried with Bernward, and were found in his sarcophagus in 1194.
There was some activity in Germany, for a time, the versatile Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim adding this craft to his numerous accomplishments, although it is probable that his works resembled the graffiti and inlaid work rather than the mosaics composed of cubes of smalt. At the Monastery of Monte Cassino in the eleventh century was an interesting personality, the Abbé Didier, its Superior.
At the end of the tenth century one Morard, under the patronage of King Robert, built and ornamented the Church of St. Germain des Près, Paris, while Guillaume, an Abbot at Dijon, was at the head of the works of forty monasteries. Guillaume probably had almost as wide an influence upon French art as St. Bernward had on the German, or Nicola Pisano on that of Italy.
It seems hardly possible that Roswitha could have seen its gifted bishop Bernward, himself a painter, and a worker in mosaic and metals, though owing to the uncertainty of the date of her death one chronicler making it as late as 1002 it is just possible that she may have done so.
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