I’ve used AI in the past to try and add colour to usually wooden statues which have limited evidence of their past polychrome look. It often makes it look colourful and that is in keeping with what I’ve seen in wider imagery.
This screen in the museum shows the evolution of how the figures in their collection were painted. This shows a much more pure and white look back in the medieval period towards more colour recently, although goodness knows what happened between 1893 and 1895.
This is an under-stated little number, it’s a bell which happens to be one of the oldest surviving in any German speaking country. It’s thought to date from around the early part of the ninth century and it’s made from three pieces of forged iron which have been smoothed and then riveted together.
The bell is nicknamed ‘Saufang’ which means ‘pig’s catch’ as it is rumoured that it got buried in a nearby pond and was discovered by a pig. As with many of these rumours, it’s likely made up, but it’s a nice story.
However, what I think is the most exciting thing about this bell is that it is from this church (what was then the Convent of St Cecilia which was founded in 888), or at least, the religious building that was here before. It left the church in the nineteenth century, but now the building is used as a museum it has made its way back here indirectly. I very much like this circle of history and there’s no better place for the bell to be today.
This felt mildly unsettling when walking by it, namely a skull tucked away in the stonework. According to the museum display, this may originally have formed part of a cell like hermitage. This would have been the home of an anchoress, a female enclosed beside a church in order to renounce the world in a very literal and rather committed way. She would have lived for years in what was usually a single stone room attached to the side of the church, with the shuttered slit allowing her to receive communion and be able to be involved with services. I don’t think I’d like this, it would play havoc with my travel plans.
The information panel notes that these recluses were normally higher ranking people (as someone who have to be paid to bring them food), and that as many as fourteen such cells are documented in Cologne between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.
It was only discovered in 1976 and the skull is likely not linked to the hermitage, this dates to the seventeenth century when the area was reworked to be a burial vault for the Augustinian canonesses who were operating the church.
This is one of my more irrelevant posts, although sometimes I wonder if any are actually relevant, but it’s an abandoned car park in Cologne. I wasn’t brave enough to explore it as I’m hardly going to be an urban explorer, but I like how quickly nature can take over.
It’s located on Deutz-Mülheimer Strasse and I’m pleased to say that they have closed the entrance from the road off as we all know someone who would otherwise drive down it….
My home for three nights was the Accor operated Ibis Budget which was coming in at just over £30 per night which I thought was very reasonable. It’s a short walk from the city centre of around fifteen minutes, so is conveniently located.
The little shop fridge area near the reception desk. The team member who was checking me in was friendly, although he was chewing gum quite aggressively which added to the whole experience for everyone.
There’s a bit of an effort to add character to the corridors.
The room is basic, but it’s cheap, so I’m easily pleased.
And from the other side of the room. That shower arrangement has been controversial in Ibis Budget hotels for years, but it’s being phased out now and they’re building enclosed bathrooms.
This is the photo of the city that has been placed over where the television used to be. Not that I ever turn TVs on in a hotel room, but they’ve upgraded the size of the screen.
Now this I think is brilliant. Very often in Accor hotels they will offer 100 points if you don’t have the room cleaned, which I usually take. However, hotels sometimes forget and have to be reminded and it’s all quite awkward getting the points sometimes.
Anyway, they take a different approach here, if you don’t have the room cleaned, you get a free drink from the earlier mentioned fridge. I thought this might be a faff to claim, but they pop a little card under the door which is the voucher that guests can claim their drink with. The offer includes all drinks, so I was pleased to get a couple of different beers for free.
All told, I very much liked this hotel as it felt like decent value for money. There were no noise issues internally or externally, with the team members being friendly and engaging. The online reviews are a little mixed, but they are often people expecting a rather more decadent room than is actually offered. I think the word ‘budget’ might be a clue here…
One one star review noted:
“Hardly anyone has a decent level of english…is it because Germany is self-sufficient and is thus not in need of tourists… shame on you”
Although the team members I encountered here spoke perfect English, there is a level of arrogance in thinking it’s shameful when they don’t.
“This hotel is right next to another ibis and the staff isn’t trained to guide customers to the right ibis”
There is a subtle clue that one hotel has an enormous “Ibis” sign and the other one has “Ibis Budget”. It’s not clear how staff are really meant to help customers who go wrong other than point them towards the correct hotel…..
Anyway, I’d stay here again, although it’s clear that the prices are ramped up considerably when there are trade shows on in the neighbouring buildings and I would be displeased to pay a lot of money to stay here. But when it’s keenly priced, all feels well.
Without verging too much into the political, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne is clearly trying to do something serious and in very many ways admirable. It does not want to be an old ethnographic museum that simply places objects in cases and invites visitors to gawp at them as though the wider history of colonialism, collecting and cultural power were of no consequence. That instinct is sensible, and probably necessary. There is a genuine effort to reinterpret the collection, to question how objects arrived in Europe, and to push visitors into thinking about who gets to tell these stories. On paper, that is all rather noble. In practice though the museum perhaps sometimes feels so anxious about the moral framing that it risks becoming slightly stiff and over-managed, as though it no longer quite trusts the objects to speak for themselves.
For all the language of reinterpretation, there remain plenty of fairly conventional displays of artefacts in cases in the first few rooms, presented in a manner that would not have seemed wildly unfamiliar in a much older museum. That in itself is not a problem and is no doubt deliberate as part of the story that they wish to tell about the evolution of the museum.
The collection is interesting, although the display labels are not very clear visually, and there is nothing shameful about displaying it properly and giving people the information they came for. But the curatorial voice often seems oddly nervous, almost apologetic, as if the museum is worried that straightforward engagement with the material might be morally suspect unless heavily supervised. The result is perhaps a slightly sub-optimal arrangement in which the institution appears, at moments, to be more comfortable critiquing the existence of its collection than actually helping visitors understand it in a direct and human way.
Museums do not need to pretend that difficult histories are not difficult, but nor do they perhaps need to turn every gallery into a little seminar in correct opinion. At times it feels less like a place eager to share knowledge and more like one slightly embarrassed by its own holdings.
Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg (1547-1601) was the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne and enjoyed the kind of job security most would kill for, until he met Agnes von Mansfeld and decided that a Protestant marriage was more convenient for his needs.
In a move that local Catholics found rather sub-optimal, he converted to Calvinism and tried to turn the Archbishopric into a secular family heirloom. This attempt to “have his cake and marry it too” ignored the situation where if you stop believing in a Church’s theology, you might actually want to leave it.
The resulting five year long Cologne War was partly the outcome and Gebhard’s defiance managed to annoy the Pope enough to earn him an excommunication and sparked a continental mess that dragged in Spanish and Dutch armies. Despite his grand ambitions of a secular dynasty, his Protestant allies eventually realised that subsidising a romantic rebellion was a poor investment, leaving Gebhard to flee his burning residence in Bonn.
Gebhard ended his days as a cathedral dean in Strasbourg, a significant step down from Prince-Elector. He’s still buried in Strasbourg cathedral, but his legacy is still relevant because Gebhard failed to transform Cologne into a secular Protestant duchy and so the territory became a vanguard of the Counter-Reformation. The artwork in the photo was painted in 1579 when all was well and before his little relationship issues was one of the reasons that a number of nations started to fight each other.
I had initially thought that this sculpture from the early 1300s had been damaged at some time over the centuries. But, it’s actually a representation of St. Denis. As for this story, St Denis had his head cut off because third century Roman authorities were not especially keen on Christians, which was, from his point of view, rather inconvenient and somewhat sub-optimal. According to the legend, he then picked up his own head and carried on walking, which is an extremely strong commitment to making an entrance and must have come across as very brave. So the skull came off in a martyrdom, but the story became famous because St Denis apparently treated decapitation as more of a setback than a full stop.
The exhibit was moved from the city’s Wallraf-Richartz Museum in 1929 and it was made in Cologne. It’s made from walnut and it looks like the colours were quite vibrant.
I did my usual thing of reverting to AI to see how it might have looked, but ChatGPT wasn’t having any of it. It decided that it was a violent image and noted:
“We’re so sorry, but the image we created may violate our content policies. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt.”
Google Gemini doesn’t have the same sensitive tendencies, but I think it might have gone a bit full on colour here.
Despite his arms having fallen off, this is St. Peter as apparently he can be identified by his hair. I’d add that I wouldn’t have known that, this is the view of the museum and I have no reason to doubt them.
The museum notes that this was made in the city and was inspired by the Cologne Cathedral sculptors and perhaps this is also from the same building. It dates from between 1315 and 1320 and is made from walnut.
He looks like a cheery soul and this polychrome sculpture is in quite a solid state of repair given its age. It’s a shame that more isn’t known about its provenance and what churches it has likely spent most of its time in, but I doubt that it has been out of Cologne for very long.
And back to AI to show what it might have looked like.
Cologne’s city library offers a practical little “library of things” alongside its books, allowing people to borrow outdoor games and leisure equipment rather than buy them. I think that it’s a rather sensible arrangement, especially for items people may only use occasionally, and it helps turn the library into a wider community resource. A very nice little idea.
There you go, you can borrow:
Boomerang
Boule
Croquet
Tin can throwing game
Cornhole
Hula hoop
Indiaca tennis
Jumping ropes
Skittles
Mölkky
Pedalo Classic
Giant Mikado
Giant bowling game
Slackline
Speedminton set
Quoits / ring toss
Stilts
Throwing game
Twister mat
Viking chess XXL
Ladder golf
