Restoring Charlemagne’s chapel: historical consciousness, material culture, and transforming images of Aachen in the 1840s

The 1840s offer crystallizing images of Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen that continue to resonate. In this decade, the Carolingian building, restored in words and images by scholars, made an auspicious debut within the coalescing discipline of art history. Simultaneously, the well-known restoration of the extant medieval chapel, which began in the 1850s, found sure footing as the chapel’s columnar screen, which Napoleon had removed, was reinserted. While these co-existing, interrelated restoration movements – focused on the chapel’s dilapidated state and notions of its importance as an imperial, Christian, and German work – diverged in methods and results after mid-century, they remain central to understanding both the chapel in scholarship and the extraordinary monument in the town centre of Aachen today.