There aren't many art historians or researchers in general who, at the age of 93, present a book that represents a kind of cross-sum of their life's work.

And there will be even fewer who have such a broad horizon of experience as Anton Legner, who as a child and adolescent in Prague experienced both the funeral of the first Czechoslovak President Masaryk and that of the "executive of Prague" Reinhard Heydrich, on the resistance fighter in 1942 carried out a deadly assassination attempt.

In Masaryk's case, a "great, solemn calm lay over the wintry city," Legner writes in his book; in Heydrich's case, "men in black uniforms stood guard, and dull drum rolls accompanied the eerie procession."

Uwe Ebbinghaus

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Anton Legner, who, after studying in Germany and working at the Augustinian Museum in Freiburg and the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, was director of the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne from 1970 to 1990, talks almost casually in the last chapter about these two details that show his early sensitivity to the most diverse forms of reflect the commemoration of the dead.

The book is actually supposed to be about the cultural history of rock crystal, but the memoirs in the last chapter - Legner calls them "crystal stations" - make it clear that the unique natural material embodies a metaphysical figure of thought for the art historian that shaped his life and at the same time leads right into a spiritual experience of the Middle Ages, one that has become increasingly alien in modern times.

Whereby the special constellation

When Legner came to Cologne in the 1970s, the city in which the relics of the Three Kings had been venerated since the Staufer period and, in the Golden Chamber, the remains of St. Ursula and her 11,000 companions, he was impressed by the partially ornamental arrangement of bones "not strange, but known and familiar".

It reminded him of the "relic stagings in the Prague churches" shaped by Emperor Charles IV's mania for collecting.

He was aware early on that this special understanding of medieval piety challenged the zeitgeist.

He writes mischievously that the students in his art history seminars would often have felt as if they had "inadvertently gotten into a religious event" when the "aura of the objects" was once again the focus.

"Kölner Reliquary Culture" was the name of Legner's last book from 2017. In the new one about rock crystal, relics and their transcending religious function also play an important role.

Since the Middle Ages, the crystal had served them as a shell that enabled the “sanctuaries” to be seen and protected at the same time, as Legner writes.

The rock crystal was able to make the holy visible and at the same time, in its purity and clarity, to reflect the essential characteristics of the holy.

In addition, according to the Book of Revelation, he referred to the heavenly Jerusalem as a precious crystal, the foundations of which were adorned with twelve precious stones.

It was not until the fifteenth century that glass overtook rock crystal, which is found in mountain caves and symbolically connects earth and sky, in its long unchallenged purity.

Luther's assessment of relics as "dead things" also marginalized reliquaries made of rock crystal;

it was not uncommon for them to be rededicated as secular drinking vessels after the Reformation.

If you look at all the reliquaries, monstrances and crosses presented in the richly illustrated book with the eyes of the 21st century, in which the rock crystal is partly used as a decorative element, it seems almost inconspicuous and therefore puzzling because of its glass resemblance.

Only after reading this book do you see him with new eyes and understand his importance and radiance.

The aura that the reader may still be missing can be experienced in the exhibition “Magie Bergkristall”, which opened in November in the Schnütgen Museum.