Focus on this artwork and discuss the Original location dispute.
The "Angelic temple" named in the inscription has been identified by some scholars as Bernward's sepulchral church of the archangel St. Michael. According to them, the doors were originally hung in the south aisle (perhaps as two separate doors), in the cloisters, or in no longer extant westwork and were transferred to the Cathedral in 1035 for the new western entrance which Wolfhere (de) reports that Bishop Gotthard had made in his biography, Vita Godehardi. A combination of the previous hypothesis with the original location of the doors is provided by Wesenberg. Latterly, Bernhard Bruns attempted to locate the original location of the doors at St. Michael's by their iconography. The excavations carried out during renovations in 2006 have now demonstrated that St. Michael's never had a westwork. But the installation of the doors on the south aisle has also come into question, since foundation remains of a narthex were found there, next to the western stairway tower. Recent research in religious history now demonstrates templum angelicum was a liturgical form for a church dedicated to St. Michael.Other scholars argue that the doors were in Hildesheim Cathedral from the beginning, in the westwork which is otherwise held to have first been built in 1035. Although the current west gallery has only been there since 1035, they argue that Bernward had already laid down a west building here, whose shape and appearance can no longer be reconstructed with confidence. Either Bernward would have had the previous west choir and the crypt underneath truncated to create space for a vestibule, where the Bernward Doors might have been installed or he would have had the west choir extended and installed the doors in the entrance to a chapel, which would have been built in front of the apse. Only a few hints in the foundations support the idea of a Bernwardian west gallery in the cathedral and they allow no more detailed conjecture about its layout.
Literary sources offer no evidence for Bernward's construction work on the cathedral. If the doors were located in the western part of the building, they would have had to have been moved pretty soon after, since the cathedral was drastically altered by his successors Gotthard, Azelin and Hezilo. A later period of drastic reconstruction of the western part of the building occurred in 1842–50. Later, the westwork was largely rebuilt after taking severe damage in an air raid during the Second World War. The modern plan of Wilhelm Fricke (which is not uncontroversial) is not based on the alleged layout of Bernward's time, but on the westwork of Minden Cathedral and the alleged appearance of Hildesheim cathedral's westwork under Bishop Hezilo (1054–61).The leaves of the door escaped damage in the air raid of Hildesheim on 22 March 1945 only because they had been removed (at the initiative of the cathedral chapter) almost three years earlier, along with many other artworks of the cathedral. The leaves of the doors were taken to the so-called Kehrwieder wall in the southeast of the old city, where they spent the war underground. Since the doors weigh several tonnes, they had to be transported lying longwise in a stable scaffold by two teams of horses.
cloisters Hezilo Azelin Vita Godehardi St. Michael Bishop Gotthard westwork archangel Hildesheim cathedral chapter Minden Cathedral narthex de Wolfhere Hildesheim Cathedral aisle Second World War