Nicholas of Verdun

Nicholas of Verdun (c. 1130 – c. 1205) was a renowned metalworker, goldsmith and enamellist active around the years 1180–1205. He was born in the city of Verdun, Upper Lorraine. The region extending from the valley of the Rhine and Meuse rivers to Cologne was the major northern center of copperplate enameled metalwork in the 12th century and Nicholas was probably trained in one of the many Mosan workshops. Although he must have maintained a large atelier of his own with numerous assistants, possibly based in Verdun, commissions in Cologne, northern France and outside Vienna required him to travel frequently.

Around the year 1200, a new awareness in northern Europe of Byzantine art, coinciding with a revival of interest in classical art, led to the emergence of a highly classicizing style of figural representation in stone sculpture, metalwork and manuscript illumination. Nicholas of Verdun was a leading practitioner of this short-lived proto-Renaissance as seen in the enameled plaques of the Klosterneuburg Altar and the Three Kings Shrine in Cologne Cathedral.^[1]