Morality in the Town Hall

This mural fragment was found in 1859 under the distemper in the walls of Cologne City Hall. There, as here, it was situated in the north wall. Its former location can be seen from the window: the large Council Chamber of the City Hall, later known as the Hansa Hall, which once served as the court and today is used for prestigious occasions. It was built c. 1330 and largely destroyed during the Second World War. In the late Middle Ages it was one of the most sumptuous secular rooms in Germany. The display wall on the south side shows stone carvings of the “none Worthies”, as they were known. These Pagan, Jewish and Christian heroes were viewed as models of upright living and wise governance. The bourgeois councilors of Cologne used them as it were as a – legendary – ancestral portrait gallery.

A similar political function was served by the paintings on the north side of the hall, which extended along both side walls. As the legal historian Stephan Altensleben discovered a few years ago, it showed the so-called “authorities”: primarily wise men from Pagan antiquity and the Old Testament who were all equipped with banderoles referring to the virtues (wisdom and justice) and the axioms of good government. The north wall also showed a conversation between the king and the seven electors (secular and ecclesiastical princes empowered to elect the king od the Holy Roman Empire). They are giving each other pieces of wise advice.

The elector’s adages, the maxims of authority and the axioms of city governance from the City Hall of late mediaeval Cologne have lost none of their topical relevance today.