| This ninth-century bronze statue depicts either Charlemagne or his grandson, Charles the Bald. Notker the Stammerer, one of the biographers of Charlemagne, suggested that Charlemagne was ordained by God to be the heir of Rome: "He who ordains the fate of kingdoms, and the march of the centuries, the all-powerful Disposer of events, having destroyed one extraordinary image, that of the Romans . . . then raised up, among the Franks, the golden head of a second image, equally remarkable, in the person of the illustrious Charlemagne." |
