A major part of the appeal of bronze as an artistic medium was its famed use by the ancients, who used it to cast statues of their gods and heroes. It is said that the ancient Greeks even valued it above all other materials. Despite this, the material was not interpreted as intrinsically ‘pagan’ and it did not deter later Christians from making religious sculptures from bronze, as proven by our Corpus Christi from circa 1200. The use of bronze was even justified by biblical passages that associated it with judgement and strength.

The adoption of Christianity in Scandinavia from around 1000 A.D., brought about a gradual transformation in the arts. Churches of lasting materials are built and decorated in styles sometimes derived from local pre-Christian traditions and sometimes borrowed from Romanesque, Gothic or Byzantine art. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, foreign workshops executed many important commissions in Scandinavia, and the style of local art shifted from the French orbit to the German. The century following the coronation of Danish king Valdemar the Great (1131-1182), in 1157, saw the construction of numerous Romanesque churches and was an age of relative security and prosperity in the region.