To understand why the Madonna was made, you have to understand what was happening in 983. Emperor Otto II had died suddenly in Rome, leaving the throne to his son Otto III - aged three. Otto III's mother Theophanu, a Byzantine princess by birth, served as regent and held the empire together against Henry the Quarrelsome, who was making his own claim to the crown. The reigning abbess of Essen at this moment was Mathilde, granddaughter of Otto I and a partisan of the regent's cause. Look at the sculpture now and the politics become hard to miss: a woman holds a globe in her right hand, an orb of power, while a small but extravagantly dressed Christ child sits on her lap. A mother holding the world for her son until he is old enough to rule it. Historians have long suspected that Theophanu herself donated the figure to Essen Abbey as both devotion and statement.

The core is poplar, carved from one trunk. The carver clearly had not done much of this before - statues this big and this free-standing had been almost unknown in the Christian world since the Byzantine iconoclasm two centuries earlier. The proportions don't quite resolve: the profile, the front, and the back do not flow into a single coherent body. None of which mattered, because the surface was what people saw. Sheets of gold leaf were beaten thin enough to wrap the wood smoothly and then pressed in around every fold of the carved drapery. The folds themselves echo those on the Cross of Otto and Mathilde, dated 982 and known to have come from a Cologne goldsmith's shop. That stylistic fingerprint is the strongest evidence we have for where the Madonna was born.

The thing she holds aloft has puzzled historians for a thousand years. It looks like a globus cruciger, the orb-and-cross symbol of imperial sovereignty, except that the cross is gone and her fingers grip it in a way no emperor in the artistic record ever does. One reading: it is an "apple of salvation," a deliberate inversion of Eve and the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Mary, the New Eve, offers redemption where Eve offered damnation. Another reading: it is the Mundus, the world itself, and Mary holds it on behalf of the infant who is its true ruler. Both readings work. In the 10th century, theology and politics were the same conversation. A mother regent ruling for an underage emperor would have heard her own situation in both.

From her creation through the Reformation, the Golden Madonna lived a life. She was kept normally in the treasury and brought out for major feasts. On the most important procession - the Purification of the Virgin, forty days after Christmas - the treasuress handed her to the youngest canon of the parish on the eve of the feast. He hid her under his cloak and carried her at night to St. Gertrude's church in the city. The next morning she was veiled and carried back to the cathedral in solemn procession, laid on the offering stone called the steyn, ceremonially unveiled, and crowned with the child crown of Otto III. Then she was carried back into the minster, just as Mary had been welcomed by the people of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The processions ended in 1561 when the Reformation reached the city, though not the abbey. Bishop Franz Hengsbach revived the ritual in 1978. Concerns from the restorers ended it again in 2000.

Pope John XXIII issued a Pontifical decree on 8 July 1959 naming the Golden Madonna as Our Lady of Good Counsel and patroness of the newly established Diocese of Essen, the so-called Ruhrbistum. The decree was signed by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Domenico Tardini. That same year, Cardinal Hengsbach moved her out of the treasury and into a climate-controlled, high-security showcase in the northern side chapel of Essen Cathedral, where she remains. The Ruhr is one of the most heavily industrialized regions on earth, a place defined for two centuries by coal smoke and steel furnaces. Its symbol is a thousand-year-old wooden statue covered in gold leaf, made for a queen defending her son's throne.