[3] Egbert was a significant patron of science and the arts, who established one or more workshops of goldsmiths and enamellers at Trier, which produced works for other Ottonian centres and the Imperial court.

But as archbishop Egbert seems to have still been fighting a rearguard action, building on developments by his predecessor of the story of the origins of the see, in which a staff given by Saint Peter to Eucharius, the supposed first bishop, played a large role.

[6] The appearance, not recorded before Egbert's episcopy, of an actual staff alleged to be that Saint Peter gave to Eucharius, certainly deserves to be treated with great suspicion as a "brazen" fabrication.

[8] Egbert was one of the most important Ottonian clerical patrons, and though he also built churches and monasteries, and no doubt commissioned wall-paintings and works in other media, the surviving pieces are in the form of metalwork with enamel and illuminated manuscripts.

There are three main survivals of metalwork pieces certainly commissioned by Egbert, though contemporary literary references make it clear there was originally a large production, and both the three clear survivals and a larger group of objects often related to Trier both show "astonishingly little unity" in style and workmanship, which makes the confident attribution of other pieces such as the Cross of Otto and Mathilde very difficult.

The finest painter of this manuscript worked on a number of other books, probably at Trier and later Reichenau, and is known as the Gregory Master, whose work looked back in some respects to Late Antique manuscript painting, and whose miniatures are notable for "their delicate sensibility to tonal grades and harmonies, their fine sense of compositional rhythms, their feelings for the relationship of figures in space, and above all their special touch of reticence and poise".

[17] The Egbert Psalter, which he commissioned for his own use in Trier Cathedral, was used a number of times after his death as a diplomatic gift, travelling as far as Russia and Hungary, and has been in Cividale del Friuli in northern Italy since 1229.

[20] A well-known miniature in the Registrum Gregorii of Gregory writing probably represents Egbert also, and the pairing of portraits of popes and bishops of Trier found on the Limburg staff also appears.