VIII. LATE 15TH CENTURY

COLOGNE

The Master of the Life of Mary (Marienleben Meister)

After the death of Stefan Lochner at mid-century, painting in Cologne–never on the cutting edge of modernity–went into a decline for about ten years, until the arrival of the Master of the Life of Mary, who brought fresh influence from Netherlandish painting, in particular from the style of Rogier van der Weyden (Brussels) and his follower, the Dutch-born Dirk Bouts, Sr. , whose workshop was in the university city of Louvain.

The Master of the Life of Mary seems to have worked in Cologne for only about five years.. His name is inspired by the series of 8 oak panel paintings, originally done for Cologne's Church of St. Ursula in the early 1460's. Seven of the panels are in Munich today; the eighth in London's National Gallery. The iconography of the series is based in part on the Golden Legend and in part on the Gospel of St. Luke.:

The Birth of Mary
Like his near contemporary the Florentine painter Ghirlandaio (whose work he could never have seen), the Marienleben Master's work is treasured for its natural details of costume and furnishings rather than for its power of expression. Here the birth takes place in a space modeled on a middle class home, with a tiled floor and carved Gothic furniture, including a cedar chest in which the expectant mother has stored swaddling clothes, baby blankets and such. A large number of midwives and/or neighbor women have arrived to care for St. Anne and to prepare the bath for her new daughter–surely a prefiguration of the impending Christian rite of baptism, if not also of the Immaculate Conception (the idea that St. Anne had also conceived by divine means. The series begins with a painting that we did not see–the Meeting of Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate, when they inform one another that angels have foretold Anne's miraculous pregnancy.)

The Annunciation
Like the following painting, The Visitation, the Annunciation involves only two figures and normally is treated in vertical format. For reasons probably specified by his client, the Marienleben Master chose to cast the entire series in matching horizontal compositions. Consequently, here a great deal of "dead air" between Mary and Gabriel is filled up with artfully constructed furnishings.

The Visitation
This painting deals with Mary's visit to her cousin Elizabeth, who is about to become the mother of John the Baptist. It is of particular interest to us because the portrait and coat-of-arms of the donor appear here on the left –Dr. Johann Schwarz von Hirtz, who is known to have donated the series to St. Ursula's in 1463–apparently in the form of a single altarpiece.  Dr. Schwarz-Hirtz (d.1481) had been knighted in 1458, and was a member of the City Council from 1440 until 1474. He was also elected Mayor on four occasions (1443, 1453, 1461, 1467.)

The Presentation in the Temple
Here the influence of Van der Weyden (from his altarpiece in Cologne's Church of St. Columba) is mixed with that of Stefan Lochner's altarpiece (Darmstadt, q.v.). Though the figures have the taller and more slender proportions of Flemish painting, the altar itself is shown broadside and ornate, as in the Lochner.

The Master of the Lyversberg Passion
This anonymous painter, like the Marienleben Master, was also greatly influnced by Netherlandish painting, but uses shorter, slightly stockier figures and bolder colors, and is also more interested in dramatic action and crowd scenes.. His name is taken from the 19th-century collector, Jakob Johannes Lyversberg, the Cologne merchant who acquired the Passion Altarpiece from the Carthusian church of St. Barbara in 1794. and had it sawed apart into individual panels. The center is lost, but both wings have survived: One of the panels bears the house mark of the Rinck family of Cologne, and a document from the church archives pinpoints the donor as Dr. Peter Rinck, who donated the altar in 1464.

The Last Supper
If the painter ever visited the Bouts workshop in Louvain, he did so before 1464, for he seems to have had no knowledge of the Netherlandish painter's most important altarpiece, which centers around a Last Supper in perfect perspective, with seating arranngements around a square table. This Last Supper is the old fashioned type, with the people on the far side of the table having haloes, and with a St. John who has fallen asleep "on the Lord's bosom"–right in the middle of the round table.

The Resurrection
This panel is strongly influenced the Bouts painting of the Resurrection that was in Cologne's Church of St. Lorenz (Lawrence) in the late 15th century. The angular postures of the soldiers, and the physical appearance of Christ himself come very close to the Bouts style, but the sky here remains an old-fashioned gold. surface.

The Master of the St. Bartholomew Altarpiece
A major painter in Cologne around 1500, he has been described as "the best painter about whom we know nothing." Very possibly a Carthusian monk, he seems to have been trained in the Dutch cathedral city of Utrecht as a miniaturist: his oeuvre includes the illuminated Prayerbook of Sophie van Bylant, which is dated 1475 and was illustrated in Utrecht. By 1480, hwoever, he had settled in Cologne, where he was still living until the presumed time of his death, somewhere between 1510 and 1520. In his anonymity he is one of the last of the Gothic painters, but the vigor of his modeling and his complicated way with tracery and drapery reveal that he was an older contemporary of Albrecht Dürer.

His painted figures are easily recognizable by their crescent-shaped eyes, curly hair, and spoon-shaped fingers.

Portrait of an Unknown Man, ca. 1480/85?
Thought to have been oneof the artist's ealiest paintings after coming to Cologne, this seems to represent a Dutch client, for the carillon tower of the Utrecht Cathedral can be seen outside the window in the background. The man, who is evidently middle-aged, holds a columbine blossom in his hand–a most unusual attribute iondicating that this is not a wedding or engagement painting. It may perhaps once have had a pendant Madonna and Child, since small angels are holding a piece of tapestry behind the sitter. The man may perhaps be a widower, as the purple columbine would suggest.

The Holy Family, ca. 1475/80
A somewhat gnomelike Holy Family, with a naked Infant Jesus seated on the bottom of the picture frame, next to a bowl of gruel. An indulgent Joseph supports him to prevent his falling off. If the suggested (by Rainer Budde) date is correct, this would be one of the earliest depictions of the child Christ with a bowl of solid food, rather than nursing, and the food itself would be here in a spiritual sense, as nourishment for the Christian viewer of the picture. Paintings of this general type will be much more common in the early 16th century (Joos van Cleve, Gerard David et al.)

The St. Thomas Altarpiece (The Incredulity of St. Thomas) ca. 1495
This painting was donated by Dr. Peter Rinck to the Carthusian church of St. Barbara in Cologne, and seems to have been commissioned as early as 1481, but left unfinished until later. It is an unusual, visionary staging of the subject. Christ and the Apostle Thomas are centered on a stone pedestal, almost live living sculpture, as Christ displays his wounds to Thomas to prove his identity as the same person who was crucified and buried. (Thomas had declared his unwillingness to believe that Christ had returned to life unless he could see and touch the wounds made during the crucifixion.) More unusual yet is the half-circle of fractional figures above and behind Christ and Thomas–all of whom had testified to the truth of the resurrection: Mary Magdalene, who was the first to see Christ after the Resurrection; St. Helena, mother of Constantine, who led the expredition to Jerusalem to find the True Cross; and the great theologians St. Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin from its original Hebrew and Greek sources, and St. Ambrose, who defeated the Aryan Heresy.

The Madonna and Child with Sts. Augustine and Adrian, ca. 1490-/1500
Half-length figures, in a gold "shadow-box" setting. Augustine, dressed in his episcopal gear, presents the Christ Child with his "wounded heart" (a reference to a passage in the Confessions: "You have wounded my heart with the arrow of your love.") St. Adrian is dressed in full armor and is accompanied by the hammer and anvil that were some of the equipment usedin his martyrdom.

The Mystic Betrothal of St. Agnes, ca. 1495/1500
This painting, in the Nuremberg Museum, is based on the "biography" of St. Agnes found in the Golden Legend, where the story is told of St. Agnes' allegation that she had become engaged to Christ, in order to ward off the unwanted attentions of the son of the local Roman prefect. This could easily be mistaken for a mystic marriage of St. Catherine, except for the presence of Agnes's trademark lamb (agnus) in the foregraound, and the great basilica seen outside the window, with a young woman standing in front of it. This would be Constantine's daughter Constantia, who ordered a church to be built over Agnes's tomb when she had been cured of leprosy by the saint.

The Madonna with the Nut, ca. 1505/10?
This small, very odd painting (30 x 20 cm.), also known as the Dormagen Madonna (from a 19th-century owner), gets is most common name from the walnut on the window sill–a reference to St. Augustine's Sermon for the Sunday after Christmas, in which he used a walnut as a metaphor for Christ: the green outer skin, which "bleeds" when ruptured, is compared to Christ's human flesh, while the nut shell represents the wood of the Cross, and the nutmeat inside Christ's divinity. The strange anatomy of the Madonna, who has a mono-bosom, and the awkward treatment of the nude Christ Child's body are certainly strong arguments in favor of the artist's having been a cloistered monk.

The St. Bartholomew Altarpiece, 1503
This large (128 x 160 cm.) painting, ( Munich ,ex coll. Boisserée , and King Ludwig I of Bavaria) was donated to the Church of St. Columba in Cologne by the local merchant of textiles and metals Arnt von Westerburg, whose coat-of-arms appears in the upper left corner of the frame. (The other escutheon on the opposite side is that of his wife's family.) However, when the painting was cleaned just after World War II, the kneeling Carthusian beside St. Bartholomew came to light. He was apparently the person who originally commissioned the altarpiece, and who may have been painted out because he had not been able to pay for it in full–possibly because he died too soon. Von Westerburg, a City Council member (1481-1513), wishing to make a gift to a different church, seems to have picked up the check for the painting in the long run. It is one of the master's largest and most important paintings, and the one from which his nickname is derived.

AUSTRIA

MICHAEL PACHER, d. 1498

Michael Pacher, who would have an Italian passport if he were alive today, is the first German-speaking artist who seems thoroughly to have understood both one-point and two-point perspective–still an Italian monopoly during his lifetime. His workshop was in Bruneck (Brunico today), in the Pustertal (Val di Pusteria), south Tyrol, and he seems to have been familiar with ssome of the art of Andrea Mantegna, most notably the Ovetari Chapel frescoes in Padua, and some of the Madonna paintings as well.

Much of Pacher's own work has been destroyed or badly damaged, some of it during the hostilities in the late 1600's, others in 1709 (his altarpiece for the Franciscan church in Salzburg). His most important remaining works are the St. Wolfgang Altarpiece and the Altarpiece of the Church Fathers.

The St. Wolfgang Altarpiece, St. Wolfgang am Abersee, 1471-81
This is a double-transforming altarpiece (Wandelaltar) with two pairs of movable wings, making three distinctly different views for use on various different occasions–every day, Sunday, high holy days. The core of it is an eloborate piece of lindenwood sculpture, depicting the Coronation of the Virgin, which is flanked by four scenes from the life of Mary. When these painted wings are closed, two rows of paintings concerned with Christ's public life and ministry appear–four over four. When the altarpiece is completely closed, four scenes from the life of St. Wolfgang appear, flanked by the carved figures of two saints in armor–George and Florian. A carved Crucifix with Mary , John, the Archangel Michael, and the Magdalene are in the elaborate Gesprenge at the top, and are visible at all times, while the Adoration of the Magi, a relief carving, appears at the foot of the altarpiece (the Staffel).

The altarpiece fully open:
The Coronation of the Virgin Mary (sculpture, gilded and polychromed)
The Mary paintings: The Nativity; the Circumcision; the Presentation in the Temple; the Death of Mary

The second opening: (all paintings)
Christ's pubic life and ministry. Very unusual subjects, because few feast days of the Church are involved.
Christ's Baptism; The Temptation of Christ; The Wedding at Cana: The Miracle of Loaves and Fishes
The Attempt to Stone Christ; the Cleansing of the Temple; Christ and the Adulteress; The Raising of Lazarus
These subjects all have important implications for the future of Christian theology and ritual., but are not normally seen together except in manuscripts. This part of the altarpiece seems directly related to the fact that the artist's client was the Benedictine Abbot of Mondsee.

The altarpiece completely closed:
St, Wolfgang Building a Church
St. Wolfgang Preaching
St. Wolfgang Giving Charity (grain from the episcopal granary)
St. Wolfgang Driving Out a Demon from a Woman Possessed
The lindenwood guardian figures: St. George (L.), St. Florian (R.)