THE DESTRUCTION OF IMAGES OF GREEK ART

New times arrived. But alongside the flowering of humanism and the Renaissance, a grave moral and spiritual crisis shook the Church. Alas, the changes were accompanied by violence and destruction of extreme brutality, owing to the iconoclastic fury of the Protestants.
Indeed, the adherents of Church reform condemned holy images, basing themselves on Biblical prohibitions:
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them”
In its materiality the image is deceiving; the danger exists that the true believer may venerate the  image itself more than what it represents. The image, by its power of seduction, may lead the senses astray instead of inciting to prayer. By its excessive cost, the image encourages the egoistic pride of rich donors and not their charitable duty towards the most deprived; God must be served through his poor rather than by vain expenditure on sculptures and paintings of excessive proliferation. Those were some of the arguments set forth, with variations, by all the leaders of the Reformation in their works, their sermons or their pamphlets. Luther was relatively moderate, insisting on the educative role of narrative subjects while denouncing temptations to idolatry and the squandering of money. Thus he blamed Carlstadt’s iconoclastic zeal at Wittenberg in 1522 and condemned the violence of “criminals and pillaging hordes of peasants” at the time of the peasant revolts of 1524—1525 in South Germany. In Switzerland, first Zwingli, then Calvin, criticized sacred images more radically, urging their suppression or destruction.
As the ideas of the Reformation, mingled with material and social demands, made headway in Europe, the manifestations of iconoclasm multiplied in diverse forms: sporadic outbreaks or intense explosions like that in the Netherlands during the year s66; spontaneous acts of handfuls of individuals driven by poverty and religious fanaticism, or movements orchestrated by civic authorities won over to the new doctrines. Thus at Strasbourg beginning in 1524, under the auspices of the town council, paintings, crucifixes, altarpieces and other images began to be removed from religious buildings and systematically destroyed or sometimes carefully dismantled. Inevitably, in many towns, sculptors in want of commissions were reduced to expatriating themselves or to begging for living allowances, and often ended up in poverty. The printing press played a considerable role in the spread of the Reformers’ doctrines, in particular those of Luther and Calvin. And preachers everywhere carried on the most active propaganda, for example thundering against the scandalous figures of female saints adorned more luxuriously than prostitutes, a veritable incitement to voluptuousness and not to pious thoughts.
At Steenvoorde in Flanders, on so August 1566, following a sermon by Sebastian Matte, some twenty members of the audience stormed the monastery and laid waste all the images. The destructive rage reached its height during the Beggars’ Revolt; the inhabitants of Tournai sacked the churches of their town, looted the treasuries, profaned the relics and smashed the statues. In France the Huguenots also engaged in blasphemous demonstrations and wholly devastated many religions edifices, in the south and southwest especially. In England, under the auspices of the monarchy, the Anghcan Reformation entailed, over and above the suppression of the monasteries and the sale of their goods, the systematic destruction of monumental figures decorating the church choirs and chapels.
Thousands of sculptures accordingly perished in the agonies of the Bildersturm, annihilated in the flames of pyres and beneath the blows of pickaxes or irreparably mutilated. Works fallen forever into oblivion or illustrious works of which surviving records preserve the memory, sharpening our regret at their loss, such as the altarpiece by Nicholas of Leyden on the high altar of the cathedral of Constance destroyed during the Zwinglian iconoclasm, or the altarpiece by Michael Erhart and Jorg Syrlin the Elder in the cathedral of Ulm, torn down by the Lutherans.
Other agonies, military or revolutionary, later contributed, it is true, to the disappearance of many medieval images. And this is not to forget changes in taste and the desire to renovate or purify church decoration, largely responsible for multiple destructions of Gothic altarpieces, stalls, rood screens and choir screens. If the reforming iconoclasm banned religions art, the Church of the Counter-Reformation, which defended it, wanted itto be above reprdach and called for austerity and decency.
“The Middle Ages ended on the day the Church itself condemned them,” wrote Emile Male, deploring the death of medieval iconographic traditions after the Council of Trent (1545—i563). But we also know that in spite of everything the Middle Ages remained strongly present, as Henri Focillon affirms: “They have not disappeared, they have not been wiped out. It would seem the West is nostalgic for them. The nostalgia became a conscious longing in England in the eighteenth century, with the neo-Gothic style dear to Horace Walpole. It gathered strength with the progress of Romanticism, and the nineteenth century finally gave it the tone and power of an historic force... This marks the beginning of a vast inquiry which, starting from a reaction of taste and ever sustained by more intense forces, ends in a wider knowledge of the past, in a more complete possession of mankind.”

Read More

BETWEEN GOTHIC AND BAROQUE

If the taste of late Gothic artists for ornamental luxuriance became more pronounced in architectural decoration, as in Picardy or the Iberian peninsula, without any genuine renewal of plastic language, in the Germanic lands on the contrary sculpture moved into a strange and violent world reshaped now by the social and religious upheavals of the age. The afterglow of a style, this “baroque Gothic” is fascinating to an eye and mind willing to accept its excesses and vagaries. Within a broad movement essentially affecting the southern part of the Empire and involving a new generation of sculptors active from about 1510 on, the tendency described as “Danubian” asserted itself with force and originality.
Over and above controversies concerning the notion of a “Danube school” in painting (Doriaustil), there is general agreement on a close community in spirit and forms between the works of the main representanves of the Danubian style and the sculptures produced concurrently in the same Austro-Bavarian region. The genesis of the new plastic style occurred within the late Gothic tradition, taking .the old methods a step further while developing new rhetoric in perfect osmosis with the contemporary graphic and pictorial language, as shown by the sculptures of Hans Leinberger, mentioned at Landihut from iio to 1530. If, for example, the tumultuous draperies clothing his figures and soaring far out from the body in  arbitrary folds spring from the previous Gothic conception, their treatment avoids angles and breaks in favour of floating undulations at the edges and large inflated folds, tracing long diagonals interrupted here and there by little stiff crinkles on the surface of the fabric: a treatment closely corresponding to the manner of Albrccht Altdorfer (Re— gensburg, c. 1480*1538), as seen in his pen and ink drawings on a dark ground where white highlights bring out the forms and billowing folds with festooned curves and parallel bands.
Leinberger, who, moreover, worked in 1518-1519 at the same rime as the painter for the new Sehiine Maria pilgrimage church in Regensburg, appears to have transformed Altdorfer’s graphic inventions into volumes. At the very least he exploited plastically the new formal pos— sibilities offered by the Danubian style, as also initiated by other artists inch ai Lucas Granach the Elder (Gronach 1472-Weimar 13) and Jhrg Breu (Augsburg, c. 1475- 1537). The pictorial component is even more present in Leinberger’s bmewood or boxwood reliefs without poly chromy (some bearing the sculptor’s monogram), which reflect the strange atmosphere of Danubian works and a characteristic taste for the vegetable kingdom. In the moving scenes of martyrdom or the Passion, the natural elements, like the falling branches of the grear sprnces on rhe banks of the Danube, seem quickened by the same inner movement as the figures, their hair, their clothing and even some accessories. The lines play freely and mingle in an apparent but skilfully controlled confusion. Both in works of very small format and in monumental figures, the poses and drapery, far more than the faces, render the emotions with a power of expression and a capacity ofinvennon that puts Leinberger in the front rank of the sculptors of his time and makes him the equal of the great Danubian painters. His influence pervades a large number of anonymous Bavarian sculptures of varying qualities, often hard to classify into distinct groups, like the one formed by the works of the Master of the Altotting Doors, a personality more independent than the mere imitators of the master.
Leinberger also exerted a certain influence on the Salz— burg and Passau workshops, connected by their common links with the Danube school. The Master of lrrsdorf, Andreas Laekner, or the sculptors who worked with the painter Wolf Huber (c. 1485 — Passau 1553), notably on the Peldkirch altarpiece (1515—1521), borrowed extensively from engraved or painted models for the compositional designs and formal types of their carvings in relief or inthe round.
The mysterious Master l.P., maker of several small panels in pearwood without polychromy carved with a subtle virtuosity, was active during the I520s, perhaps at Pasiau or Salzburg, and more doubtfully in Prague, where sculptures attributed to his workshop are preserved (altar— pieces of Zlichov and the Tyn church). The Mourning over the Dead Christ in Leningrad, signed with the monogram I.P., shows how the master absorbed and transformed Leinberger’s vision, amplifying the pathos and sense of space, which he developed further in depth and suggested by foreshortened bodies, delicate shadings and increased emphasis on natural setting. In the Original Sin reliefs at Gotha and Vienna (the latter dated 152i), inspired by a Drer engraving of 1504, the accent is placed on the fabulous landscape, the fantastic rocks and tall trees with rough and knotty trunks, made in the image of the Danubian painters. The free attitude of the two nude figures, Adam turning seen from behind, and Eve animated by a slight contrapposto, shows a concern for the representation of the body marked by the humanism of cultivated circles, for whom, moreover, these small cabinet pieces highly prized by collectors were intended. Master I.P. thereby links up with the new art of the Renaissance, although his tall slim figures with their rngged features remain alien to antique balance and regularity, and later seemed to evolve towards a mannerist formulation.
On the edge of the Danube region and outside it, countless works of traditional use, altarpieces and devotional images, were made in ateliers that followed the general trend of style in the iins and I520s and seem more resistant to the Renaissance spirit even when they resort abundantly to an antique repertory of ornament, with garlands, pilasrers and putti. Regional or individual nuances shift the common tendencies towards an overwrought accentuation of forms, lines and expression:
the leering and gesturing figures in the altarpiece of Mauer near Melk (Lower Austria); the giddy swirling movement that galvanizes the Zwettl sculptures (Lower Austria); the monsfrously overblown tulip of Hans Witten’s pulpit in the cathedral of Preiberg (Saxnny); the brutal dynamism of Claus Berg’s apostles in the cathedral of Cstrow (Meeklenbnrg); or the rentacular sprouting of the Tree of Jesse in Douvermann’s alrarpiece at Kalkar (Rhineland).
In addition to the garments buffeted by a violent wind, as in Claus Berg, or blistered and quivering as in the sculptures nfLeinberger and Master I.P., a type of drapery with parallel folds had a widespread success in quite different regions such as Carinthia, Tyrol and Swabia, where the ourpn,t of the Memmingen workshops was characteristic of this Parallelfaltenstil. Thus the Master of Ottobeuren (possibly Hans Thoman, active at Memmingen from 1514 to 1525), named after the Annunciation and Nativity reliefs preserved in the great Benedictine abbey of Ottobeuren, patterns the limewood surface with a strange network of curved and regular lines which is carefully organized and sets up a play of light and shadow. At the same time the forms of his figures, whose quiet self— possession is very much in the Swabian tradition, acquire a genuine plasticity which seems to echo the new humanism; it recurs in most contemporary works, beginning with those of Leinberger and the Danubian sculptors. On the other hand, the reliefs place the figures in tiers on ascending levels in almost complete contempt of the representation of space.
Master H.L. carried the tension and instability of lines to their peak. His monogram appears on several prints dated from 1511 to 1522 as well as on the Breisach altar— piece, completed in 1526, without our being able to ascertain whether this engraver was also the sculptor or merely the designer of the carvings. And his training remains equally obscure, since the manner of this sculptor, who has affinities with Danubian art, is strikingly original. The swirling eddies of the clothing, hair, vegetation and clouds tend to submerge the figures in the Breisach Coronation of the Virgin and completely fill the area of the shrine. But extravagance here is restrained with supreme mastery. The intricacy of the forms does not weaken the expressive force, and the overall view of the work is never blurred by excessive ornament. The monumental effects peculiar to late Gothic German altarpieces full of large figure carvings are enhanced here by the power and plastic authority of the divine personages. A sublime work, this Breisach altarpiece, which, as against the serene assurance of the Renaissance, opens up a magic world and points the way to Baroque.

Read More

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL SCULPTURE

While the last traces of the international Gothic style faded away, the picture of Iberian sculpture at the close of the Middle Ages was coloured by new values dominated by northern influences.
The manner of the foreign sculptors from the north, however, changed on their contact with Spanish surroundings and their style was transposed by the indigenous masters into a specifically Spanish key. The boom in production was concentrated mainly in the Castilian regions, as well as Catalonia, Andalusia and Portugal, after the middle of the fifteenth century. Often the artists’ names leave no doubt as to their northern origin.
In Toledo, Hannequin de Bruselas, maestro mayor of the cathedral, put up the door of the south transept, the Puerta de los Leones (1462—1465), whose sculptured decoration was the work of Juan Alemn and his collaborators, among whom was Egas Cueman, Hannequin’s brother. From the start northern influences prevailed in this portal. The stiff, impassive, monumental statues of the splays and the figures in relief of the Tree ofJesse on the inner tym— panum are clearly defined by a linear rhythm emphasized by the prominent verticals or diagonals of the tubular folds between the smooth areas. This tense and graphic style, not without delicacy in the treatment of  feminine and juvenile faces, hands and details of clothing, presents undeniable resemblances with the sculpture of the Lower Rhine, linked, as we know, with Netherlandish art.
These masters of Toledo, probably schooled in the north before settling in Spain, represent a stylistic phase
parallel to that of their contemporaries from Brussels, Utrecht or Kalkar, such as Master Arnt, in the second half of the fifteenth century. Here as there, the forms and imagery show the dominance of the great Flemish painters, known very early in Spain, as witnessed by the works of Egas Cueman for the abbey of Guadalupe (CIceres), which interpret some typical designs of Rogier van der Weyden. But from the prolific production of Toledo emerged a peculiar tonality attributable to the local milieu. The typically Iberian predilection for ornamental richness showed itself everywhere inside religious buildings: in the teeming flamboyant decor of the choir screen in Toledo Cathedral, the capilla mayor carved from 1483 on under the direction of Martin Sanchez Bonifacso and Juan Guas; in the vast altarpiece in polychromc wood on the high altar (1498—I 504) which sets out the sculptured scenes in superimposed compartments in the Netherlandish manner and ws the joint work of sculptors of such diverse origin as Copin de Holanda, Sebastian de Almonacid and Fclipe Bigamy (i.e. from Burgundy); or yet again in the Toledo church of San Juan de los Reyes, originally destined to house the tombs of the Cathohc Kings, where an astonishing heraldic decor punctuated by figure carvings, conceived by Juan Guas, covers the walls (5478-1495).
In funerary art the Toledo sculptors or their Castihan emulators also affirmed their specific manner, precise and vigorous, with an acuteness verging at times on dryness, as shown by many examples, such as the tombs by Sebastian de Almonacid of the constable Alvaro dc Luna (died 1489) and his wife (cathedral of Toledo); or that, justly famous, of the knight at arms Martin Vsquez de Arce (died 1486) (cathedral of Sighenza), which, unusually, presents the deceased leaning on his elbows and reading, thereby transforming the traditional type of recumbent figure in a humanist mode.
At Seville as well, the foreign masters who arc mentioned after the middle of the fifteenth century (like Lorenzo Mercadante dc Bretafia, Pieter Dancart, who is called airman, Master Marco Flamenco) introduced rigid, energetically outlined forms, physical types and compositional schemes at once stemming from the Netherlands or Lower Rhine and displaying various autonomous accents according to personality. The original use of clay for modelling statues or reliefs distingnishes several series of Sevdlian works. Those ofMercadante on the portals of the Nativity and the Baptism (1466-1467) of the cathedral embellish their somewhat stiff robustness with an emphasis on expression in the rounded and smiling feminine faces. His successor in practising this technique, Pedro Milln (mentioned from 1487 to 1507) sofrened still further the physiognomies of his polychrome terracotta figures, several of which bear his signature, such as the Christ of Sorrows from El Garrobo (Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville).
The enormous altarpiece in polychsFome wood on the high altar of Seville Cathedral, begun from a design by Pieter Dancart around 148 1-5482, and continued by various teams, notably from 5497 to i5cs by Master Marco, then by Pedro Milln mentioned in e5n6-15n7, and from in8 to 1525 byJorge Fernndez and his brother the painter Alexo, had its central part completed only in January 1526. This shows how difficult it is to estimate the share of each in this collective work. Some figures, like those of the Birth of the Virgin, rather suggest the art of Pedro Milln by their regular oval faces and quiet drapet— aes. Others, like the figures of the Raising of Lazarus, have more vivacity, more individuahzed features, and belong to a later stage, perhaps that of Master Marco and Jorge and Alexo Fernndez, which seems to echo the style of the Kalkar workshops in the entourage of Master Arnt.
At Burgos flourished the singular genius of Gil de Silo, the great name of late Gothic Spanish sculpture. Was he a northern master who had emigrated to Spain? A Spaniard trained in the north? The question remains unresolved hecanse of the absence of explicit documents and the perfect fashion his art reveals of northern characteristics and Iberian traditions. For the charterhouse of Miraflores, Gil de Silo created three masterworks: from 1489 to 1493 the alabaster tombs of the parents and brother of Queen Isabella the Catholic Kin gJohn II, Isabella of Portugal and the Infante Alfonso—and from 1496 to 1499 the monumental alrarpiece in polychrome wood. Other works, like the Tree of Jesse altarpiece sn the St Anne chapel of Burgos Cathedral (donated by Luis de Acuha, bishop from 1456 to 1495), were made sn his workshop as well as the tomb of the queen’s page, Juan de Badilla (died ii), for the monastery of Fresdeval (Museo Provincial, Burgos).

Read More

ENGLAND SCULPTURE

The widespread destruction wreaked during the English Reformation, especially of monumental statuary and decoration, together with the conservatism prevailing in funerary sculpture and the production of alabaster reliefs, augment the difficulties in the study of the stylistic development of English sculpture at the close of the Middle Ages.
Largely exported to the Continent by the workshops of Nottingham or other towns, the overabundant production of small carved and painted alabaster panels, whether independent devotional images or elements of altarpieces, indeed became repetitive after the middle of the fifteenth century. Since the documents corresponding to extant works are often missing and since the sculptors consistently re—employed the same iconographic and stylistic formulas, the English alabasters are difficult to date accurately. But it is easy to recognize them thanks to their simplified, highly typical treatment—lean forms, stereotyped faces, crisp draperies—and their refined polychromy, which delicately brings nut the natural colour of the alabaster.
The large output of alabaster or stone tombs followed the general evolution of funerary art, adopting in particular the twin representation of tomb effigy and  withered corpse, the deceased reposing on the tombslab in all the paraphernalia of his earthly glory above the macabre image of his cadaver (tomb of John Fitzalan at Arundel or, at Ewelme, Oxfordshire, tomb of the Duchess Alice of Suffolk, who died in 1477). Inside the churches, the sculptured decoration consisted chiefly of rows of figures in stone sheltered by canopies on the chancel screens and in funeral chapels (chantries), built in large numbers in the late Middle Ages. The statues of English kings adorning the choir screen of Canterbury Cathedrat (1411—1427) have a quiet density scarcely enlivened by a few sinuous falls of drapery, also appearing, at mid—century, in the figures of angels and saints ornamenting the funeral chapel of Richard Beauehamp in the church of Sr Mary at Warwick. This style has been related to the activity of John Massingham, mentioned at Canterbury in 1436, at Oxford, where he was responsible for the decoration of All Souls College from 1438 to 1442, and in London in 1449. Several sculptures from the chapel of Henry V at Westminster Abbey (about 1441—1450) issue from a similar spirit but others, like the Angel and the Virgin of the Annunciation, clearly reveal the influence of painted or sculptured models from Brabant and Flanders by their physical types and conception of draperies with broken and hollowed folds.
But it was at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the next, at the moment of the full flowering of artistic activity, that several sculptors are mentioned as coming from the Netherlands or Germany to work at the English court. Unfortunately, the teams collaborating on the rich decoration of the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster (I503-1512) remain anonymous. On all the walls unfolds a frieze of angels carrying armorial bearings placed above a row of statues. The energetic treatment and expressive force of these sculptures, which verge on dryness and stiffness in the least successful works, evoke in some aspects the art of the Lower Rhine at the end of the fifteenth century and recall the figures of the Divsnity School at Oxford (1481). This harshness, which also appears in stone tombs and in woodcarving—choir stalls, benches, beams, rood screens—is one of the characteristics of English production of the late Middle Ages, unreceptive to Italian novelties. The style of the Florentine master Pietro Torrigsani, summoned to build the tomb of King Henry VII (1512-1518), indeed  presents a complete contrast with the pieces from the Gothic workshops of London or regional centres, whose activity was suddenly broken off by the English Reformation in the 1540S.

Read More

CHAMPAGNE AND PICARDY

In a style familiar and fashionable by turns, the Champagne workshops produced, around  1500, long anonymous processions of devotional images in stone or polychrome wood, in marble or alabaster: Virgin and Child or male and female saints, at whose feet was often carved the donor’s diminutive kneeling figure. The wholly Gothic plastic density of these statues, their poised gestures, their gentle, delicate and regular faces, are accompanied by many anecdotal details and coquetries of dress embroidered braid, small hanging chains, studded belts, pleated and knotted ribbons—even more abundant than in other regions of France. Concurrently the dolorous themes of the Passion are treated in a serious and reserved tone, stripped of pomp or pathoa, in a large and famous collection of works gathered around the St Martha of the church of the Madeleine at Troyes and the Entombment of Chaource (1515).
To explain the decorative excesses of Champagne sculpture, reference has often been made to the influence of the Netherlands, of which Nicolas Halins, established in Troyes from 1494 to 1544, could have been one of the transmitters, but not, as has wrongly been said, the only one. Indeed, the penetration of  northern formulas through imported objects or the influx of foreign artists, forms part of a general movement, which in sculpture partially included Champagne as well as Picardy, Artois and Normandy, and broadened in scope through the circulation of engraved models. The art of altarpieces especially, which interpreted the examples of Brusiels and Antwerp in stone or wood, owed much to this influence. The work of the Picardy cabinetmakers and image—makers who carved in oak the stalls of Amiens Cathedral from io8 to and the frames of the first “Puys” (medieval religious societies) of Notre—Dame also show acquaintance with the narrative style, alive and racy, of the Netherlandish workshops. The large stone reliefs of the cathedral choir tower mark the stages of a different stylistic development, more typical of Picardy, which extends from the first scenes from the life of St Firmin (about 1490), arranging tiers of calm figures clad in stiff and simple draperies, to the last episodes in the story of john the Baptist (1531), highly ornate in taste, in which the suppler figures are swathed in animated fabrics enhanced by refined polychromy. ‘the Gothic sculpture of Picardy, little affected by Italian novelties, had an exceptionally late flowering, whose luxuriant effects invaded the great faades of flamboyant Gothic buddings and continued to influence altarpieces well after the middle of the sixteenth century. In Normandy, too, the abundance of sculptured decoration was linked to the last creations of Gothic architecture, marked more rapidly, however, by the intrusion of Renaissance motifs.

Read More

SOUTHWESTERN FRANCE

The serene clarity of the Loire statuary is embellished, moreover, with particular accents which contrast or harmonize with the monumental simplification and the picturesque details, the inward expressions and gracious effects. Southwestern France, the north and Champagne display different facets of these tendencies in the regional variants of French sculpture at the close of the Middle Ages.
A touch of suavity brings out the childlike and languid charm of many anonymous sculptures, in polychrome stone, of the third quarter of the fifteenth century in the regions of Toulouse and Rodez. As usual, the works of the masters, Jacques Morel, active at Rodez in 1448, or Pierre Viguier, recorded at Villefranche-de-Rouergue and Rodez from 1451 to 1497, are now destroyed or very fragmentary, making it difficult to identify for certain the originator of this personal tone in Lataguedoc and Roucrguc sculpture.
“Nostre Dame de Grasse” at Toulouse and the Annunciation at Inires bear charming witness to  this style which blossomed and diversified at the end of the fifteenth century, spreading its influence towards Albi and Moissac as well. The generous gifts of Louis I of Amboise, bishop,of Albi from 1473 to 1502, spurred important undertakings:
the monumental Entombment carved for his Chteau de la Combfa, and the teeming flamboyant decor of the rood screen ana chaucel screen of Albi Cathedral, where the figure carvings renewed the traditional local types, gain in weight and complexity and are brightened by picturesque strokes of inspiration.
A graver sentiment, related to the art of the Loire, emanates from the figure groups created at the beginning of the sixteenth century in Prigord and in Bordclais by the workshop of the Master of the Biron Entombment, which makes much of the Italianizing ornamental repertory.

Read More

LOIRE VALLEY

In the regions washed by the Loire and its tributaries, the “casing up” of French art made itself felt with a particular brilhance, thanks to royal, princely or bourgeois patrons who quickened the art centres of Berry, the Bourbonnais and Tourasne. There, too, the arnstic climate of the early fifteenth century had paved the way for this later flowering.
At Bourges, after the death of Jean de Berry in 14I6, halting the work on the ducal building sites, the workshops kept up some activity, which increased with the installation there of the royal court in 1422 and the great undertakings ofJacques Cccur at mid-century. Father of the celebrated Michel Colombe, the sculptor Philippe Colombe, whose authenricated works have not survived, is recorded at Bourges from 1434 until his death in 1457. Jcan de Camhrai, the Duke’s image-maker, died only in 1439. We may connect with various aspects of his style, rooted moreover in the fonrtecoth century, several anonymous sculptures, preserved from this first part of the century, in which the density and sohdity of forms and the calm rhythm of sohd folds prevail, without excluding a tender and charming vivaciousness in the childlike faces.
In Toasraine, too, a measured power, far removed from all dramatization, a naturalism exact without excessive attention to detail and a quict gentleness reigned from the middle of the ccntury in the statuary which revealed indisputable affinities with the art of the painter Jean Fouquet, established in Tours, where he died around 1480. Thus the energetic handhng of the Virgin and St John on Calvary, originating perhaps in the abbey of Beaugerais, has often been related to the exceptional plastic and  monumental sense shown in Fouquet’s pasnted figures. Several oak sculptures, images of worship or decorative panels, bear witness to the activity of woodcarvers at Tours, also certified by documents. Works in stone, like the angels of the tomb of Jeanne de Montjean at Buesl (around 5460, Archaeological Society of Touraine) or the statues of the castle chapel of Chteaudun consecrated in 1464, present equivalent stylistic characteristics, later heightened and enriched in the Tonraine workshop of Michel Colombe.
Colombe’s creations, known from texts, at Bourges where his name appears in 1457 and at Monlins where in 1484 he worked for the luxury-loving Duke of Bourbon, have unfortunately been lost. They would doubtless have enabled us to evaluate the role of this sculptor, coming in fact from the Berry milieu, in the evolution of a specific- ally Bourbonnais style, illustrated by many sculptures from the time of the master’s sojourn or of later date, such as the works of his disciples who remained at Moulins after his departure around 149o. There, notably, was elaborated a particular type of feminine face, regularly oval, sometimes slightly plump, with small features, a large convex forehead and almond-shaped eyes uuder blurred eyebrows, a type that recalls the meek—looking Madonnas painted around the same period by the Brussels painter Jcan Hey, the Master of Mouhns. To the serenity of expressions, the harmonious balance of forms and calm fall of the draperies, is added the exquisite delicacy of gestures that emphasize the fineness of the hands, and a painstaking handhng of details of dress chiselled in the stone.
Majesty prevails in the monumental statues of St Peter, St Anne and St Susanna from the Chteau de Chantelle, carved in the very first years of the sixteenth century, probably by Jean de Chartres, Colombe’s chief collaborator at Moulins. But the face of the Virgin as a child, standing beside St Anne, further refines the type that had become habitual, and the elegance of Susanna reveals a mind that is almost worldly. Bearing witness to the influence of these formulas, even beyond the boundaries of Bourbonnais, many series of saints show kinship in their slender silhouettes, delicate face and informal grace tinged with preciousness and coquetry. One of the most famous is the Mary Magdalene of Montlnon.
The new tonality that henceforth marked Bourbonnais sculpture is part of the general evolution of the Loire country under the dominance of the art of Michel Colombe, which it is at last possible to apprehend. The tomb of Franots II and Marguerite de Foix at Nantes, ordered in 1499 by Queen Anne of Brittany and made from i502 to t507 in the workshop at Tours, where Colombe’s name is mentioned from i496, enables us to define the master’s style at the close of his life. If it draws extensively on the traditional Loire heritage, it also introduces innovative conceptions blending smoothly with the recent contributions of the Italian Renaissance. In the Nantes tomb, Colombe did not content himself with adopting the anttqne decorative repertory brought from beyond the mountains by the court sculptors of Charles VIII and of Louis XII, and already present in the ornamentation of chateaus or figure groups such as the Entombment of Solesmes, dated i49t1. The corner statues of the Cardinal Virtues on the Nantes sarcophagus express the ideal of noble and serene beauty which inspires the sculptor; these statues portray his search for compact and balanced volumes, his care for the human form in the sensitive modelling of the body and the construction of faces with features more sharply drawn than previously. The old Gothic idealism revitalized during the fifteenth century did not oppose Italian art; it opened itself to new ways and encouraged the harmonious meeting of traditional and Renaissance style in this final phase of the Middle Ages on the banks of the Loire. The nephew and collaborator of Colombe, Cuillaume Regnanlt, to whom is ascribed the famous Virgin and Child from Olivet (Louvre, Paris), kept alive at Tours the final style of his master, who died around i5i4, when the mannerist tendencies of the Fontaineblean court were already making headway.

Read More

THE “EASING UP”

After the middle of the fifteenth century a new spirit gradually came over sculpture, a phenomenon which the art historian Louis Courajod has called /a dtente, the “easing up” of French art, in order to stress the contrast between the tension and emphasis of Claus Slutcr and his Burguudian following and that tendency towards quieting down, towards the search for grace and equilibrium. In reality this new style, more complex thau a simple reaction to au opposing current, was nourished by traditions from the beginning of the century, still hardy after several decades. And although this later art sometimes shows a hint of Netherlandish influence, it totally diverges from the experimeuts being carried out in the Germauic lands.
Jacques Morel, often considered to be the prime mover behind the “easing up,” ensured the continuity of the muffled and peaceful manuer of the early fifteenth century, accompanied by the habitual penchant for individualized features and heavy fabrics with soft and ample folds. Among the works created during the itinerant career which led Morel from Lyous, where he is mentioned iu 1418, to Toulouse, Rodez, Avsgnon, Souvigny aud Angers, where he died in 1453 in the service of King  Ren ofAujou, there is preserved only the funerary monument of the Duke of Bourbou at Souvigny (Allier), commissioned in 1448 on the model of the tombs of Champmol.
The latter left Dijon in s456. and it was Antoine Le Moiturier of Avsgnon, assumed to be the pupil of Jacques Morel, who in 1466 was given the job of completing the tomb ofJohn the Fearless and who helped to reorient the Burgundsan style in accordance with the general trend towards a “relaxed” art. The two angels surviving from the altarpiece, now destroyed, of SaintPierre-le-Vieux at Avignon, conimissioned from Le Moiturser in 1463, enable us to define the plastic language of this sculptor who simplified forms, accentuating the angular lines and large empty areas of the breaking folds; precisely dehneated the fringes and braid of the clothing on the surface of the stone; and enhanced the sweet and childlike expressions of the rounded faces. There was no superfluous complication in this style. quiet and sober but without roughness, in which the formal vocabulary, blending with the specifically Burgundian tradition, was abundantly and diversely utihzed by the prolific workshops of the Auxois and the Autunois in the late fifteenth century.
Several sculptured groups are doubtfully attributed to Le Moiturier, including the Entombment of Semur-enAuxois (1490). On the other hand, the famous tomb of Philippe Pot (Louvre, Paris) cannot be from the master’s hand: the idea of enlarging the mourners almost to hfessze and making them carry the slab on which the tomb effigy lies is daring, and testifies to an original conception that gives the old formula a new lease of life; but in detail the execution is weak and the handling dry and perfunctory.

Read More

FRANCE THE HERITAGE OF CLAUS SLUTER

It is tempting to consider fifteenth-century Bnrgundian sculpture solely from the angle of its dependence on Sluter—so evident is the great master’s mark—and to exaggerate the degree of his influence outside the boundaries of Burgundy. That, however, would he inaccurate, for the nuances introduced by the sculptor’s successors ar the head of the dncal workshop of Dijon diversified and transformed even the specifically Sluterian language. And in the other French provinces, the taste for individuahzed faces, for ample forms and draperies, did not necessarily signify a Burgundian influence but also followed the general trends of the period.
The temperament of Claus de Werwe, who completed the tomb of Phihp the Bold after the death of his uncle Claus Slutcr in 1406, opposed Sluterian vehemence by a calmer sensibility, full of a lyricism tempered with gentleness, as revealed in the Christ on the Cross at Saint— Bnigne in Dijon, which is attributed to him. Jean de La Huerta, of Aragonese origin, who after Claus de Werwe’s death in 1439 was made responsible in 5443 for carving the tomb of John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria, brought more forcefulness and complexity into  his creations; more search for effect into the drapery of his figures.
Some fifty years after Champ mol, the Virgin and Child and the John the Baptist in the church of Rouvres, probably carved by Jean de La Huerta for the mayor of Dijon, Philippe Mchefoing, still followed in the tradifion of Sluter’s works but without retaining their unusual vitality, despite the remarkable beauty of the flowing draperies, owing to a certain heaviness acquired by the figure types.
Numerous sculptures of the first half of the fifteenth century have been located in the two masters’ sphere of influence by comparison with rare authenticated works like the angels and mourners of the ducal tombs. A charac teristi series of Virgins of meek aspect small, thick—lidded eyes, slightly elongated and pointed nose, ball-shaped chin and round cheeks , enveloped with clothes that are heavy but animated by simple and subsiding folds, seems akin to the art of Claus de Werwe (Virgin and Child of Mcillysur—Rouvres). Other feminine figures in stone or alabaster exhibit square faces with more sharply defined features, often slightly sulky expressions and hair sprinkled with little hook—like curls, typical of the sculptures attributed to the chisel ofJean de La Huerta.
Reproduced in a workshop or imitated by various hands, the same models with minor variants were thus adopted for the facial types, the iconographic formulas and compositional schemes of the draperies (Virgin and Child statues at Auxonne, about 5447, at Pluvault, in the cathedral of Autun and at Sully). The short silhouette of some Virgins could be particularly broadened by the movement of the large mantle passing over the free arm, which moves far out ftom the body. This type of drapery, distantly derived from the art of Champmol, gave rise to different stylistic intcrpretafiuns of lugh quality (Virgin and Child at Bzouotte, at Poligny, and in the rue de la Porte-auxLions in Dijon, today in the Louvre). But the less skilful Burgundian sculptors did not always prevent the solid plasticity of these figures from becoming ponderous, the fullness of the drapery from verging on heaviness, and their expressive values from lapsing into monotony.

Read More

NETHERLANDS, WESTERN

In this rapid survcy of German lands wherc thc richcst talents tuo oftcn leave secondary but important masters in thc shade, the West and North of Germany and their ties with the Netherlands may be referred to only in broad terms.
The episcopal city of Utrechr was the most active art centre of the northern Netherlands in the second half of the fifteenth centory. Gradually moving away from the international Gothic style and recepnve to the snfluences of the southern Netherlands, in particular Brabant sculpture and Flemish painting, the art of this city had its own specific language. Several sculptors are recorded in Utrecht, such as Jan Nude, mentioned from 1450 to 1494, and Adriaen van Wesel from 5447 to 1489-1490. The latter carved numerous altarpieces, notably the one, now dismembered, for the brotherhood of Our Lady at ‘s Hcrtogenbosch (1475—1477). As in the southern Netherlands, the scenes were composed of  small polyehrome wood reliefi,juxtaposed in the compartments of the shrine, and affirming a pronounced taste for anecdote, for concrete and picturesque elements. Adriaen van Wesel caught the familiar gestures and the expressive features of his figures with a charming vivacity, but also with a sweetness that places him still in the mainstream of international Gothic.
His contemporaries often handled their forms with a certain hardness. Thus many feminine figures, slim and straight, combine stiff drapery falling in cylindrical folds with delicate and gracious facial types, and show extreme accuracy in rendering the finely chiselled details in oak or stone (St Ursula in the Beguine convent of Amsterdam, attributed hypothetically to Jan Nude; male and female saints of the Master of Koudewater).
This elegant and biting style had direct extensions in the regions of the Lower Rhine, close geographically and historically, since Cleves and Kalkar formerly belonged to the bishopric of Utrecht, itself part of the archbishopric of Cologne.
The most influential personality here was that of Master Arnt, who had a workshop at Kalkar (from 1460), then at Zwolle (from 1484 until his death sn 5492), which carried out important commissions such as the choir stalls for the church of the Franciscans at Cleves (i474) and the altar— pieces of Sr George (around 1480) and of the Passion (1490—1492), for the high altar of the St Nicholas church at Kalkar. The mark of Arnt’s style, at once tense and gracious, linear and solid, and of his incisive treatment of the surface, was determinant for the sculptors of Kalkar and Cleves,Jan van Halderen and Dries Holthuys, and also influenced the chief master established in Cologne at the end of the fifteenth century, Tilmann van der Bruch (first mentioned in 1467). A new stylistic modulation was later added by much sought-after sculptors like Heinrich Douvermann (mentioned at Cleves and Kalkar from 1510 onwards), the Master of Elsloo (active in the Middle Meuse, early sixteenth century) or Arnt van Tricht (active c. 15 22—1560 at Antwerp and Kalkar). 

Read More

SWABIA

The artistic landscape of Swabia in the third quarter of the fifteenth century was profoundly marked by the art of the Ulm sculptor Hans Multscher, who died in i467. On that tradition built the new generations active towards the end of the century, from which emerged the personal- sty of Michael Erhart, whose name appears in Ulm from 1469 to 1522. With the exception of the Ctucifix of  Schwbisch Hall signed and dated ‘494, practically all the sculptures which documents ascribe to him have disappeared, as for example the figures of the high altar of  Ulm Cathedral, commissioned from the joiner Jorg Syrhn the Elder In 1473 and destroyed during the Reformation. For that reason the attribution to him of doubtful works continually sparks off fresh controversies.
Erhart is, however, credited by general consent with the Virgin of Mercy from Ravensburg (State Museums, Berlin) who shields two groups of the faithful from divine wrath beneath the skirts of her protective mantle. Her svelte and uprsght figure, scarcely bowed, exhibits firm outlines and a placid sweetness inherited from Multscher and ahen to the open and dynamic volumes characteristic of Upper Rhenish sculptures. Erharr introduced a new grace evoked by the elegant but reserved bearing of the Virgin, the debcacy of her gesture and her fine face carried on a long thin neck and skilfully set within the round outbne of the veil. As with Riemenschneider, his search for an idealized beauty is expressed in the creation of images of the Virgin Mary: harmonious, serene, almost disembodied. At Blaubeuren, the figure carvings of the altarpiece dated 1493 and 5494 and probably made in the workshop of Michael Erhart in collaboration with his son Gregor (born at Ulm, died at Augsburg in i540), possess more ample forms and drapery and have more broadly modelled faces; but they present a nobility of tone and a quiet grace in the same spirit.
The Ulm workshops, numerous and very active around 1500, adopted and enriched this Erhartian language, reflected in the languid look of many figures with subtly balanced attitudes, full but elegant forms and gentle features. Partial inlierituri of this style, the wurks of Niklaus Weekmann (mentioned at Ulm from i48i to 1526) and his workshop revived the types of drapery animated by more complex folds with voluminous bulges between deep hollows (Thalheim altarpieee). The rapid propagation of formulas devised by Weekmann, repeated or interpreted by his pupils and followers throughout all Swabia and even beyond, maintained a relatively uniform, at times somewhat monotonous style for several decades. In the least successful works the forms verged on flabbiness and the expressions seemed drowsy, which rendered the fashionable types uninteresting.
The refined and subtly shaded art of Daniel Maueh (Ulm, 1477 Liege, i540) led to a simdar infatuation. Marseb, coming from an Ulm milieu, interpreted the traditional elements in a personal manner, inventing his own compositions and intensifying the lyricism of expressions. In the Holy Kinship altarpieee of Bieselbach, signed and dated s5so, which he chose to leave in monochrome, he also adopted Renaissance decorative motifs transmitted by Augsburg, which was rapidly penetrated by southern influences.

Read More

TILMAN RIEMENSCHNEIDER

The progress of the long, fertile and illustrious career of Tilmbn Riemensehneider is well known a rarity in the Middle Ages thanks to the abundance of documents and works that have been preserved. Born at Heibgenstadt in Thuringia towards i4o, journeyman in 1483 and master in i485 at Whrzburg, where he was in charge of a large workshop receiving extensive and numerous commissions, the sculptor held an established position in the city, of which he was mayor in 1520-1521. The conditions of his apprenticeship and first professional engagements, however, are unknown. His first recorded commission, in 1490, for the parish church of Munnerstadt, was the  Mary Magdalene altarpieee installed in 1492 and today dismembered. There followed the sandstone statues of Adam and Eve (i49i-i493) for the gate of the chapel of the Virgin, the tomb of the prince-bishop Rudolph von Seherenberg (1496-i499) at Wurzburg and that of the Emperor Henry II (1499—1513) at Bamberg, as well as many other sculptures in stone, marble, alabaster or wood and ieveral large altarpieces, some still preserved in situ, such as those of the Holy Blood (Heiligh Into/tar) at Rothenburg (1499-1505) and of the Virgin at Creghngen (around io). The stylistic vocabulary of Riemensehneider is easy to characterize. His feminine figures, with some minor variants, all have a slender stature—narrow bust, frail limbs, fine hands—, hair set in peaceful waves, a sweet face with smooth modelling and a broad flat forehead, eyes slanted towards the temples and circled by a fold of skin, a long nose and small mouth with a slight swelhng of the lower lip. The maseuhne faces, built on the same plan, with, of course, thicker and more rugged features, present some distinct types found in many combinations in Riemenschneider’s various works, as witnessed by the apostles of Rothenburg and Creghngen. The play of draperies, animated by uneven folds broken into multiple facets, is compheated but without excessive agitation. The calm features, delicate gestures and tranquil attitudes show a melancholy sweetness even when emotion or pain are expressed.
An extreme care is taken over details and the treatment of the surface. The hmewood is often left exposed and merely accented by a partial polychromy which brings out the iubrlety of the polished volumes and emphasizei the finesse of the varied motifs barely chiselled on the surface of the wood. The process was used, in particular, for the altarpiece of Miinnerstadt, afterwards painted by Veit Stoss between i502 and 1504 (this colouring has now disappeared).

Read More

VEIT STOSS

The training and early career of this sculptor born at Horn on the Neckar, who left Nuremberg in 1477 for Cracow where he stayed nearly twenty years, remain obscure. At all events the teachings of Strasbourg were assimilated and transgressed by the passionate, deeply original temperament of Veit Stoss.
His two chief undertakings at Cracow were the marble tomb of King Casimir IV and the great altarpiece in polychrome wood in the church of St Mary which he and his workshop carved from 1477 to 1489. In the central scene of the Death of the  Virgin the dramatac emphasis and intensity of expressions, heightened by the gesticulation and mamicry of the figures, are admirable. The bodies disappear beneath tumultuous flights of draperies as if buffeted by a violent wind, but an extreme care is lavished on faces and hands, chiselled with the prodigious virtuosity that was the master’s hallmark. The powerful and craggy features of the apostles, the full oval of the Virgin’s dehcate face, the exuberant curls of the voluminous beards and hair were the many characteristic features displayed as well in the works Veit Stoss carried out after returning to Nuremberg in 5496.
There he worked in sandstone to produce the three scenes of the St Sebaldus Passion commissioned by Paul Volckammer (1499), which vied with the anecdotal reliefs of the stone carver Adam Kraft, maker of the celebrated tabernacle in the Nuremberg church of St Lawrence (1493-1496). But Stoss carved mainly in hmewood, which he coated either with an ultra-refined polychromy, as in the Annunciation (5557-1558) hanging in the choir of the St Lorenzkirche, or, preferring to bring out the material itself, with faint coloured highlights. Several figure carvings attesting to the growing preference for this prqcesi in the early sixteenth century rank among the master’s finest creations, namely Tobias and the Archangel Raphael in
• the Nuremberg museum, St Andrew in the Nuremberg church ofSt Sebaldus or St Roch in Florence celebrated by Vasari in the Lives, which in each case exhibit new formal inventions. Thebroken and arbitrary lines of the draperies show with a still more heightened spiritedness in the copperplate engravings made by the scnlptor.
Unlike the Nuremberg bronze-founders, Peter Vischer the Elder (1460—5529) and his sons, Stoss remained a stranger to the Italian novelties introduced by Albrccht Dtircr (Nuremberg, 1471—1528). Stoss’s last work, the altarpiece of the Carmelites (5520—1523), today in Bam— berg, once again affirms his mastery and the force of his personal genius, which had a tremendous impact on many sculptors, whether pupils or followers, such as Master Pave1, active at Levoa in Slovakia.

Read More

FRANCONIA

Upper and Lower Franconia display contrasting faces in their two main art centres, Nurcmberg and Wflrzburg, where two outstanding creators, Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemcnschneider, occupied the first rank.
At Nuremberg, after the middle of the fifteenth century, the influence of  Hans Multscher, which confirmed a traditional taste for calm and compact figures with mild expressions, was challenged by the influence of the Upper Rhine transmitted through the prints of Master E. S. and Martin Schongauer or by direct contact with actual works (Nordlingen is not far from Nuremberg). It was a mobile style, angular but marked by mildness and a fragile grace, that prevailed in Nurembcrg in the years 1470-1480, and which is notably illustrated by the sculptured parts of the altarpieces painted by Michael Wolgemut (Nuremberg, 5434 or 1437—1519). Veit Stoss shattered this relatively tranquil art.

Read More

TYROL AND AUSTRIA

The echo of Strasbourg art reverberated in different ways in the Alpine regions in the late fifteenth ceotury:
distinctly in Austria and around Constance, Zurich and Fribourg in Switzerland; more discreetly in the Tyrol. The personality of Michael Pacher, who is first mentioned at Bruncck in South Tyrol in 1467 and died at Salzburg in 1498, was indeed original. From his workshop came several carved and painted altarpieces intended for Tyro— lean churches like that of Gries (1471—1475) or for more distant places: such arc the famous altarpiece of St Wolfgang (1471-1481) in the  Salzkammergut and that of Salzburg (1484-1498), destroyed in 1709. Stylistic divergences between the painted panels and the sculptured sections led to the mistaken belief that Pacher was not both the painter and sculptor, as he is now generally regarded to have been. While the scenes viewed in perspective on the St Wolfgang wing panels reveal specific contacts with Italian painting, in particular the works of Jacopo Bellini and Andrea Mantegna, showing a conception of space already inspired by the Renaissance, the luxuriant Coronation of the Virgin which occupies the central panel is one of the great masterpieces of late Gothic. Its style derives mainly from the art of the Swabian sculptor Hans Mnltscher, represented, precisely in the South Tyrol, by the Sterzing altarpiece (1456—1458), without overlooking some Stras— hourg innovations of the 146os. The scene forms a complex whole of a profuse bnt skilfully ordered richness centred around God the Father and the kncehng Virgin. The monumental figures are enveloped in ample garments with breaks and tubular folds running through them which form broad, well-defined transversal lines between the smooth areas. The broad fleshy faces, typical ofPacher, resemble those of the painted figures which also display the same plastic density as the sculptures.
The influence of this so personal art was felt by the Tyrolean sculptors of the following generations, like Hans Klocker, mentioned atBrixen from 1478 to ioo, who ran a very active workshop in which many altarpieces were crafted. However, Klocker can be clearly distinguished from Pacher, in particular by his more incisive manner and the more angular forms of his sculptures.
Pacher was also known to the woodcarver who, between about 1491 and 1498, made the Kefermarkt altar- piece in Upper Austria: he is identified tentatively with Martin Kriechbaum, recorded as working in Passau from ‘473 to i5o8. His style bears in addition the imprint of Strasbonrg formulas transmitted either by the intermediary of Austrian followers of Nicholas of Leyden or directly, since the master probably came to Passau in 1469. But the nervous mobility of the figures in the central panel of the Kefermarkt altarpiece, their tormented faces, the almost metallic crumpling of the draperies hollowed by violent shadows and deployed in space, and the sharp chiselling of the accessories and decorative elements, have no equivalents. Everything points to a highly singular talent which unfortunately is no longer represented today except by this altarpiece and the Deacon statuette in the Louvre.

Read More

THE “LEANING BUST” THEME

Fully to appreciate the extent of Nicholas of Leydens influence, we may take as a point of reference the theme of the ‘leaning bust.” In Strasbourg itself and in the Upper Rhine, the popularity of this theme was considerable among the the great master’s followers. But they seized above all on the anecdotal character of these “spectator” figures and lingered over the minute delineation of human features, sometimes almost trivially emphasized to the detriment of inner life. Expressive power prevailed iu the work of Nicholas of Haguenau, recorded in Strasbourg from 1485 to 5526, who carried out varied and important works such as the altarpiece of the high altar of the cathedral, the Fronaltar (tsos), and who is credited with the carvings of the famous Issenheim altarpiece (Unterlinden Museum, Colmar). His contemporary, Veit Waguer, active from 5492 at Haguenau aud Strasbourg, also repeated the leaning bust theme, almost caricaturally, for the altar— piece, commissioned iu 1500, for the Strasbourg church of Saint—Pierre—le—Vicux.
In the footsteps of Nicholas of Leyden, in Coustance aud in Vienna, sculptors like Heinrich Iselin (active at Constance from 1477 until his death iu 55,3) and Anton Pilgram (active at Heilbronn, Brno and Vienna from 5481 to isis) interpreted in their turn the traditional model introduced into the decoration of stalls, pulpits and tabernacles. However, in Ulm Cathedral the leaning figures, attributed to different sculptors, which surmount the reveals of the stalls commissioned from thejoinerJiirg Syrlin the Elder in ‘469 and completed in 5474, adopt only the formal aspect of the subject and betray a spirit alien to the style that issued from the Strasbourg milieu.

Read More

THE GERMANIC WORLD AND THE NETHERLANDS

Detectable before the mid—fifteenth century, the renewal of style was essentially achieved in the work of Nicholas of Leyden, which lies at the very source of late Gothic sculpture (Spdtgotik) in the southern part of the Empire. In Swabia, Hans Multscher (recorded in Ulm from 1427; died before 1467) had already begun to stiffen the pose of his figure carvings, with their compact and solid silhouettes; to harden the pliant folds and soft curves of international Gothic, on which he nevertheless remained dependent. The break was finally made by Nicholas of Leyden. Probably of Dutch origin as his name indicates, he was also called, more rarely, Nicolaus Gerhaert after his father. Nothing is known of his training and   we have records for only eleven years of his life, from 1462 to 1473; years marked by a few undisputed works (only four are extant), by his arrival in Strasbourg in 1462 at the latest, and by his departure in 1467 for the court of the Emperor Frederic III in Vienna and Wiener Neustadt, where he died in 1473. That is little indeed, measured against this remarkable sculptor’s personality.
The tomb of Archbishop Jakob von Sierck at Trier, signed and dated 1462, is already a work of his maturity. The plastic density of the recumbent figure is well served by the sweep of the draperies, hollowed or distended with sharp and broken folds conferring live movement upon this tomb effigy of an all too often static type, formerly accompanied by a withered corpse effigy. The doorway of the Strasbourg Chancellery, erected in 1463—1464, was ornamented by Nicholas of Leyden with a Virgin and Child, the armorsal bearings of the town, and two busts:
an old man and a yonng woman probably representing the Emperor Augustns and the Sibyl of Tibur, who were known from earlier casts (only the two heads in red sandstone are preserved, sn Strasbourg and Frankfurt). The stock theme of the half-length figure leaning on a window ledge, whether handled in pasnting as in the portraits by Van Eyck or inserted in an architectural setting as in the Jacques Ccenr palace at Bonrges, is here completely remodelled. Leaning over the windowsill, advancing a shoulder and inclining the head in a skilfnl play of contrasting lines, the two figures of the Chancellery have a mobile posture that lends an inner dynamism to the carved bnst and suggests spatial recession. The Epitaph of a Canon in Strasbonrg Cathedral, signed and dated 1464, and the admirable Leaning Bust of a Man in the Notre-Dame Museum of Works, attrsbuted to Nicholas of Leyden and sometimes regarded as his self—portrait, give the same sensation of life, thanks to the naturalness of the gestures and the movement of the bodies. Added to the delicate rendering of faesal expression the attentive gaze of the Emperor and the Sibyl, the lowered eyes of the leaning man sunk in thought is a sharp and exact treatment of the features which inscribes in detail on the stone surface every hne, every wrinkle, every fold of flesh. This focus on the human, going beyond the mere transcription of reality. places Nicholas of Leyden in the line of the great innovative painters of the southern Netherlands and in more distant descent from sculptors bke Claus Sluter. The elongated body of Christ on the cross at Baden-Baden. another signed work dated 5467, takes over devices used by Van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, also disseminated by the prints of Master E. S. The Crucifix of the Nrdlsngen altarpiece (1462), because of its kinship with that of Baden-Baden, has been attributed to Nicholas of Leyden and would thus be his only extant woodcarving. His altarpiece for the cathedral of Constance (1465-1467) was destroyed at the Reformation and the other figure carvings of the Nhrdhngen altarpseee are ascribed to an anonymous Strasbourg master directly in touch with Nicholas, the maker of the Dangolsheim Virgin and Child. The slim and pliant silhouette of the Virgin is concealed behind the flaps of the cloak flung far out from the body, which stands back, creating empty spaces that seem to penetrate the sculptured form. This new and complex plastic conception, worked out in Strasbourg and adopted along the Upper Rhine, was diffused through South Germany by the prints that propagated the Upper Rhenish repertory of forms: it constitutes one of the dominant features of late German Gothic sculpture. The widespread use of limewood, light and soft, allowed sculptors to carve freely and deeply in the material in order to chisel with virtuosity those intricate forms so characteristic of Germany, and to release broad flights of drapery rhythmically broken by folds with sharp edges and acute angles.

Read More