I first encountered late-medieval German painting while visiting art museums across West Germany over the course of a “working gap year” from college in the early 1970s. Wanting to learn more about the genre, I wrote a master’s thesis on a late-medieval German topic after receiving my baccalaureate back home, but then chose to write my doctoral dissertation on late-medieval French manuscript illumination.
While I have never regretted my change of scholarly course, I still eagerly seek out late-medieval German paintings in every museum I visit. Why am I so drawn to them? First and foremost, I love the visual tension created by the determined efforts of many artists to marry the medieval fundamentals of line, pattern, and formal repetition with the early-modern naturalism of the Netherlandish ars nova and Italian Renaissance art. The results of this effort can be almost jarring at times: one often encounters convincingly rendered figures and landscapes that are improbably foiled by tooled-gold backdrops rather than skies. Those figures and landscapes must often compete for the viewer’s attention as well with saturated stretches of color and forceful patterns that spar rather than harmonize with one another. Some of these stylistic traits persisted even after Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg successfully melded German linearity with Italian Renaissance spatial clarity in the early sixteenth century. Given this emphasis on line, it is hardly surprising that Germany spearheaded the development of the graphic arts in the fifteenth century.
Just as importantly, German late-medieval painting tends to be highly expressive and inclined to emotional extremes. The quintessential embodiment of these tendencies is Matthias Grünewald’s monumental Isenheim Altarpiece, completed in 1516: the contrast between the crucified and resurrected depictions of Jesus there could not be stronger.
Given my love of the genre, I was delighted to learn in 2019 that the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris had funded a project to catalogue all of the German panel paintings in French public collections made between 1370 and 1550. The material result of this effort is the exhibition under review here, comprising 131 objects drawn from more than sixty French institutions.
This wealth is spread across three museums in the east of France. The Renaissance in Germany (1500–50) and its early modern afterlife are the primary foci at the Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology in Besançon (forty-seven objects); German art from 1420 to 1540 on the Upper Rhine, from Strasbourg to Basel, is the theme at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, where the Isenheim Altarpiece can also be seen (thirty-three objects); and works from the rest of Germany from 1370 to 1530 are on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon (fifty-one objects). All three institutions display their objects in a series of discrete, custom-built spaces that allow for presentation by artist, theme, or subject matter. In my view, the installation at Dijon, the historic capital of the duchy of Burgundy, is the most successful aesthetically; painting the walls in most of the spaces there a deep burgundy was an especially nice touch.
As the nation-state of Germany was not created until 1871, I acknowledge that “Germany” may not be the best word to designate the art on view in this exhibition. The show’s organizers use the word “Germanic,” which suggests that the subjects of this exhibition are the products of a shared German culture, language, or both. While I will continue to use the word “German” here, one must keep in mind that that language and culture stretched in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the North Sea to Denmark to the Baltic Sea in the north; the Swiss and Austrian Alps in the south; the Rhine and northern Netherlands in the west; and modern-day Poland and Lithuania in the east.
Given the expanse of the German linguistic and cultural sphere, styles were regional and often peculiar to just one artist or atelier. The heterogeneous results present the exhibition’s visitors with one visual surprise after another. Picking standouts is not easy, but let me draw readers’ attention to three representative works. The German taste for doll-like sweetness in the first half of the fifteenth century, for example, is well represented by an enthroned Virgin teaching her baby son to write that was painted in Austria around 1420 and is now in the Louvre. Surprisingly, Jesus seems to have fallen asleep during his lesson. Said slumber is a prolepsis (foreshadowing) of his death on the cross for the sake of fallen humankind, a point subtly driven home both by the red color of the child’s garment and by the turning of Mary’s mantle inside out so that its white lining can visually allude to the Savior’s burial shroud. This dark subtext gives the panel a bittersweet aftertaste.
Contrasting with this, the late-medieval German predilection for brutish figures, loud colors, and forceful patterns is evident in a depiction of about 1465 from the Nuremberg atelier of Hans Pleydenwurff, now in Chambon-sur-Voueize (Creuse), of a female saint, possibly Catherine of Alexandria, about to be beheaded. There the eager executioner raises the saint’s chin with his left hand before striking her neck from behind with the sword in his right. What really jumps out at the viewer, though, are the saturated reds, greens, blues, and yellows of the garments. Its folds notwithstanding, the martyr’s blood-red brocade tunic comes across as a flat plane patterned with exquisite floral forms in gold; the hem of the tunic defies gravity as well.
In contrast to the clarity of the space that accommodates the four Pleydenwurff figures, the twelve apostles in a Dormition of the Virgin painted in Salzburg around 1465 and now in Moulins form a volumetric but spatially incoherent jumble around Mary’s deathbed, their wide-ranging expressions of grief rendered with exceptional power. The tooled-gold backdrop only increases the claustrophobia of the shallow space that houses the figures.
While high-speed trains (and cars) make it relatively easy to move between the three venues hosting this groundbreaking exhibition, I will not deny that viewing all three requires making something of a trek. In my (possibly biased) view, though, doing so truly vaut le voyage—is worth the trip.