Panel paintings at Feigen
Late medieval imagination was joined to sacred purpose in every aspect of daily life. At the close of the Middle Ages, devotion itself was an art, one that lent gravity to all the other arts and shaped the tenor of living. Art was intended to ornament fleeting existence with symbols and admissions of life’s transcendent significance. Modern audiences, particularly those with an antiquarian bent, make brief excursions to the Gothic world. But they do it largely as strangers, lugging along the dry bones of a secular age.
Impatience with religious sensibility, however, does not keep even the most hardened aesthetes from succumbing to the lapidary charm of Sienese, Florentine and early Netherlandish panel painting. Noted European and American collections are filled with religious iconography produced in the great workshops of Italy and the Southern Netherlands during the late 14th and 15th centuries. Nonetheless, German panel painting of the identical period has received less sympathy. Some of the world’s most esteemed collections have been nonchalant toward German work prior to 1500, or roughly the generation of Dürer and Grünewald.
Master of the Burg Weiler Altarpiece, Württemberg, “Martyrs of the Theban Legion,” circa 1480, oil on spruce panel, 20 by 14-3/16 inches. Image courtesy of Sam Fogg & Richard L. Feigen & Co.
Late Medieval Panel Paintings: Materials, Methods, Meanings at Richard L. Feigen has been assembled with an eye toward increasing the audience for these underappreciated works by less common names. A collaboration with Sam Fogg, London-based dealer in medieval art and manuscripts, this is a thoroughly satisfying joint venture. Of the 22 panels on show, the majority are German, with a complement of French and Spanish pieces. On purely visual grounds, the ensemble is its own argument for recovering these works out of critical and curatorial neglect.
There are many wonderful paintings here. Offered necessarily as objets d’art, they are more than mute collectibles. They are relics of our inheritance from what was once Christendom and testify to the devotional fabric of medieval life. “Christ Mocked” (1429), a portion of an altarpiece made for the Franciscan church in Bamberg, is a particular favorite.
A stricken Christ occupies central position within a simplified architectural setting. That near-static compositional core is countered by the energetic gang of tormentors, their jeering faces and the angles of the poles they hold to prod their quarry, pushing a briar crown into his scalp. Medievals would have had no difficulty recognizing themselves in the narrative’s double tale of an historical event and its meaning to witnesses down the centuries. To ordinary worshippers of the day, the scene’s fearful truth was that, in some way, they, too, wielded the clubs and drove the thorns. It is a call to contrition, something quite beyond the arcana of stylistic and technical features on which collectors brood.
The 15th-century soul, finely attuned to pathos, pulsed with recollection of the Passion and what were considered Old Testament heralds of it. The martyrdom of the seven Maccabee brothers and their mother, told in the Hebrew apocrypha, lent itself to the prevailing sensibilities. “The Torture of the Maccabean Brothers” (before 1517), created for a Benedictine convent in Cologne, is a stunning panel.
The Maccabee family and its executioners wear contemporary Rhenish costumes. The styling is splendid. Medieval ingenuity in devising instruments of torture is on detailed, enthusiastic display in a dense composition of great pictorial beauty. Linear distortion—especially of the central bloodied figure, bent in half and suspended from a pulley—jars the modern eye. In art historical terms, it points ahead to the deliberate distortions of Max Beckmann and the German expressionists. But in religious terms, it serves as a precursor and companion to iconography of the Crucifixion. Solomona, cradling the head of her youngest son on the rack, provides a prototype of endurance equal to that of a later sorrowing mother, Miriam of Nazareth. One heroic Jewish family was seen to stand as harbinger to the other.
Some might think a gruesome tableau of Jewish martyrs an odd choice for a convent wall. Not at all—certainly not for one that claimed to hold relics of the Maccabees. As a prompt to prayer, contemplation of the Maccabean deaths leads to contemplation of the Holy Family and the martyrdom at the heart of it.
Discussion of this panel in the accompanying catalog is particularly fine. It extends commentary to Erasmus, who enjoyed friendship with the nuns of the convent, and it recounts the history of the Maccabean revolt and the Seleucid king who suppressed it. The essay helps a modern audience grasp these panels as a sign system created to enhance the theology it professes.
Beautiful and substantive, the catalog bends, at times, under the weight of its own tutorial on late medieval materials, supports, grounds, pigments and brushwork. The ingredients and cookery of it all has been widely available at least since Cennini’s The Craftsman’s Handbook was translated from the Italian two centuries ago. All the attending emphasis on X-radiographs, infrared and macro photography are aimed at market considerations. True, these have their place in the salesroom. But they also empty the work of meaning. The culture that fathered the work remains a foreign country.
Sacrifice is frequently inherent in Christian art, if not an explicit subject. Understanding that is crucial to seeing the connection between these historic panels and the universal, timeless concerns of how we choose to live and die. Collector bidding might rest on the chimera of “objective judgments” made by the light of forensics. But art is really possessed only by those who find nourishment in it.
Late Medieval Panel Paintings: Materials, Methods, Meanings
Through Jan. 17, 2012, Richard L. Feigen & Co., 34 E. 69th St., 212-628-0700, www.rlfeigen.com.
