Great Altarpieces
Virdis, Caterina Limentani & Pietrogiovanna, Mari
SUMPTUOUS IMAGES Great Altarpieces Gothic and Renaissance Caterina Limentani Virdis and Mart Pietrogiovanna Vendome, $150,421 pp. Lawrence S. Cunningham Hooking at church architecture closely...
...The work, broken up and dispersed in the Napoleonic era, was only reassembled and fully described in the twentieth century...
...The same expansive and exacting coverage is given to each work...
...A few of them, like Duccio's Maesta in Siena (whose separated panels have found their way all over the world) or Griinewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, are considered artistic masterpieces...
...Yet they were meant to be seen in a church setting, illuminated by the unsteady light of candles and lamps and whatever natural light filtered in through stained-glass windows...
...Early Christian basilicas like those in Rome and elsewhere typically had an altar facing the people with a space behind for the presiding celebrant and his clergy...
...Since the interior panels of the altarpieces were shown only on special occasions, they assumed a certain revelatory character...
...That shift encouraged decorative artistic works like crucifixes to be affixed to the walls facing the priests and the congregation...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...On the verso of the next section there is a black-and-white schematic indicating how the scenes are arranged on the piece when it is closed and open...
...The scholarship is equally superb...
...As is well known, the Northern artists, pioneering the use of oil paints, created the most stunning and seemingly photographic detail...
...Some, to be sure, gave glory to the patrons who paid for them: their portraits appear not infrequently in the central or side panel, usually in an attitude of prayer...
...From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, such works became increasingly elaborate, done either as paintings or as cunningly complex sculptures...
...Beginning with Robert Campin's Merode Altarpiece (now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York) done in the early fifteenth century, the volume ends with the Retablo Mayor, now in the cathedral of Valencia, a Spanish work of the sixteenth century clearly inspired by Al-brecht Durer...
...The following six pages give full-page photographs of details: Because the pages are about 13 x 11 in., the precision of the artist is revealed in an astounding way...
...A bibliography and a very useful index are also included...
...On the recto, the exterior panels are actually tipped into the text so the viewer/reader can see the altarpiece closed and then open the panels to see its interior with its gorgeous full-length portraits of Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome...
...This eye for representational fidelity in the painters in the North has led many scholars to scan the appurtenances found in the paintings (candles, books, flowers, embroidery, and so on) to detect "hidden symbolism" that may (or may not- it depends on the rigor of the analysis) relate the separate parts to the whole...
...That said, there is still merit in a careful perusal of a book as beautiful as this: as Saint Bonaventure notes in the opening chapter of the Itinerarium, "whoever is not enlightened by such splendor of created things is blind...
...It is only in their intended setting, I think, where we can properly gaze as opposed to look, that we can really appreciate how powerful these works are...
...What end did these altarpieces serve...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham Hooking at church architecture closely can teach a person a good deal about theology and liturgical practice...
...of Notre Dame...
...Michael Pacher (1435-98) is a lesser-known painter from the Tyrol who did a great altarpiece honoring the fathers of the church for an Augustin-ian monastery...
...Let me take just one chapter...
...This is not a hurriedly compiled "art book" destined for the remainder table at Barnes & Noble...
...When the exterior doors were pulled back, the interior panels gave the viewer a glimpse of the beauty of the world of heaven...
...Altarpieces took various forms, from a single-panel painting to hinged pieces with three panels (trip-tychs) to more elaborate assemblies (the polyptych) that had several wings and could be opened or closed to reveal or hide interior panels that were displayed during the Mass or for veneration on feast days...
...Rather, it features some of the most beautiful art photography, all in color (there are over four hundred illustrations and only the schematics of the various altarpieces are in black and white), that I have ever seen...
...In between are sumptuous photographs of the work of-to name some of the more familiar-Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grunewald, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Carlo Crivelli, and Luca Signorelli...
...Thus, for example, the fur cuffs of the donors of the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan Van Eck, or the jeweled crowns or the copes of the singing angels, are simply breathtaking in their exactitude...
...The chapter on Pacher describes the making and rediscovery of the altarpiece, talks about the artist's training (while his portrait style is quite clearly Northern, he learned his perspective from the study of Mantegna and his color theory from Venetian artists), and provides the pertinent scholarship...
...The origin and development of these altarpieces are discussed with high intelligence by Caterina Limentani Virdis in the introductory chapter to Great Altarpieces-as stunning a book on art as I have ever seen...
...With the rise of private Masses, chapels began to bulge out from the laterals of the church and altars began to be recessed against the walls...
...It is now housed in the art museum (the Alte Pinakothek) in Munich...
...Only by spending time with this book can you understand the care that went into it and why it is so costly...
...For most people today altarpieces are simply great art, and many of them adorn the walls of museums...
...Just to enumerate that litany of artists and art works is to give no sense of how wonderfully their work is made present to us in this volume...
...That shift, in turn, led to the construction of more elaborate altarpieces behind the altar...
...Thirty medieval and Renaissance al-tarpieces are illustrated in great detail...
...But like so much Christian art, altarpieces were meant, simultaneously, to raise the mind and heart of the worshiper to the mysteries of the faith and to enhance the beauty of the setting for the liturgy...
Vol. 129 • December 2002 • No. 22
