Altar of St Mary

From the former Franciscan Church of the BVM Queen of the Holy Rosary, Remetinec near Novi Marof.
The altar of St Mary consists of a retable done in the 15th century and an altar frame made in the 17th c. In the central part of the retable remaining from the former Late Gothic winged altar there is a statue of Mary with Child on a half moon in the shape of a human head with angel musicians below her feet, and above her head two hovering figures of dressed angels that once held a starry crown with which they were crowning her. In the side fields divided into vertical sequences are the figures of four church fathers, four evangelist and twelve sainted virgin martyrs. In morphology, style and typology, the retable suggests that trend in Gothic central European sculpture that appeared in the 1430s, and is called the dark period. To a great extent it was formed under the influence of a naturalist concept of the depiction of Low Countries art of the period. The progenitor of this new visual idiom was the austrian sculptor Jakov Kaschauer from Košice in today’s Slovakia. His style is characterised by folds of clothing of a doughy structure, as if thumb pressed, standing out from the body that they practically deny. Something like this expression is the Remetinec retable, and it is obvious that the masters who made it, apparently more than one, were close to the sphere of influence of Kaschauer.
The architectural formal complex of the altar frame with statues of SS. Peter and Paul of 1669, put up thanks to Nikola Makar, the most senior vice-captain of the Križevci border and his wife, as told by the inscription in a cartouche on a side protuberance of the predella, has the characteristics of the style of northern Mannerism, which marked the art of the second half of the 17th century in inland Croatia. The anonymous master of the altar showed a greater technical mastery in the carving of the ornamental decoration of the sinewy Mannerist motif, while in the formation of the statues he stayed at the level of provincial carving. But irrespective of the stiffness of their posing, underlined by clothing of parallel and thickly sequenced folds, with their interior strength they break free from dependence on the architectural frame. The whole of the retable is a unique example of a successful symbiosis of two styles, the older Gothic and the then contemporary Mannerist.