Christ Taking Leave of His Mother

At a gate outside the walls of a city, Christ is embracing his mother who is sinking to the ground overcome with grief at their parting. The three women accompanying Mary are standing on the right, next to the city gate. In the left-hand background and between trees Peter stands next to the other disciples. Behind them, one can see a landscape with woods, a castle and craggy rugged mountains on the horizon.
The panel was part of large altarpiece. The Gemäldegalerie holds another panel belonging to the same altarpiece, the Disrobing of Christ (fig. left). This scene shows the executioners tearing off Christ’s clothes, while Mary tries to cover her son’s nakedness. The two groups face one another in a single pictorial plane. The main movements and gestures take place in parallel pictorial fields. The structure
of the composition is essentially linear. Christ is leaning over towards the middle, thus bringing his face into central focus, looking directly at the viewer. This raises the narrative painting to the status of a devotional painting. Christ’s head becomes the Holy Countenance, a picture within a picture.
Both depictions feature important elements of the art of Bernhard Strigel that developed out of the Swabian late-Gothic style. Characteristic are the very slender, mannered figures whose expressions are generally informed by either contrived or brutal gestures. The compositions are constructed in clearly divided receding planes. Lines and planes are Strigel’s chief means of expression, demonstrated also
by his penchant for profile views. Two further panels from the destroyed altarpiece have been preserved in Karlsruhe (Kunsthalle): the Annunciation and Christ Washes the Feet of His Disciples. Four panels each showing two saints burned in Berlin in 1945. Some of the themes suggest the context of a major Passion cycle scenes. The altarpiece must therefore have been very large, with several pairs of wings. But it is almost impossible to say what it looked like, since the surviving pieces do not provide a sufficient basis for a reconstruction.
The clear structure of the scenes, the relationship of the monumental figures to the landscape and the large-scale painting with the luminescent colours suggest that Strigel’s late style began around 1520. The provenance from Isny im Allgäu is unconfirmed. Wilhelm H.Köhler | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting – Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019