Death of St. Mary

These altar panels have remained a mystery to this day. When the two narrow versions were unearthed in 1956, they were seen to stem from the same hand as the Death of St. Mary and the experts thought they were the side-wings to the latter. Since then, all three panels have been exhibited as a triptych. If the Death of St. Mary and the two scenes of the Apostles are now exhibited separately and the two scenes of the Apostles are shown as a pair, then this is because the matter has been reconsidered. Because neither thematically speaking nor in terms of height do the narrow panels seem to belong to the broader one. By contrast, it seems certain that the two scenes of the Apostles belong together: the heavens, the line of the mountains, the architectural arches and the curve of the land in the foreground progresses seamlessly from the inside edge of the one panel to that of the other. While they may not form a diptych, they were probably painted as the wing panels for a now lost centrepiece or as part of a multi-part altar to the Apostles. Given the idiosyncratic use of shape and colour (Christ in a red tunic with a pink under-robe) and the architectural capriccios (combining Classical Greek and Roman, Renaissance and Romanesque elements), one may rightly ask why we know of no other works by this imaginative artist. The panel depicting the Death of St. Mary, truncated on the left, shows her on her deathbed surrounded by the Apostles in a Renaissance-like church. The panel was first identified in 1913 as a work by Leiden master Aert Claesz. van Leyden. From 1935 onwards, the work was attributed to other masters: to Abraham Schöpfer, a pupil of Wolf Huber, given the discernible influence of the Danube School; to Johannes N. Hogenberg, who came from Munich and was active in Mechelen (by way of explaining the combination of South German and Dutch elements); and to a pupil of Wolf Huber, who had a studio in the Lower Rhine region, as a panel of writing with the Ten Commandments in the middle was read as revealing a Lower Rhenish dialect (or a Lower Frankish version). (Bettina Baumgärtel)