Angel Holding a Candlestick

The twisting pose of this angel makes it a particularly virtuoso creation, and it has rightly been hailed as “one of the most beautiful of all Late Gothic statuettes”. It was part of Cologne Cathedral’s tabernacle, which was probably begun around 1515 and was lauded in a poem as a “wonder of the world” (mundi miraculum). The tabernacle was torn down in 1766, but a large number of fragments, some found in excavations, have survived. Franz Maidburg was a pupil of Tilman Riemenschneider, as is witnessed not least by the delicate working of the surface of the stone. Maidburg was one of the most important sculptors active in Germany in the first half of the sixteenth century, and worked chiefly in the cities of Upper Saxony that had grown rich through the mining of silver ore. Thus, for example, he played a key role in furnishing the Church of St. Anne at Annaberg, a town in the Erzgebirge mountains newly founded in 1496.