Angel Playing a Lute

This angel was originally associated with a Madonna on the tabernacle of the Church of St. Mary in Husum. The tabernacle was completed in 1520, but pulled down in the early nineteenth century. It was made by Hans Brüggemann, who worked principally for Duke Friedrich of Schleswig-Holstein and others in the duke’s circle. The Husum tabernacle, carved in wood and about twenty metres high, rivalled the celebrated southern German tabernacles sculpted from stone, especially those in Ulm and Nuremberg. Brüggemann took a lively interest in the prints of Albrecht Dürer, and this little figure from Husum takes after the angel archetype first seen in Dürer’s Apocalypse of 1498.