Lecture 24: Riemenschneider and Grünewald

Riemenschneider and Grünewald ..................................................

Lecture 24

As in the last lecture, I want to deal with two German masters of the late

15 th and early 16th centuries in this lecture as well. One is a sculptor; the

other is a painter associated with a sculptor—Tilman Riemenschneider

and Matthias Grünewald.

C

ontemplating altarpieces by these artists, we will discover their

different styles and depictions of sacred subjects. We will look at

Riemenschneider’s Altarpiece of the Holy Blood and Grünewald’s

Isenheim Altarpiece. The two artists seem retrogressive because the style

of their work is not like that of the Renaissance-oriented Dürer. They both

have strong ties to the late-medieval traditions of northern Europe. However,

Riemenschneider displayed a compelling Humanism and emotional

directness in his work, while Grünewald, a contemporary of Dürer’s and an

artist aware of Renaissance ideals, chose another path.

Tilman Riemenschneider (1460–1531) worked principally in Würzburg as

a sculptor in wood and stone. He never traveled widely, although his work

occasionally seems to reveal the inÀ uence of the south. Our ¿ rst example

shows Riemenschneider’s Altarpiece of the Holy Blood (c. 1501–1505,

Church of St. Jacob’s, Rothenburg). The shrine stands about 29 ½ feet high

in Rothenburg, an imperial city near the Rhine (“imperial” here refers to the

Roman Empire). There was a long tradition of wood carving in the north,

and Riemenschneider was one of the last great sculptors in wood. He did

not gild or paint his work, which may have been a response to the growing

resistance in Germanic countries to what was regarded as idolatry, especially

in religious sculpture.

The relic of Christ’s blood, which gives this altarpiece its name, is contained

in a vial or crystal embedded in a cross that is supported by two angels in

the section of the altar just above the main scene of the Last Supper. This

group of angels is À anked by larger ¿ gures of the Annunciation. This scene

is unusual because Mary is on the left and the Archangel Gabriel is on the

right, a reversal of the traditional placement.