Martin Schongauer

C.F. Wendelstadt, Inspektor of the Städelschen Institut, Frankfurt, in the early 19th century;
With Duveen Brothers, London, from or through whom bought in 1924 by;
Kammerherr Fritz von Goldammer, Frankfurt, until his death in 1929;
Inherited by his wife (stored at the Thyssen Bank in Berlin from 1939-1944):
Given by her in 1944 to her daughter and son-in-law;
By whom given to their grandson, the present owner, in 1980.

Frankfurt, Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Ausstellung von Meisterwerken alter Malerei aus Privatbesitz, Summer 1925;
Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Vom Jenseits ins Dieseits.  Sakrale Bilder des Spätmittelaltars aus den Beständen des Hessischen Landesmuseums und aus Privatbesitz, 16 September - 12 November 1995, no. 18;
Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle, Spätmittelaltar am Oberrhein.  Maler und Werkstätten 1450-1525, 29 September 2001- 3 February 2002, no. 73;
Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, on long-term loan from 1989 to 2003.

O. Götz, G. Swarzenski, & A. Wolters, Ausstellung von Meisterwerken alter Malerei aus Privatbesitz, Sommer 1925: beschreibendes Verzeichnis, Frankfurt 1926, no. 188;
O. Götz, "Leihausstellung aus Privatbesitz im Städelschen Kunstinstitut", in Der Cicerone, vol. XVII, 1925, p. 736;
E. Buchner, Martin Schongauer als Maler, Berlin 1941, pp. 74-8, 178, no. 6, reproduced p. 78, fig. 47;
E. Flechsig, Martin Schongauer, Strasbourg 1946, p. 392;
I. Baum, Martin Schongauer, Vienna 1948, p. 58, reproduced plate 180;
A. Stange, Deutsche Malerei der Gotik, vol. 7, Munich/Berlin 1955, p. 21, reproduced fig. 22;
A. Stange, Kritisches Verzeichnis der deutschen Tafelbilder vor Dürer, vol. 2, Munich 1970, no. 70;
C. Ilsley Minott, Martin Schongauer, New York 1971, p. 30;
T. Jülich, "Martin Schongauer: Madonna, von Engeln gekrönt", in Kunst in Hessen und am Mittelrhein, vol. 31, 1991, pp. 19-24;
S. Ebert-Schifferer, T. Jülich, Gottesfurcht und Höllenangst.  Ein Lesebuch zur mittelaltarlichen Kunst, Darmstadt 1993, pp. 38-61;
M. Woelk (ed.), Vom Jenseits ins Dieseits.  Sakrale Bilder des Spätmittelaltars aus den Beständen des Hessischen Landesmuseums und aus Privatbesitz, exhibition catalogue, Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, 16 September - 12 November 1995, no. 18;
C. Heck, in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, London 1996, vol. 28, p. 152 (as one of two small panels which are "precious and representative works by Schongauer");
D. Lüdke, in Spätmittelaltar am Oberrhein.  Maler und Werkstätten 1450-1525, exhibition catalogue, Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle, 29 September 2001 - 3 February 2002, pp. 160-2, no. 73, and under no. 74, reproduced in colour on p. 161;
S. Kemperdick, Martin Schongauer. Eine Monographie, Petersberg 2004, pp. 247-8, reproduced on p. 249, fig. 94.


ENGRAVED:
By C. Hoff, Frankfurt, 1828.

Long familiar to visitors to the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, where it has been on long-term loan for many years, this small panel was first brought to light in the 1920s, and formally inducted into Schongauer's painted oeuvre by Ernst Buchner in his catalogue raisonné of 1941.  Since then it has been included as an autograph work in all the key publications on Schongauer's paintings until 2004, when doubts were cast by Stephan Kemperdick (see Literature).

Until then scholars have been unanimous in believing this to be an early work by the artist, though their views have diverged as to its precise dating.  Buchner thought it was probably painted before 1470, while Lüdke placed it slightly later, to 1473-5. A dating in Schongauer's early years is fully supported by all the stylistic evidence.

Schongauer's paintings vary considerably in size, as well as in support.  The diversity in scale is extreme, from the large-scale altarpiece panels, including the famous Madonna of the Rose-Garden of 1473 in Colmar, which stand in stark contrast to small-scale panels painted for private devotion such as those in Munich, Vienna and Berlin, and the even smaller postcard-sized panels such as the one in the J.P. Getty Museum, and the present picture.  There are very few of them: Baum listed eleven works, including multi-panel altarpieces, while Kemperdick's restricted oeuvre consists of only seven works, including one consisting of two double-sided panels, and another, an altarpiece of many panels which he elsewhere assigns to Schongauer's workshop.  Within this miniscule oeuvre are panels which vary in size from 255 by 165 cm. (original dimensions) to 16.5 by 11 cm., and made of four different types of wood.

Our understanding of Schongauer's early chronology depends partly on information recorded by Schongauer's most famous early admirer, Albrecht Dürer, who made notes on some of his early drawings.  Dürer's information seems authentic and consistent, and there is no reason to dispute it.  Schongauer is however much better understood as an engraver than as a painter.  His engraving of the Virgin and Child on a Crescent Moon (Lehrs 40; K. 33) can therefore be reliably dated to the very early 1470s, and this is a key print both in dating the present picture and in underscoring its attribution to Schongauer, since both painting and print have much in common.  The engraving needs to be seen in reverse to understand this clearly; that is to say in the same direction that Schongauer engraved his copper plate (see Fig. 1).  The poses of the crowning angels are very similar, so is the handling of the drapery, and they are facing in the same direction.  The crown is also directly comparable, although in the present painting, unlike both the print and Schongauer's later painting of the Virgin and Child crowned by Angels in the J.P. Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the artist has painted the inside of the far side of the crown, seen through its piercings.  Moving down the picture, not only is the shape and angle of the Virgin's head similar, but the handling of her mouth: with a line running laterally where the lips meet and turn up at the end; and the point of the chin, which in both is drawn with three strokes in a very similar manner, show remarkable similarities.  Her left hand is depicted in a very similar manner in both, and the drapery folds that extend beyond and below it also show a close resemblance.  Similar too in both works are the angle and folds of her robe falling over her right shoulder, as is the organization of the billowing drapery folds beneath the Christ Child in the engraving.  These have been moved sideways so they appear before the shaped window frame, which would obviously have been impossible in the print which is enclosed by a framing line.  The illusionistic device of a window opening is also familiar to us from Schongauer's prints, for example the Man of Sorrows, which is one of Schongauer's earliest prints, dating from circa 1470 (Lehrs 34, K. 32) in which the Virgin's robe falls over the bottom edge of the window embrasure, as it does here (see Fig. 2).  A comparable device is to be found in another early engraving of the Virgin and Child with a Parrot (Lehrs 37, K. 34; its composition served as a basis for the later Getty painting), where the masonry in shadow is engraved using lines of hatching that are similar to those, unfortunately largely effaced by over-cleaning, that are to be seen on the parapet to the lower right in the present painting.  The organization of the drapery under the right arm of the Virgin both in the Man of Sorrows and the present picture is also directly comparable.   

There are further similarities between Schongauer's early engravings like the Man of Sorrows and the present painting which can best be understood by reading the engraving in reverse.  Seen thus (the way in which it was created on the copper plate), the hand of St. John holding the book in the Man of Sorrows is directly comparable to the Virgin's left hand in the present painting (see Fig. 3).  In the print the forefinger extends between the leaves of the book, and is thus partly invisible, while here it vanishes into a drapery fold. Schongauer repeated this idea in the later Getty Virgin and Child in a Window, in whch the forefinger of the Virgin's left hand is also tucked beween the leaves of a book.  The way Schongauer paints hands in early works such as these, and in his large-scale painting of the Virgin in the Rose Garden (Colmar, Dominican Church) as well as in his early engravings is distinctively different from his later works.  In another very early engraving, The Flight into Egypt (Lehrs 7, K. 6), the draperies of the angels who bend the date palm over so that Joseph can reach its fruit show close similarities with those that Schongauer painted here (see Fig. 4), though these resemblances are to be noticed with the print not reversed.  The twisting tail of drapery beneath the angel to the left of the print resembles that below the corresponding angel in the painting.  A more distinctive feature is the charateristic "dimple" that occurs in the lower part of the drapery beneath the angel to the right in the painting.  This reappears in the drapery extending to the right of the right-hand angel in the print, but is more clearly seen near the knee of an angel holding a banderole in the upper right corner of another early engraving, Schongauer's Adoration of the Shepherds (often called The Nativity, Lehrs 4, K. 4; see Fig. 5).

These close similarities do not of themselves prove beyond and doubt that Schongauer painted the present picture, but it makes it very unlikely that it was painted by anyone who was not very close to him at this early date - the beginning or the first half of the 1470s.  The painter must have been intimately connected with Schongauer at this moment, since knowledge of the engraving, rather than of Schongauer's creating of it, would naturally lead to a composition in the reverse direction.   Kemperdick nonetheless associates the present picture with works that have been attributed to Ludwig Schongauer, and that can only with difficulty (his words) be imagined before the year 1490.  He thinks it is by the same hand as panels illustrating the Life of the Virgin that have been attributed to Ludwig Schongauer, circa 1490, including a Visitation in the Hessisches Landesmuseum (see under Literature, reproduced fig. 93), and he thus described the present picture as 'Workshop or Follower of Martin Schongauer, perhaps Ludwig Schongauer'.

The present 'Maria Lactans' displays many similarities with another small painting by Schongauer on a panel of very similar size, and also depicting the Virgin and Child crowned by Angels, in a window, which is now in the J.P. Getty Museum, Los Angeles.  Both derive from ideas found in Early Netherlandish painting, but the Getty picture is probably a later work, which Lüdke dates it to the following decade.  In both pictures the Virgin is surmounted by an elaborate crown borne aloft by angels, but only in the present picture can one see the inside of the distant part of it visible through the interstices; under strong magnification it is clear that much of it was painted "wet-in-wet", and therefore executed quite quickly.  Also to be clearly observed under strong magnification is that the black background covers the distinctive red of the Virgin's robe, which originally extended considerably further to the left.  Although it does not appear cut-off in its present form, this phenomenon has an interesting parallel in the key engraving of the Virgin and Child with the Crescent Moon, where the fall of the edge of the Virgin's robe is partly concealed by the burin-work indicating shadow where the tongues of flame extend from behind her.  It is indeed quite plausible that the Virgin's robe originally extended further to the right in the engraving (or left when reversed here in Fig. 1), until re-worked to include the flames.

Both pictures have recently been examined using reflectography.  These examinations have not revealed under-drawing in either work, but have brought to light a small pentiment in the present picture, in the left hand of the Virgin, which cradles the Christ Child's shoulder:  her little finger was originally intended to be straight, but was amended by the artist to give it a similar angle to the others.

The difficulties in assessing Schongauer's small painted oeuvre should not be underestimated.  It is likely, as Kemperdick and others have suggested, that his large scale works, such as the eight double-sided panels that comprise the retable painted for the church of the Dominicans of Colmar were executed wholly or partly by Workshop assistants. The present picture, together with the Getty painting, and the other small-scale works: in Munich, and his masterpieces in Vienna and Berlin; are more likely to stem entirely from his own hand, but since they were probably painted over a span of fifteen years - the greater part of Schongauer's active career - stylistic changes and developments must be allowed for within the group.  The present work is in any event likely to pre-date the formation of a sizeable workshop, coming shortly after Schongauer's putative journey to the Netherlands.  The condition of its painted surface, of which key parts including the face of the Virgin have abraded surface layers, makes a comparison of its brushwork with the other small-scale paintings far from simple.  This is why the very close compositional similarities between it and Schongauer's early engravings, (often in reverse), which reveal his creative processes in such detail, are so important for our understanding of it. 

We are grateful to Dr. Fritz Koreny for his invaluable help in researching and cataloguing this picture.