The Master of the Hildesheim Magdalene Legend is so named here after this exquisite set of panels that once formed the wing of an altarpiece in the monastery of Saint Mary Magdalene in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, created around 1416–20. The artist has also long been known as the ‘Master of the Göttingen Barefoot Altar’ after his altarpiece of 1424 made for the Franciscan church of that name in that city and now preserved in the Hanover Landesmuseum. Though his precise identity remains unknown to us, this elegant anonymous Master was active in both cities in the first quarter of the fifteenth century and was much influenced by other artists active in Lower Saxony such as Bertram von Minden as well as Conrad von Soest in adjacent Westphalia. The panels here combine scenes from the life of Mary Magdalene with episodes from the New Testament and the saints and kings associated with the monastery church in Hildesheim. Their charming and graceful manner provides a perfect illustration of the elegance of the so-called ‘soft style’ prevalent in German painting in this region of Germany during the last phase of the International Gothic style, a courtly idiom which had its roots in the traditions of French manuscript illumination and Bohemian painting from the previous century.

All four of these panels originally formed part of the high altar of the Augustinian Magdalenenkirche in Hildesheim. The altarpiece may be dated with some accuracy to the period of the enlargement of the church in the early fifteenth century. The monastery church was originally founded in 1224 and consecrated in 1294 but was later expanded and converted to a basilica dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene in 1416. In the same year the adjacent convent or Reuerinnenkloster for ‘fallen girls and women’ was also consecrated. The construction of the basilica itself was completed in 1420, and the altarpiece presumably finished at that time or in the years immediately following. The panels originally formed both sides of one of the wings of the altarpiece. The centrepiece probably consisted of a single painting or sculpture, whose subject and whereabouts are both unknown. The completed altarpiece was constructed with two panels on each wing on both the inner and outer sides. The inner sides contained scenes from the legend of the life of Mary Magdalene, visible on feast days or other important occasions, while the outer faces, which would have been visible when the altar was closed, were painted with the Adoration of the Magi and various saints, many specifically connected to Hildesheim. The remaining four panels are divided today between the Westphalian State Museum in Münster, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, the Landesmuseum in Hanover and the Kunsthalle in Hamburg.¹ The overall iconographical scheme of the altar, while neither strictly chronological nor historical, would however have been entirely becoming for a monastery church dedicated to the Magdalene and the nearby convent for ‘fallen women’. The Master of the Hildesheim Magdalene Legend has appropriately chosen to emphasise the repentant humility of the saint and her closeness to Christ. Such an iconography would suggest that the missing central section most probably contained a single painted episode from the life of the Magdalene, or perhaps a sculpture of the Crucifixion, with the Magdalen at the foot of the cross.

These four panels originally composed the left wing of the altarpiece. The outer side was painted with the Adoration of the Magi above and the Saints Mary Magdalene, Augustine and Livinus below (fig. 1). The latter are identified by an inscription which ran horizontally between the two scenes, much of which is still visible today despite being cut in two. As with their counterparts on the right-hand wing, the figures are richly and colourfully dressed, and they are set against a dark sky decorated with golden stars. The foremost King has removed his crown and kneels bareheaded before the infant Jesus, who grasps his hand with a wonderful childlike expression while He touches his finger to his lips. The Virgin’s magnificent halo with its bejewelled crown stands in contrast to those of the other Magi, whose haloes and gifts are more plainly drawn. The presence of this scene in the altarpiece is unusual, for it does not feature the Magdalene, but it may perhaps refer to the famous reliquary of the Three Kings in the cathedral at Hildesheim.² The playful gesture of the infant Jesus as He receives his gift is typical of the painter’s endearing style. In the panel beneath we see on the left the Magdalene herself, holding her traditional symbol of a jar of ointment, and clothed in rich draperies (signifying her life before her conversion to Christianity) resplendent with the typically deeply patterned folds of the international Gothic courtly style. Beside her stands Saint Augustine, one of the four Fathers of the Church, holding a heart pierced by an arrow, a symbol of his remorse for his own dissipated youth, a clear parallel to the life of the Magdalene. Lastly, we see a bishop saint, identified by the inscription as the seventh century martyr saint Livinus or Lieven of Ghent, a companion of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, holding his tongue – symbol of his martyrdom – in a pair of pincers.

The inner side of the left wing (fig. 2) was painted with the Raising of Lazarus above the Supper in the House of Simon the Pharisee. Lazarus was the brother of Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha, and his resurrection as recounted in John’s Gospel (11: 1–44) was among the most famous of Christ’s miracles. It is of particular importance in the story of the Magdalene, for it was the moment when both she and Martha converted to Christianity. The colours and costumes of the figures are rich and colourful, and the warm gold background and decorated halos give these inner scenes an additional lustre. The central figure of the Magdalene drying Jesus’ feet with her hair is paralleled in the scene below, where she washed His feet with her tears and anointed them with oil. This particular anecdote is recounted in the account of Saint Luke’s Gospel (7: 36–50), and the scene itself was unquestionably one of the best-known episodes of the saint’s life. The apostle on the right looking on disapprovingly is Judas Iscariot, who, as the evangelist noted, protested against the waste of such valuable ointment. The bare feet pointing downwards, the benign expressions and restrained gestures of the figures, especially the sloping almost sleepy eyes of the Magdalene and her sister are entirely characteristic of the Hildesheim Master’s gentle and elegant style.

The panels from the right-hand wing of the Hildesheim altar similarly permit the reconstruction of their respective places within the altarpiece (figs 3–5). The two panels from the outer side of the wing, today in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (fig. 3),³ depict the apostle saints Peter, Paul and John, who are placed above the bishop saints Hermagoras, Godehard and Bernward, who are identified by an inscription on a band between the two scenes.⁴ These are the only panels from the altarpiece to have survived intact together in their original format and use the same dark background decorated with gold stars as the left wing. The presence of the local saints Godehard and Bernward is hugely important, for together with the scenes from the life of the Virgin they surely secure the relationship of the altar wings to Hildesheim.⁵

Their connection to the Magdalenekirche itself is further supported by the inclusion in the panels from the inner sides of the same wing of the subjects of The Ascension of Mary Magdalene (fig. 4) today preserved in the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster,⁶ above a Noli me tangere (Christ meeting Mary Magdalene in a garden) (fig. 5), now in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.⁷ While the latter subject of Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection in the garden is familiar from the gospel of Saint John, the painter’s source for the Ascension would have been the Golden Legend, a famous compendium of lives of the principal saints compiled by the Genoese Dominican Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) in the thirteenth century. The miracle is said to have taken place near Sainte-Baume in southern France, whither the Magdalene is believed to have spent the last thirty years of her life in fasting and penance. Even at the moment of her ascension, lifted by seven angels, the Magdalene maintains her characteristic dreamy and blissful expression. The painter has faithfully included the hermit who is said to have witnessed the event and taken the news back to Marseille. Although both of these panels are decorated with a gold ground, its effect is matched by an increased interest in decorative foliate forms and patterned trees characteristic of the Master.

For all his undoubted elegance and charm, no details regarding the life or character of the Master of the Hildesheim Magdalene Legend have come down to us. His distinctive style, however, permits the attribution of a few other works to his hand. Chief among these, as Reinhold Behrens first noted in 1939,⁸ is the better known and very much larger double-winged altarpiece painted for the Franciscan monastery Barfüsserkirche (‘Barefoot Church’) in Göttingen, which is dated 1424 and now preserved in the Hanover Landesmuseum (fig. 6).⁹

The present panels were then unknown to Behrens, who made the connection on the basis of stylistic parallels with the Noli me tangere in Stuttgart and the two panels of Saints in Hamburg, but they were subsequently joined to the group by Ernst Buchner in 1950 and then by Behrens in his more thorough study of the Magdalenenaltar in 1961. All subsequent scholars have acknowledged this connection, and for this reason the author of the Hildesheim altarpiece has long been recognised as the same hand (or at the very least from the same workshop) as the eponymous creator of the Hanover retable, often called the ‘Master of the Göttinger Barfüsseraltar’, or the ‘Master of the Göttingen Barefoot altar’.¹⁰ As the Hildesheim altar can be shown to predate that in Göttingen and is on far more modest scale, it is generally considered to be an earlier work by the artist, who must have been active in both cities in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. Closer to it in date and attributed to the same hand by Stange and Behrens is a small altarpiece of the Three Kings preserved in the chapel at Offensen near Holzminden, in whose wings depicting the Annunciation and the Nativity the characteristic female physiognomies of the Master of the Magdalene Legend may be clearly seen.¹¹ The wings flank a carved shrine of the Three Kings in the same way as the Magdalenenaltar may have boasted a sculpture as its central panel. Behrens suggested that the Hildesheim Magdalenenaltar was the earliest of these works, dating from 1416–20, that in Offensen slightly later around 1420, and the large double-winged altar from Göttingen the last and concluding work of the group from 1424.¹² From these works we can see that the Master of the Hildesheim Magdalene Legend was significantly influenced by some of the most important painters working in the so-called ‘soft style’ of the late international Gothic in Germany. Initially his style seems to have been formed quite closely upon that of Bertram von Minden (1345–1415) in Hamburg, exemplified by the great Grabow Altarpiece in 1383 now in the Kunsthalle in that city, with its bright colours and decorative rhythms. As Behrens first observed, for example, the present panel of the Supper in the House of Simon the Pharisee and its dense arrangement of figures can be compared with a Last Supper of around 1383 associated with the workshop or following of Master Bertram, conserved today in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.¹³ While the panels from the Magdalene altar in Hildesheim seem to follow closely the gentle style of Bertram of Minden – and indeed were once attributed to his hand – by the time of the Franciscan ‘Barefoot Altar’ in Göttingen nearly ten years later this influence had been supplanted by the more elegant and sophisticated art of Conrad von Soest (1370–1422) in nearby Westphalia, one of the greatest of all the German masters of the ‘soft style’ in this period. The influence of his works, such as the famous Niederwildungen altarpiece in the church of Saint Nikolas in Bad Wildungen of c. 1413, or the sumptuous later Marienaltar of c. 1420 in Dortmund, can be detected in many of the figures in the Göttingen altar, whose proportions are slimmer and their heads more elliptical than their counterparts in the earlier Hildesheim altar panels.

Remarkably, the Hildesheim retable seems to have remained undisturbed on the high altar of the Church of the Magdalene until the early nineteenth century, something to which these altar panels no doubt owe their remarkably fine state of preservation, with all their original details and gilding intact.¹⁴ After the expansion of the 15^th century the church was again renovated in 1721 in the Baroque style and finally enlarged once more between 1794 and 1797, at which time, according to the Archdeacon of the Cathedral Chapter, the Gothic decorations were apparently removed. These renovations proved short-lived, for a few years later in 1810 the monastery was closed, presumably as part of the process of secularisation that followed defeat to the French in the Napoleonic wars of the first decade of the century.

The central section of the altarpiece, however, did not stay with its wings, for only the latter were later acquired by Werner Graf von Haxthausen (1780–1842) (fig. 7). It is not known for certain, however, at what date or where he obtained them.¹⁵ A veteran of both the Tugenbund and the Befreiungskrieg against Napoleon, Von Haxthausen was made a member of the governing council of the new Prussian Rhine province in 1815, but disagreements with his peers led to his departure to live in Bavaria in 1835. A distinguished philologist, he was also an avid collector of early paintings, especially those of the German school, which he seems to have mostly bought or inherited during his time in Cologne. The inventory of his collection drawn up by Mathias Joseph de Noël in Cologne in 1826, for example, included some 274 pictures, mostly of the early Cologne school, including works by the Master of Saint Laurenz, the Master of Saint Severin and Bartel Bruyn, as well as early Netherlandish works, such as those by the Master of 1518 or Herri met de Bles. By the late nineteenth century, however, the group of panels from Hildesheim had been broken up. As early as 1869 the Noli me tangere is recorded in the Württembergische Altertumsammlung, before being acquired by the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart in 1902. The panels of Saints Paul, Peter and John and Saints Hermagoras, Godehard and Bernward were acquired two years later by the Kunsthalle in Hamburg through the agency of Alfred Lichtwark. The Ascension of the Magdalene alone remained with the present panels, and like them passed by marriage and inheritance through the Von Brencken and Von und zu Guttenberg families until being bought by the Munich dealer Julius Böhler around 1949–50, by whom it was sold to the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster.

We are grateful to the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte for their assistance in clarifying the provenance of this work.

¹ The overall size of the altar was around 152 x 394 cm. Whether the retable originally possessed a predella is not known.
² When Reinhald of Dassel brought the great Shrine of the Three Kings to Cologne in 1164, he gave three fingers to the cathedral at Hildesheim, where he had held several offices. The Carmelite friar John of Hildesheim (c. 1310–1375) was the author of the famous Historia Trium Regum (‘History of the Three Kings’) published later around 1373–75. A 15^th-century reliquary is still preserved in the Dommuseum in Hildesheim. See Marx 2015, pp. 221–22, reproduced fig. 14.
³ Inv. no. 370; panel, 133.5 x 79 cm. Behrens 1961, pp. 159–60 ff., reproduced fig. 119.
⁴ Godehard Bishop of Hildesheim from 1022–38, is shown holding a model of the monastery church that was founded in his name following his canonisation in 1132. His predecessor Saint Bernward (960–1022) was Bishop from 993–1022 and an important patron of the arts. The martyr saint Hermagoras was Bishop of Aquileia in the late third century.
⁵ Kier and Zehnder 1998, p. 309, record the suggestion made by Matthias de Noel, the compiler of the Haxthausen inventory of 1826, that the panels might have come from the Cathedral of Goslar to the south-west (destroyed in 1811), where Saint Bernward of Hildesheim was similarly venerated, and where a chapel had been dedicated to the Magdalen since 1270.
⁶ Inv. no. 856; panel, 67 x 80 cm. Behrens 1961, pp. 163 and 165, reproduced fig. 122.
⁷ Inv. no. L24; panel, 66.5 x 79.5 cm. Behrens 1961, pp. 162-3, reproduced fig. 122.
⁸ R. Behrens, ‘Der Göttinger Barfüsseraltar: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der niedersächsischen Malerei des frühen 15. Jahrhunderts, diss. Göttingen 1937, Bonn 1939, pp. 77–78. Behrens ascribed the panels to the immediate workshop of the Göttingen Barefoot Master.
⁹ Inv. no. 763; tempera on panel, gold ground. 305 x 787 (open) cm. See M. Wilson, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover Landesgalerie. Die deutschen und niederländischen Gemälde bis 1550, Hanover 1992, pp. 102–12, no. 32, reproduced figs 36a–36n.
¹⁰ Behrens initially regarded the Stuttgart and Hamburg panels as a product of the workshop of the Master of the Barefoot altars before later fully attributing the whole group to his hand, while Stange (1967) regarded all these works generically as the work of a Master from the School of Lower Saxony.
¹¹ Panel, 90 x 110 cm.; wings 81 x 49 cm. Stange 1967, p. 233, no. 766, and R. Behrens, ‘Der Altar in Offensen’, in Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, vol. I, 1965, pp. 89–100, reproduced figs 65 and 66. See also Hartwieg 2010, pp. 244–56.
¹² Dendrochronological analysis of the Hamburg and Münster panels undertaken by Peter Klein in 2000, supports this dating. Both panels are made from timber from the Harz foothills in Lower Saxony, with an earliest felling date of c. 1403, and a likely usage date of around 1415. See Hartwieg 2010, pp. 106–218 for a full technical analysis of the Göttingen Barefoot Altar, and pp. 238–43 for the Hildesheim Magdalen Altar.
¹³ Behrens 1961, p. 167. See A. Stange, Deutsche Malerei der Gotik, vol. II, Berlin 1926, p. 145, reproduced fig. 187 (part). The Last Supper is one of six panels from an altar depicting the Life of Christ.
¹⁴ Behrens 1961, p. 163 f. lists an entry in the Monastery archives from the late 17^th century which records the restoration of the altarpiece: ‘Anno 1466 Altar summum in Templo Monasterii s. Maria Magdalena dicatum est s. Hermagore, Bernwardii, Godehardi – anno 1694 renovatum est tabulatam’. Dombibliothek Hildesheim, Hs 361a, f. 63. The date of 1466 is probably a misreading of 1416.
¹⁵ Behrens suggested that the retable was removed from the monastery church during this period of renovation. Marx speculates that the panels may have been acquired by the von Haxthausen family as early as the very late 18^th century, but given the family’s lack of a specific connection with Hildesheim and Moritz von Haxthausen’s later predilection for early German panels this does not seem especially likely.