VISITORS hoping for a glass slipper “It fits!” moment with Compton Verney’s reunited altarpiece should reset expectations.
While the wings and centrepiece of the early-16th-century Lamentation with a Group of Donors are now on display next to each other, centuries of adventure have curved the central panel to a state of fragility, while the wings displaying St Christopher and St George on the inside have been cut down, no longer in proportion to the centre. Hinging the three panels is impossible; so the side panels’ outer images of St Catherine and St Barbara cannot close to cover the central scene of the mourning of Christ by his Holy Mother and St Mary Magdalene.
The work’s asymmetry fits in with the surrounding Northern Renaissance gallery’s religious images and sculptures, which all miss parts, or settings, or colours, owing to the ravages of time and the Reformation. And the piece-by-piece detective work, carried out over 14 years by a volunteer, Christine Cluley, linking the two panels in Compton Verney’s collection with the centre panel held by the National Galleries of Scotland, also speaks to fragmentation and unification.
It is possible that the Lamentation altarpiece was created to celebrate the wedding of Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg-Kulmbach and Susannah of Bavaria in August 1518. The female saints are dated 1519 and are in a different style from the other panels; so the elements may have been created at different times. St Catherine’s and St Barbara’s elongated and slightly stylised representations echo the style of female figures by Lucas Cranach the Elder.
© compton verneySt George (recto), artist unknown
Martin Luther’s examination by the papal legate Cardinal Cajetan at the Diet of Augsburg took place between July and October in 1518. Plausibly, the devoutly Catholic bride Susannah of Bavaria wanted to make a statement, through an image of the Virgin Mary at the side of the crucified Christ, about which side of the religious debate her family were on. Casimir’s brother George the Pious corresponded with Luther and would be won over by Protestantism. When Casimir died in 1527, his brother united their dynastic territories in Franconia, modern-day northern Bavaria, and recruited Evangelical preachers from Hungary and Silesia to promote Lutheranism.
A slightly later date would make the altarpiece’s creation parallel to the German Peasants’ War, 1524-25, when peasants in western and southern Germany rose up against feudal landlords and church institutions.
Casimir’s funeral in 1527 is another possible occasion for the altarpiece’s commissioning, making the orange-draped surface at the lower right a coffin. Religious art of the period offered different pictorial planes. The donors occupy the same lower third of the plane as the body taken from the cross. Painted in miniature and in meticulous detail, the donor group is close to Christ’s pierced and bloodied feet and the hem of our Lady’s flowing, red-lined blue cloak. The two most prominent donor figures wear the regalia of the Order of the Swan, a religious order of Hohenzollern nobles devoted to the Virgin Mary.
The donor given the most detailed treatment, with closely modelled brown and blue robes, regalia, and beard, bears a strong resemblance to the face of St George. A Nuremberg altarpiece from the same period, the Paumgartner Altarpiece (c.1500), shows Stephen Paumgartner as St George, with similar depictions of armour and dragon.
Similarities to the Paumgartner altarpiece support the argument for the attribution of the Lamentation to Hans Baldung Grien, Dürer’s most promising student and a friend of the Nuremberg artist’s son, also Hans. Previously, the altarpiece had been attributed to an unidentified Franconian Master. Dürer was so much in demand that his designs were regularly carried out by members of his workshop and other artists. In 1986, the Metropolitan Museum’s “Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 1300-1500” attributed the Paumgartner to Baldung.
Beside the orange-draped table in front of the donor group, a greyhound rests on its front paws. This is another nod to Dürer’s workshop, as the artist’s engraving Saint Eustace (c.1501) places a greyhound in exactly the same pose.
© compton verneySt Christopher (recto), artist unknown
St Christopher is portrayed as a giant, avuncular figure, with the Christ-child on his shoulders, holding an orb and gripping the saint’s hair with a free hand. The base of St Christopher’s staff is visible, unrefracted, in the water, but the top disappears out of the plane, possibly caused by the panel’s later shortening.
Against the central panel’s landscape of dark green foliage and distant blue hilltops, the bloodied and battered Christ-figure is Gothically gruesome. Compositionally, the discarded, oversized crown of thorns occupies the centre of the lower foreground, with a large-scale and loosely rendered jar of ointment to the right. Mary Magdalene is at the centre of the scene, her arms dramatically raised at the sight of the body of Jesus. She is depicted in Florentine style. Her right hand gestures to the Calvary scene in the top corner. A red-cloaked male figure bends to hold the cloth taut behind the battered torso; and behind him are two older, bearded men. All three figures are in a more Netherlandish style than the idealised faces of the Marys, and may represent St John, Nicodemus, and Joseph of Arimathaea.
Panel paintings were portable, and this Lamentation was probably intended for use in a private chapel. While the first two centuries of its existence are opaque, Ms Cluley has discovered a record of the altarpiece from 1768, and its inclusion in a Berlin auction of 1846, as part of the estate of the Prussian Postmaster. In 1909, the altarpiece appears in a photo of St Martin’s, Little Ness, in Shropshire, donated by the Darby family of Coalbrookdale.
The art historian Nikolaus Pevsner noted three panels in the church in 1955, and suggested to the incumbent that the piece was valuable. Four decades later, the altarpiece was sold in two lots at Sotheby’s, as the wings, no longer attached, presented no definitive proof they formed a triptych. And two separate lots maximised the sale value for St Martin’s.
After the 1993 sale, when the central panel sold for £235,000 and the side panels for £40,000, the Revd Robin Bradbury said: “When I took over the church in 1983, I knew that, because of their great value, these were pictures the church could not look after. . . The Church is not in the business of art preservation.”
The fragility of the central panel may prohibit its being lent ever again; so this Compton Verney show may be the only chance to contemplate this work in its completeness.
“Reunited: The Lamentation Altarpiece” is at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until 28 February. Phone 01926 645500.
www.comptonverney.org.uk