Sumptuous images

Commonweal, Dec 20, 2002 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

Great Altarpieces Gothic and Renaissance Caterina Limentani Virdis and Mari Pietrogiovanna Vendome, $150, 421 pp.

Looking at church architecture closely can teach a person a good deal about theology and liturgical practice. Early Christian basilicas like those in Rome and elsewhere typically had an altar facing the people with a space behind for the presiding celebrant and his clergy. With the rise of private Masses, chapels began to bulge out from the laterals of the church and altars began to be recessed against the walls. That shift encouraged decorative artistic works like crucifixes to be affixed to the walls facing the priests and the congregation. That shift, in turn, led to the construction of more elaborate altarpieces behind the altar. Altarpieces took various forms, from a single-panel painting to hinged pieces with three panels (triptychs) to more elaborate assemblies (the polyptych) that had several wings and could be opened or closed to reveal or hide interior panels that were displayed during the Mass or for veneration on feast days. From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, such works became increasingly elaborate, done either as paintings or as cunningly complex sculptures. A few of them, like Duccio's Maesta in Siena (whose separated panels have found their way all over the world) or Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, are considered artistic masterpieces.

The origin and development of these altarpieces are discussed with high intelligence by Caterina Limentani Virdis in the introductory chapter to Great Altarpieces--as stunning a book on art as I have ever seen. This is not a hurriedly compiled "art book" destined for the remainder table at Barnes & Noble. Rather, it features some of the most beautiful art photography, all in color (there are over four hundred illustrations and only the schematics of the various altarpieces are in black and white), that I have ever seen. The scholarship is equally superb.

Thirty medieval and Renaissance altarpieces are illustrated in great detail. Beginning with Robert Campin's Merode Altarpiece (now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York) done in the early fifteenth century, the volume ends with the Retablo Mayor, now in the cathedral of Valencia, a Spanish work of the sixteenth century clearly inspired by Albrecht Durer. In between are sumptuous photographs of the work of--to name some of the more familiar--Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grunewald, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Carlo Crivelli, and Luca Signorelli. A bibliography and a very useful index are also included.

Just to enumerate that litany of artists and art works is to give no sense of how wonderfully their work is made present to us in this volume. Let me take just one chapter. Michael Pacher (1435-98) is a lesser-known painter from the Tyrol who did a great altarpiece honoring the fathers of the church for an Augustinian monastery. The work, broken up and dispersed in the Napoleonic era, was only reassembled and fully described in the twentieth century. It is now housed in the art museum (the Alte Pinakothek) in Munich. The chapter on Pacher describes the making and rediscovery of the altarpiece, talks about the artist's training (while his portrait style is quite clearly Northern, he learned his perspective from the study of Mantegna and his color theory from Venetian artists), and provides the pertinent scholarship. On the verso of the next section there is a black-and-white schematic indicating how the scenes are arranged on the piece when it is closed and open. On the recto, the exterior panels are actually tipped into the text so the viewer/reader can see the altarpiece closed and then open the panels to see its interior with its gorgeous full-length portraits of Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome. The following six pages give full-page photographs of details. Because the pages are about 13 x 11 in., the precision of the artist is revealed in an astounding way. Only by spending time with this book can you understand the care that went into it and why it is so costly.

The same expansive and exacting coverage is given to each work. As is well known, the Northern artists, pioneering the use of oil paints, created the most stunning and seemingly photographic detail. Thus, for example, the fur cuffs of the donors of the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan Van Eck, or the jeweled crowns or the copes of the singing angels, are simply breathtaking in their exactitude. This eye for representational fidelity in the painters in the North has led many scholars to scan the appurtenances found in the paintings (candles, books, flowers, embroidery, and so on) to detect "hidden symbolism" that may (or may not--it depends on the rigor of the analysis) relate the separate parts to the whole.

What end did these altarpieces serve? Some, to be sure, gave glory to the patrons who paid for them: their portraits appear not infrequently in the central or side panel, usually in an attitude of prayer. But like so much Christian art, altarpieces were meant, simultaneously, to raise the mind and heart of the worshiper to the mysteries of the faith and to enhance the beauty of the setting for the liturgy. Since the interior panels of the altarpieces were shown only on special occasions, they assumed a certain revelatory character. When the exterior doors were pulled back, the interior panels gave the viewer a glimpse of the beauty of the world of heaven.