Miszellaneen Miscellanea
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miszellaneen MISCELLANEA c.g. boerner in collaboration with harris schrank fine prints Israhel van Meckenem ca. 1440–45 – d. Bocholt 1503 1. Die Auferstehung – The Resurrection (after the Master E.S.) ca. 1470 engraving with extensive hand-coloring in red, blue, green, reddish-brown and gold leaf; 94 x 74 mm (3 11�16 x 2 ⅞ inches) Lehrs and Hollstein 140 provenance C.G. Boerner, Leipzig, sale 153, May 3–4, 1927, lot 43 sub-no. 49 (ill. on plate 3) S.F.C. Wieder, Noordwijk, The Netherlands William H. Schab Gallery, New York, cat. 40 [1963], no. 64 (the still-intact manuscript), the Meckenem ill. on p. 69 private collection, Switzerland Sotheby’s, London, December 4, 1969, lot 18 William H. Schab Gallery, New York, cat. 52, 1972, no. 46 (ill. in color) C.G. Boerner, Düsseldorf, acquired April 25, 1972 private collection, Germany Sotheby’s, London, December 3–4, 1987, lot 579 (GBP 27,500) private collection Unikum. Very little is known about the early life of Israhel van Meckenem. His family probably came from Meckenheim near Bonn. He might have received his first artistic training with the so- called Master of the Berlin Passion who was active in the Rhine-Meuse region in 1450–70 (and whom Max Geisberg even tried to identify as Van Meckenem’s father). This is supported by 13 copies that Van Meckenem made after prints by this early “Anonymous.” However, the Master E.S. played an even more important role in the formation of the young artist. He worked in the Upper Rhine valley, most likely in Strasbourg, and his importance for the development of the relatively new medium of engraving can hardly be overestimated. Further, the Master E.S. was the first engraver to sign some of his prints with initials—a practice that led Van Meckenem to sign the majority of his own plates with either his initials or his full name. Van Meckenem engraved no less than 157 prints after models by the Master E.S., comprising about half of the Master E.S.’s oeuvre; it has therefore been assumed that the two artists were in direct contact during Van Meckenem’s journeyman years. The Resurrection counts among Van Meckenem’s earliest known works. The Master E.S. died around 1467 and Van Meckenem most likely acquired some of the older artist’s plates soon after and then reworked them. This print, however, is made from a new plate that copies the print recorded as Lehrs 47. 2 The fact that this is the only known impression known of the print also serves as a reminder of how precarious and random the survival of early prints is. The Resurrectionwas found in an illuminated breviary dating from the first quarter of the sixteenth century, written by one Anna Wartys van Utrecht, a nun. The three-hundred-page manuscript contained a number of illuminations as well as pasted-in colored prints, some of them even framed by illuminated decorative borders. The uniformity of style and manner of the coloring suggests that the prints were illuminated and mounted at the same time. The pasted-in prints, apart from those by Van Meckenem, can be attributed variously to the Master of the Dutuit Mount of Olives, the Master of the Martyrdom of the 10,000, and Sanders Alexander van Brugsal, all printmakers active in the Lower Rhine region (which would concur with the Utrecht origin of the writer). Sadly, the book was taken apart when auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1969 but thanks to Max Lehrs’s detailed cataloguing in Boerner’s sale catalogue in 1927 (reprinted in toto in Schab’s catalogue 40) the entire contents of the manuscript was at least documented before it was dismantled. 3 Martin Schongauer 1448 Colmar – Breisach 1491 2. St. Barbara engraving; 96 x 56 mm (3 13�16 x 2 3�16 inches) Bartsch 63; Lehrs 68 and The New Hollstein68 provenance Otto Gerstenberg, Berlin (Lugt 2785; with the “Montag number” M 536 on the verso, cf. Lugt 1840c); sold by P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., London, to Harlow, McDonald & Co., New York, for $500 Richard Zinser, Forest Hills, N.Y. (stamped, not in Lugt) N.G. Stogdon, Catalogue 10: Martin Schongauer, Middle Chinnock, Somerset 1996, no. 23 private collection A superb impression; trimmed just inside the platemark at top and to the left, touching the tip of the crown and the fold; apart from a rust spot just to the left of the saint’s coat, in truly impeccable and untreated condition. The relief of the engraved lines is wonderfully preserved. The New Hollsteinlists 22 impressions (including this one, described as “superb”). However, apart from the impression offered here, only the impressions in Basel, London, and the one in the Rothschild Collection in the Louvre are early and in good condition. Barbara was a young, well-educated woman who lived in the third century A.D. either in Nicomedia (in present-day Turkey) or in Heliopolis (in present-day Lebanon). According to the Legenda aurea she came into contact with persecuted Christians and was attracted by the new faith. When her wealthy pagan father, Dioscorus, became aware of his daughter’s Christian sympathies, he locked her away in a tower (usually shown as her main attribute). However, Barbara defied her father and converted to Christianity during her imprisonment. She managed to escape but was soon recaptured by her father who brought her in front of the Roman prefect Martinianus. She then endured horrible tortures and was ultimately beheaded by Dioscorus who, soon after, was fatally struck by lightning. St. Barbara was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers (Nothelfer in German, a word that literally translates as “Helpers in Need”). Barbara was the patron saint of artillerymen, firemen, miners, and others who work with explosives. She was also invoked for protection against thunderstorms and fire, based on her legendary association with these elements. Depictions of Barbara and the other Holy Helpers were extremely popular during the late Middle Ages. The widespread dissemination of their images was substantially assisted by the new medium of print, both woodcuts and engravings. Prints like this one by Schongauer, regularly used for invocation and prayer, tacked to walls and carried on journeys, were consequently simply worn out through practical use and this accounts for their low survival rate. A new class of mostly humanistic collectors who wanted to keep prints for their artistic quality and visual charm was 4 only gradually emerging at this time. It is, therefore, fair to say that most surviving fifteenth- century prints were already rare by the time Dürer was practicing as a mature artist in Nuremberg during the first and second decades of the sixteenth century. 5 Israhel van Meckenem ca. 1440–45 – Bocholt – 1503 3. Die Messe des heiligen Gregor – The Mass of St. Gregory engraving; 204 x 143 mm (8 x 5 ⅝ inches) Lehrs and Hollstein 352 second (final) state; Geisberg 289 provenance Count Joachim IV von Maltzan of Militsch, Silesia (cf. Lugt 3024a) Richard Zinser, Forest Hills, N.Y. (not stamped) N.G. Stogdon, Catalogue 11: Early Northern Engravings, Middle Chinnock, Somerset 1998, no. 18 private collection literature Achim Riether, Israhel van Meckenem (um 1440/45–1503). Kupferstiche – Der Münchner Bestand, exhibition catalogue, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, 2006, p. 246, no. 96 Very rare; Lehrs lists merely eight impressions (including this one), all of them of the second state with the exception of the one in Berlin (acquired from C.G. Boerner in 1879). At least three of the known impressions are damaged and/or missing the indulgence text below. Lehrs further notes that “die meisten Exemplare grau gedruckt sind” (the printing of most of the impressions is gray), something that truly cannot be said about the Maltzan impression offered here; indeed, only the impression in Aschaffenburg appears to be comparable in quality to this one (ill. in Riether, p. 145). Furthermore, as N.G. Stogdon has pointed out in his catalogue, there is no impression in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris (which instead owns two impressions of Lehrs 351, a close variant of this print), reducing the surviving impressions to seven. Geisberg counts this print among Van Meckenem’s later group of copies after the Master E.S. While there is no surviving print by the Master E.S. depicting the Mass of St. Gregory, the elegantly dressed youth carrying a fur hat on his back in the background copies the figure of the Wappen Ober (Lehrs 234) in the latter’s playing cards. St. Gregory was Pope Gregory I (ca. 540–604) to whom Christ as Man of Sorrows appeared while he was celebrating mass. It visualizes the paradigmatic core of the Eucharist: the transubstantiation of the host into the body of Christ. As a subject of paintings, miniatures, and prints it became highly popular during the fifteenth century and was also endowed to grant an indulgence. Israhel van Meckenem alone made at least seven prints depicting the scene (Lehrs 348–354) and another three are most likely copies or emulations of his work de-attributed by recent scholarship (Lehrs 345–347). After the turn of the century, however, the wide dissemination of depictions of this miracle also exposed the precarious relationship between Christ and the pope inherent in the scene. One might even argue that later anti-papal propaganda that contrasted the luxurious ways of papal Rome with the modesty of Christ’s life is already prefigured in the iconographic model of Gregory’s mass: the Savior appears, his body naked and ravaged, amongst the assembled clergy dressed in their lavish vestments.