Feilitzsch Altarpiece [left wing, verso]: St Johan Evangelist

Feilitzsch Altarpiece [left wing, verso]: St Johan Evangelist

Title

Feilitzsch Altarpiece [left wing, verso]: St Johan Evangelist

[cda 2015]

Painting on wood

Medium

Painting on wood

[http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/old-master-british-paintings-evening-sale/lot.7.html; accessed 15 March 2015]

Coniferious wood

[Exhib. Cat. Nuremberg 1963, 4, No. 7]

The exterior of the left wing panel depicts a full-length figure of the Evangelist John, facing left. He wears a red robe and his curly hair is framed by a short-rayed halo. In his left hand he holds a chalice and acts out a blessing with his right hand. All

The exterior of the left wing panel depicts a full-length figure of the Evangelist John, facing left. He wears a red robe and his curly hair is framed by a short-rayed halo. In his left hand he holds a chalice and acts out a blessing with his right hand. All of the panels exhibit a simple black background.

[Görres, cda 2015]

Attributions
Lucas Cranach the Elder and Workshop
Lucas Cranach the Elder

Attributions

Lucas Cranach the Elder and Workshop

[Exhib. Cat. Nuremberg 1963, 4-5]

Lucas Cranach the Elder

[Auct. Cat. London 2012, Lot 7]

Production dates
about 1512
about 1512 - 1514

Production dates

about 1512

[Exhib. Cat. Nuremberg 1963, 4-5]

about 1511 - 1512

[http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/old-master-british-paintings-evening-sale/lot.7.html; accessed 15 March 2015]

about 1512 - 1514

[Friedländer, Rosenberg 1979, No. 39]

Dimensions
Dimensions of support: 91 x 32.5 cm

Dimensions

  • Dimensions of support: 91 x 32.5 cm

  • [http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/old-master-british-paintings-evening-sale/lot.7.html; accessed 15 March 2015]

Signature / Dating

None

Inscriptions and Labels

A frame of the retable from the year 1624 exhibits an inscription, which may be either a transcription of …

Inscriptions and Labels

Stamps, Seals, Labels:

  • A frame of the retable from the year 1624 exhibits an inscription, which may be either a transcription of the original dedication or a new interpretation. A loose translation of the inscription reads: 'In the year 1511, on the first day after St Matthew's Day, the venerable and brave Jobst von Feilitzsch passed away, by the Grace of God he was father to four sons Moritz, Ritter von Dewen, Urban von Korwitz [sic], Eberhard and Friedrich.'

  • ("Im Jahr 1511, am ersten Tag nach Matthäus, starb der ehrwürdige und starke Jobst von Feilitzsch, dem Gottes Gnade gab vier Söhne, Moritz, Ritter von Dewen, Urban von Korwitz [sic], Eberhard und Friedrich.")

  • [cda 2015]

Owner
Private Collection
Repository
Private Collection
CDA ID
PRIVATE_NONE-P102d
FR (1978) Nr.
FR039
Persistent Link
https://lucascranach.org/en/PRIVATE_NONE-P102d/

Provenance

  • commissioned from the artist by either Jobst von Feilitzsch or, more likely his sons, for the family chapel at Rittergut Kürbitz in 1511
  • by descent in the Von Feilitzsch family until circa 1947
  • acquired directly from the Von Feilitszch family by Heinz Kisters
  • by whom sold to Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967)
  • by descent to Adenauer's heirs, by whom sold back to Heinz Kisters
  • 4 July 2012 Sale Sotheby's, London, No. 7
  • Private Collection
    [http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/old-master-british-paintings-evening-sale/lot.7.html; accessed 15 March 2015]

Exhibitions

Stuttgart 1958-1959, No. 34-38
Nuremberg/Münster 1963, No. 7

Literature

Reference on page Catalogue Number Figure / Plate
Cat. Coburg 2018 50, fn. 3 under nos. 4, 5
AuthorKlaus Weschenfelder
TitleCranach in Coburg. Gemälde von Lucas Cranach d.Ä., Lucas Cranach d.J., der Werkstatt und des Umkreises in den Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg
Place of PublicationRegensburg
Year of Publication2018
Friedländer, Rosenberg 1979 39
AuthorMax J. Friedländer, Jakob Rosenberg
EditorG. Schwartz
TitleDie Gemälde von Lucas Cranach
Place of PublicationBasel, Boston, Stuttgart
Year of Publication1979
Exhib. Cat. Nuremberg 1963 4-5 007 pls. 50-53
EditorGermanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg
TitleSammlung Heinz Kisters. Altdeutsche und altniederländische Gemälde
Place of PublicationNuremberg
Year of Publication1963
Arndt 1958 354
AuthorKarl Arndt
TitleMeisterwerke aus Baden-Württembergischem Privatbesitz
JournalKunstchronik
Issue11
Year of Publication1958
Pages352-361
Exhib. Cat Stuttgart 1958 34 14
AuthorJohann Eckard von Borries
TitleMeisterwerke aus baden-württembergischen Privatbesitz [Veranstaltet von der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart und dem Stuttgarter Galerieverein e.V., 9. Oktober 1958 - 10. Januar 1959]
Place of PublicationStuttgart
Year of Publication1958
Friedländer, Rosenberg 1932 037
AuthorMax J. Friedländer, Jakob Rosenberg
TitleDie Gemälde von Lucas Cranach
Place of PublicationBerlin
Year of Publication1932
Link http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/friedlaender1932
Doering, Voss 1905 10 94a pls. 9-10
EditorOskar Doering, Georg Voss
TitleMeisterwerke der Kunst aus Sachsen und Thüringen. Gemälde, Skulpturen, Schnitzaltäre, Medaillen, Buchmalereien, Weberien, Goldschmiedekunst
Place of PublicationMagdeburg
Year of Publication1905
Flechsig 1900 A 102, 283 123
AuthorEduard Flechsig
TitleCranachstudien
Volume1
Place of PublicationLeipzig
Year of Publication1900
Link page/n5/mode/2up

Research History / Discussion

This is the last surviving intact multi-panelled altarpiece by Lucas Cranach the Elder remaining in private ownership, its extraordinary survival due to its having remained for almost four hundred and forty years in the family church of the patrons who commissioned it. It was almost certainly commissioned by the sons of Jobst von Feilitzsch in their

father's memory in 1511, the year of his death. The altarpiece remained in the family collection until after the Second World War. In 1947 it was acquired directly from the Von Feilitzsch family by Heinz Kisters who later sold it to his friend, the great post-war Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer. After Adenauer's death it was re-acquired by

Kisters along with the large majority of Adenauer's collection.

Though its purpose was ultimately ecclesiastical, within the altarpiece are some of the best extant examples of Cranach's portraiture. It was commissioned for the Salvator church located on the Von Feilitzsch estate in Kürbitz. Jobst von Feilitzsch had only acquired the estate in 1510, the year prior to his death. The patrons of the church,

Saints Peter and Paul, are included in the wings of the altarpiece, and are found elsewhere in the church on either side of the Virgin in a 16th-century winged altarpiece. Another saint of particular significance to the family, Saint Anne, is elevated to the central role in the middle panel. She was increasingly celebrated in Saxony after Frederick the Wise returned with a relic from the Holy Land in 1493, a trip on which he was accompanied by two members of the Von Feilitzsch family, one of whom was most likely Jobst himself and her central role in his altarpiece here is thus selfexplanatory.

The precise original form of the altarpiece is not known since the original framing device no longer exists. In 1624/26 an additional chapel was constructed in the church, intended as a family tomb, by a descendant of Jobst, Urban Caspar von Feilitzsch, and he reframed the five panels in a heavy baroque frame. This frame displayed the

panels as a Schaubild, with all five panels lined up in a row. While possible that they were originally so-arranged, it is more probable that they were conceived in a manner resembling its current 'folding triptych' format. The 1624/26 frame includes what is either a transcription of an inscription from the original frame, or simply a new explanatory

inscription provided by Urban Caspar, and it reveals details of the altarpiece's coming into being. Roughly translated the inscription reads: Year 1511, on St. Matthew's Day,[1] the honourable and strong Jobst von Feilitzsch, for whom God's grace gave for sons Moritz, knight of Drewen, Urban of Korwitz [sic], Eberhard and Friedrich.

It is signed with initials V.C.V.F. (Urban Caspar von Feilitzsch). It tells us that Urban, Jobst's second son, took over the estate. It was probably he who commissioned the altarpiece from Cranach.[2] The donor figure in the left wing, however, is most unlikely to be Urban, who was born in 1480 and, as revealed by the portrait on his tombstone, wore

a beard. It most likely portrays Jobst who must have been about fifty years of age in 1511 (his birth date is not known). Indeed, Werner Schade has noted a plausible similarity with the sculpted portrait of Jobst on his tomb in the same church. In the very similar Altarpiece of the Holy Kinship in Dessau from circa 1510 Cranach portrays Jobst's

contemporary Frederick the Wise who was born in 1463. Frederick there appears of about the same age (he would have been in his late forties) as the donor figure here. Therefore, given that the altar is dedicated to him and that the figure portrayed appears of about the right age, it seems most likely, even certain, that the donor he portrayed

is Jobst, Cranach basing his portrait either on one he had previously made of him in life, or from other extant portraits of him, whether drawn, painted or carved.

Von Feilitzsch's estate at Rittergut Kürbitz was in southern Saxony, about 50 miles from Wittenberg where Cranach was employed at the court of the Elector Frederick the Wise from 1504. Cranach's earliest pictures in Wittenberg still resemble those of his earliest, Viennese, period, with their almost 'over-drawn' appearance that often pushes his

figures to the point of caricature, alongside a use of vivid, dazzling colour. Soon after his arrival in Wittenberg however Cranach's paintings become more and more indebted to Albrecht Dürer. While the stark colours of the drapery in parts of this recall the vivid coloration of the Viennese paintings, the simple drama achieved through their synthesis with the jet black background would have been inconceivable before his arrival in Wittenberg. There is here, too, a heightened interest in the physiognomies and expressions of the sitters and it is here that we observe most clearly Dürer's profound influence on the young master.

This heightened expression and realism of Cranach's portraits was most likely the result of his travels to the Netherlands in 1508 where from the likes of Quinten Massys he learned an increased sense of empathy for his subjects. Several scholars have also argued for a journey to Italy around this time, pointing to similarities with the work

of Perugino and his pupil Raphael, particularly in some of his portrayals of the Virgin. Here this influence, though less keenly felt than in some other works from the 1505-10 period, is still palpable in the classical arrangement of the three protagonists of the central panel who form two neat equilateral triangles: one through the arrangement of the three heads; the other, larger, with St. Anne's head at the apex, the left diagonal running down the edge of her cloak, the right down the Virgin's long hair, and the lower horizontal formed by the neat alignment of feet and hands. Such symmetry is found principally in Cranach's works from circa 1508 to 1512 such as the Altarpiece of the Holy Kinship in Dessau, the middle panel of a triptych in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, and the now destroyed panel, formerly in Berlin, depicting the Virgin and Child with four female saints.[3]

Friedländer and Rosenberg dated the altarpiece to circa 1512-14 but it is now widely accepted as dating from 1511-12. In addition to the evidence provided by the previously mentioned inscription, such a date is supported by new technical and stylistic evidence. Dr. Gunnar Heydenreich has recently observed that Cranach used the same

carpenter for his panels (probably Michael Tisscher) between 1505 and 1512 and that his panels from this period are formed of planks running horizontally across the picture plane. After 1512 the formation changes to the more conventional lengthways, or vertical, orientation of the planks. Given the horizontal arrangement of the planks that

make up the central panel here, we can surmise a terminus ante quem of 1512 for this altarpiece. Furthermore, each facet of the altarpiece compares itself favourably to another specific work from the 1511-12 period.

The outer wings, depicting Saints Catherine and John the Evangelist, which are the only part Koepplin, Friedländer and Rosenberg ever considered to have possible participation from the workshop (an opinion Friedländer overturned in 1946 following cleaning of the whole altarpiece, at which point he pronounced these two saints as fully autograph) share the same proportions and extended, columnar structure and small heads as several other saints on altar wings, such as Saints Barbara and Catherine on the triptych commissioned by either Wilhelm II of Hesse (1469-1509) or, more likely, his wife Anna of Mecklenberg (1485-1525), in 1509-10. This latter is the first work Cranach painted in Wittenberg to be destined for a non-Saxon court.[4]

In the central panel Saint Anne shares the same features as her counterpart in the Education of the Virgin wing panel in the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau. Likewise the Virgin may be closely compared with her own counterpart in the Dessau companion wing depicting the Holy family with angels. Both panels are dated by Friedländer and

Rosenberg to circa 1510-12, as they are by modern scholars.[5] The Holy Kinship in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna from 1510-12, in which the Christ Child likewise sits on Saint Anne's lap, shows the Virgin with precisely the same features and expression and in a remarkably similar pose. This Holy Kinship, the Dessau

wings and the present work also display the same short-hatched haloes that Cranach only used for a short period around 1510-12.[6]

Saints Peter and Paul find their most striking comparison in the two small panels in an English private collection that were exhibited in London and Frankfurt in 2007-08.[7] These two panels may have been executed by Cranach for use in the workshop as tronies, as the unfinished nature of Saint Paul would suggest. Both however, though especially that of St. Peter, are clearly indebted to their earlier counterparts in the Von Feilitszch altarpiece, in pose, physiognomy and execution. The model for St. Peter must surely have been the same for both paintings.

Saint Peter, whose principal role here is, with St. Paul, to commend Von Feilitzsch to the subject of the central panel, rests his right hand on the right shoulder of Jobst von Feilitzsch and gazes directly out of the altarpiece to meet the eyes of the spectator. Though not unusual for Cranach, such directness only exacerbates the dramatic nature of the altarpiece that is already so animated by the brilliant pigments emerging from the dark background. The black background is to be found in several other works from the period, such as the now dismembered altarpiece with portraits of Frederick the Wise and John the Steadfast in the Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg (circa 1515).[8]

Von Feilitzsch himself is dressed in the fashionable wide fur collar and fur trimmed half-sleeves that are worn by Frederick the Wise in the Veste Coburg portrait.[9] He too places his hands in prayer joined only at the fingertips. Unlike the idealised figures of the central panel, Von Feilitzsch's fulsome chin, heavy jaw and bulbous nose are

described in every detail. He is a foreboding figure, lent further gravity by the comforting hand of the protective Saint Peter. The softness of his fluidly executed, ample contours recalls Cranach's circa 1509 portraits of John the Steadfast and his son John Fredrick in the National Gallery, London, or the 1511-12 portrait of the Margrave Albrecht

of Brandenburg-Ansbach.[10] The Von Feilitzsch portrait is one that shows Cranach as no longer working in the wake of Dürer but concurrently with him; that draws on the realism and psychology of Dürer's earlier portraits but that, with its softer more-mannered touch, pre-empts a new age of German portraiture in the decade and years to come.[11]

There can be few works of art from this prolific moment in the history of German art that trumpet so loudly and proudly the fully-fledged Renaissance in Germany and that draws so obviously on, and combines so neatly, influences from the Netherlands, Italy and from within Germany itself. The combination of some of the greatest extant examples of Cranach's portraiture and the classical beauty and quiet grandeur of the central figure group, together with the extensive knowledge we have of the work's original commission and purpose, lend us a vital new understanding of Cranach's practices at this key moment in his career, a moment at which he created his most vivid and brilliant

masterpieces at the court of Saxony.

[1] Celebrated on 24th February.

[2] This is confirmed by archival material.

[3] See Friedländer and Rosenberg, under literature, pp. 76-77, cat. nos. 36 & 37, both reproduced.

[4] Ibid., p. 70, cat. no. 17, reproduced. For a colour reproduction see B. Brinkmann et al., Cranach, exhibition

catalogue, Frankfurt and London, 2007-2008, p. 164, cat. no. 23, reproduced p. 165.

[5] Friedländer and Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 76, cat. no. 35. See also Brinkmann, op. cit., p. 166, cat. nos. 24, 25, both

reproduced in colour.

[6] Other examples are the Copenhagen Virgin and Child with St. John and the four wings in the Thyssen Museum,

Madrid.

[7] Brinkmann, op. cit., p. 290, cat. nos. 83 & 84, both reproduced.

[8] Ibid., p. 172, cat. no. 28, reproduced.

[9] Ibid., p. 172, cat. no. 28, reproduced.

[10] Friedländer and Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 71, cat. no. 19; and p. 73, cat. no. 26 respectively, both reproduced. The

former was sold London, Christie's, 6 July 1990, lot 42, for £ 4.84m.

[11] See, for example, Dürer's1516 portrait of a gentleman in the Samuel H. Kress collection, Washington D.C. F.

Anzelewsky, Albrect Dürer. Das Malerische Werk, Berlin 1971, p. 242, cat. no. 133, reproduced figs. 163 and 164.

[http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/old-master-british-paintings-evening-sale/lot.7.html; accessed 15 March 2015]

  • Feilitzsch Altarpiece [left wing, verso]: St Johan Evangelist, about 1512

Images

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Technical studies

2019Technical examination / Scientific analysis

  • Infrared reflectography
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Underdrawing

DESCRIPTION

Tools/Material:

- fluid, black medium and brush

Type/Ductus:

- freehand and economical underdrawing

- thin to somewhat broader lines

Function:

- relatively binding for the final painted version; the lines define the main contours and describe essential details and facial features; no representation of volume with hatching strokes

Deviations:

- only very minor corrections were made to forms during the painting process; no changes

INTERPRETATION

Attribution:

- probably created in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s workshop

Comments:

- after a pre-existing design

[Sandner, Smith-Contini, Heydenreich, cda 2020]

  • photographed by Gunnar Heydenreich
  • photographed by Ingo Sandner

Conservation History

Date1943

Cleaned

[Friedländer, Rosenberg 1979, No. 39]

Citing from the Cranach Digital Archive

Entry with author
<author's name>, 'Feilitzsch Altarpiece [left wing, verso]: St Johan Evangelist', <title of document, data entry or image>. [<Date of document or image>], in: Cranach Digital Archive, https://lucascranach.org/en/PRIVATE_NONE-P102d/ (Accessed {{dateAccessed}})
Entry with no author
'Feilitzsch Altarpiece [left wing, verso]: St Johan Evangelist', <title of document, data entry or image>. [<Date of document, entry or image>], in: Cranach Digital Archive, https://lucascranach.org/en/PRIVATE_NONE-P102d/ (Accessed {{dateAccessed}})

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