Rheinische Glasmalerei: Meisterwerke der Renaissance (review)

The exhibition held in Cologne's Schnütgen Museum from 3 May to 29 July 2007 was an extraordinary achievement, reflected in this meticulously comprehensive catalogue and series of contextualizing essays. Incorporating multiple perspectives —iconographic, stylistic, religious, and historiographic —these two volumes bristle with superb photographs and clear, focused studies; the price is a veritable bargain.

To many the importance of Glasmalerei as a major Renaissance artform sometimes comes as a surprise. Such attitudes reflect our often unrealized dependence on the modern museum and our acquaintance with architecture whose glass, panel painting, wall decoration, altar furnishings, and statues are now dispersed. Even in present collections, Renaissance panels are arguably even more numerous than those of the Middle Ages and are associated with many artists working in other media. For example, the north nave aisle of Cologne Cathedral was glazed by workshops associated with two panel painters, the Master of the Holy Kinship and the Master of St. Severin, the latter presumably furnishing designs for Altenberg's cloister. Cloister glazing opened an even richer new field for these glass painters, in which narrative systems —placing one scene after another sequentially —reached a peak of popularity. These were exploited to great effect for the extensive and thematically complex glazed cloisters at the Cistercian monasteries of Altenberg and Apern and at the Benedictine houses of Mariawald and Steinfeld collected for this study.

Artistically these panels seduce. Alas, even the high-quality, glossy-page illustrations pale in comparison to the impact of light moving through the glass, animating color and form so impressively in the Schnütgen installation. The sixteenth century delighted in technical advances, particularly the use of sanguine, a russet tint, and the exploitation of the multiple shades of silver stain yellows. Renaissance spatial conceits reinforce the narrative, as in the panel of "God Blessing of Adam and Eve": "Go forth and multiply" is on God's halo. Large-scale graceful bodies occupy the foreground, and in the background the Fall is set in front of a tree occupied by a female-headed serpent, and the Expulsion is framed by a majestic city portal. Situating the context of the cloisters' style within Cologne's glazing production, Hartmut Scholz's essay presents the happily extant glass of St. Peter's Church. Throughout, Täube admirably evaluates authenticity and the level of intervention caused by restorations as exemplified in the Victoria and Albert Museum's many panels, and develops interrelations among the sites for painting styles.

The essays set this extraordinary surge of artistic expression in the context of Cologne's rich heritage of polychrome sculpture, production of the painting on panel for altarpieces, such as Bartholäus Bruyn the Elder, Anton Woensam, and Master of St. Severin, who can be associated with the cloister glazing. The deep influence of print culture of Martin Shongauer and Albrecht Dürer is evident. Subject matter is connected to typological traditions, issues examined in essays by Esther Meier and Reinhard Köpf. At Mariawald the Biblia Pauperum's subjects populate the window opening with bust-length images of the prophets with scrolls in the tracery, then a first level of Old Testament scenes, followed by the New Testament and donor panels in the base. As delightful as it is to see images familiar from the block books pulsate in color-drenched three-dimensional realism at Mariawald, Apern and Altenberg's narrative cycles of St. Bernard stun with their iconographic novelty, especially within the context of the Protestant Reform's antipathy to the cult of saints. Altenberg's extant panels are the most extensive, showing fifty-nine episodes of Bernard's life from childhood, the beginning of the Order, papal schism, Second Crusade, miracles, dispute mediation, and symbolic representations.

Since the secularization of the Rhineland in the wake of Napoleonic conquests these panels were widely dispersed in the liquidation of monastic goods. The history of the glass has its own dramatic story, including acquisition...