Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria, and South Tirol (review)

Monumental in conception, lavish in its materials, and sumptuous in its visual display, the English-language edition of Rainer Kahsnitz's Die grossen Schnitzaltäre: Spätgotik in Süddeutschland, Österreich, Südtirol (2005) is a breathtaking model of its subject. Like the late Gothic German and Austrian winged altarpiece, the book itself is a mighty machine for the interchanging of images and a treasure trove of almost indescribable beauty. Perhaps its greatest glory lies with the new series of color photographs by Achim Bunz, who, in capturing the quiet elegance of a Riemenschneider face or the plastic rhythms of a twined garland by the Master H. L., avoids both the archaeological sterility and the contrived grandeur associated with much sculpture photography. The allure of the book's color plates leads one to suspect that, like the spectacle offered by the south German altarpiece in its original setting and in its heyday — which was also the era of the printed broadsheet's ascent — the pleasures afforded by this large, luxurious tome are grounded in a nostalgia for virtuoso craftsmanship and a visual medium long ago supplanted by more mobile systems of image-delivery.

Like German predecessors such as Walter Paatz (1963), Herbert Schindler (1978), and Norbert Wolf (2002), Kahsnitz is concerned to identify a corpus of masterworks that reveal the historical development and artistic potential of the genre, an approach that privileges certain kinds of questions and banishes others. The author organizes the material into a collection of twenty-two short monographs, ranging authoritatively over the essentials of each altar's production and patronage history, with selective commentary on alterations and restorations. This is followed by a survey of each pictorial program, including the sculptures of the corpus and architectural superstructure, and the reliefs and paintings of the wings. Kahsnitz's essays are skillfully balanced and eminently readable, thanks in part to the fine translation by Russell Stockman. They combine lucid formal analyses with judiciously chosen notes on sources, comparisons, tidbits of artist biographies, forays into iconographical interpretation, and technical data. Footnotes have been abjured in favor of bibliographic listings at the rear of the book.

Not surprisingly, given his longtime role as the curator of medieval sculpture at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Kahsnitz is at his best when describing the sculptures: drawing out the logic of their compositions, the virtuoso displays of technique, the daring plays of light, shade, and movement that make these works so compulsively beautiful. Readers looking for fresh insights or novel methods of interpretation for the study of the altarpiece will, however, be disappointed. For all its richness, the analysis remains beholden to the tradition of Typengeschichte, an approach appealing for its taxonomic clarity but limited in explanatory power. In the book's introduction Kahsnitz rehearses the evolutionary line connecting the earliest painted panels, whose shape indicates a placement atop an altar, and the altar reliquary chests of the mid-fourteenth century. Reservations about the theory that makes the early winged retable a direct descendant of the reliquary altar lead him to give equal importance to another type of retabular structure: the baldachin altar, in which a single figure or sculptural group is showcased in a shrine cabinet enclosed by folding wings. It was these two precursors, in the author's view, that were "harmoniously blended in a revised configuration" (24), thus producing the normative type; and it was this type that furnished the stage for artistic innovation and the experiments in plastic form by Niclas Gerhaerts van Leyden and Michael Pacher, the theatrical spaces of Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemenschneider, and the riotous swirling rhythms of the Zwettl Master.

Typengeschichte has undeniable advantages, of course, since it grants us a frame for assessing the direction and quality of artistic innovation, and allows us to form a reasonably complete picture of developments in the face of enormous gaps in the evidence. Still, as one...