Lynn F. Jacobs’s new book, The Painted Triptychs of Fifteenth-Century Germany, raises important issues about the nature of German early modern painting and its relationship to its better-known Dutch counterparts. But it is primarily concerned with the potential and effects of the format of the triptych itself. Jacobs introduces English speakers to the German notion of Medialität, for which there is no satisfactory English translation. Medialität is neither medium nor mediality but rather has to do with the format and its inherent properties. Jacobs shows how German painters brilliantly exploited the potential of the triptych, profiting from its status as a folding object, displaying at different times an open interior façade and a closed exterior side with its wings shuttered across its interior. In fact, many German artists transgressed the boundaries of inside and outside, of center and side--and in so doing suggested a variety of new meanings that the altarpiece could convey. Such “blurred boundaries” are a principal theme of Jacobs’s book.

The author begins with an account of the literature on fifteenth-century German painting. The cataloguing efforts of Alfred Stange were central to marking out this art historical domain, but because of Stange’s pronounced Nazi past--and because of the expansive, nationalistic geographic reach of his monumental study--the subject became tainted for later German art historians. Since the 1970s and increasingly in recent years, however, scholarly attention has turned to this interesting chapter in German art. Robert Suckale’s Die Erneuerung der Malkunst vor Dürer (2009) is an in-depth study of painting in Nuremberg and Franconia that identified its strengths and distinguishing characteristics. This work was particularly influential for two reasons. First, it treated German painting as an independent subject worthy of study and not simply as a reflection of Dutch art. And second, Suckale had previously called out Stange and his work for its national socialist ideology.

Unlike Suckale, Jacobs concentrates on North-West Germany, particularly on the painting of Westphalia and Cologne. Her first thematic chapter is on Conrad von Soest and the development of the painted triptych in Westphalia in the last decades of the fourteenth and the early decades of the fifteenth century. Jacobs is not interested in all of Conrad’s many innovations; she focuses on his use of the triptych format, on his division of narrative scenes and of his posited relationship between interior and exterior. She shows how Conrad pointedly effaces the boundaries between narrative divisions to stress thematic interrelationships. Importantly, the developments in Westphalia precede the innovations in Flemish painting and are quite independent of artistic achievements in Flanders. In fact, the Norfolk triptych, one of the few Dutch works earlier than Van Eyck’s paintings, shows the influence of Westphalian art.

Whereas Dutch triptychs of the fifteenth century usually cast their exteriors in grisaille, German triptychs reject this technique for the use of color in all parts. Further, the triptychs of Westphalia and Cologne preserve a gilded background throughout the fifteenth century, whereas Flemish paintings substitute a more naturalistic landscape setting. Occasionally, German artists imitate the monochrome appearance of carved stone. Thus, Gabriel Angler’s Crucifixion of ca. 1440 in Munich has a reduced color palette and situates its narrative scenes within a pronounced architectural framework. But this painting was likely intended for the choir screen at the Benedictine monastery church at Tegernsee, where it embraced a particular sculptural logic.

Much of Jacobs’s book concerns painting in Cologne. Rather than present the art of the city again as a point of reception of nearby Dutch painting, Jacobs shows how Cologne painters frequently took different approaches. This is particularly true of Stephan Lochner, whose Adoration of the Magi Altarpiece in Cologne Cathedral--the Dombild--likely presented a prescient model for Rogier van der Weyden, whose own Adoration of the Magi Altarpiece was contracted for Cologne--for the church of St. Columba. As Jacobs shows, the theme of the Adoration of the Magi was quite unusual in the Netherlands at this time, especially as the central panel of a triptych. Rogier must have seen himself in competition with Lochner. Interestingly, whereas Rogier’s style resonated with Cologne painters, his Adoration triptych found few emulations in the city. Lochner, typical for his countrymen, does not present his Annunciation on the outer wings in grisaille, but he does reduce the saturation of color, so that the interior appears in a newfound splendor. The outer Annunciation subtly shifts the customary gold ground to the simulation of a golden, embroidered curtain, which falls in regular folds behind the two protagonists. Dutch painting did not offer such nuanced depictions on its exteriors.

It was not only Rogier who was interested in goings-on in Cologne. Hans Memling originally came from Germany and must have visited Cologne, most likely before his appearance in the Netherlands in the workshop of Rogier. He too learned from Lochner. Jacobs is interested not in the various formal coherences between Memling and Cologne painting but in the way Memling’s use of the triptych format was influenced by Lochner and company. Cologne emerges from this study as a vibrant artistic center, using the triptych to achieve goals not assayed in the Netherlands.

Perhaps Jacobs’s most illuminating chapter is on the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece, named for a triptych now in Munich. As Jacobs shows, this artist used spatial ambiguity and displacement along with ironic quotations from Rogier to generate a realm between earth and heaven. His plastic forms imply the presence of sculpture while they seem to inhabit an ideal realm of their own. The reference to sculpture and goldwork expands the usual boundaries of the medium and imparts an exceptional presence and immediacy to the images.

There is some dispute as to the geographical origins of this artist. Jacobs recounts the discussion without becoming consumed by it. The reductive and simplified constructions suggest to this reader that the artist indeed came from the northern Netherlands. There is some similarity to the visages of Geertgen and his epigones as well as to an occasional humorous stance, as signaled years ago by Erwin Panofsky. [1] Utrecht would seem a likely origin; the tower of Utrecht Cathedral appears in one of the portraits by the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece. And it is otherwise difficult to explain the northern Dutch dialect of the text that appears in one of the wings in Munich. Interestingly, the Bartholomew Master conceives the back of the wings of two prominent altarpieces in grisaille as was common in the Netherlands. The Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece would be one of several artists who gravitated between the Netherlands and the Lower Rhine. Jacobs mentions Jan Joest van Kalkar, who originated in Wesel yet immigrated to Haarlem, where he died in 1519. We might also think of Joos van Cleve, who likewise trained in the Rhineland, only to establish himself in Antwerp. Similarly, the sculptor Arnt van Zwolle/Kalkar traveled between the north-eastern Netherlands and the Rhenish city of Kalkar, which was a center of sculpture in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Borders were porous, and it is wise not to be drawn into nationalist scholarship with seeks to claim certain artists as part of a local patrimony. Jacobs is free of this habit. As Jacobs shows, Cologne, the city of Lochner, had a tradition to reckon with both for painters of the Low Countries and for those of the Rhineland.

Jacobs concludes her book with a coda on triptychs of the early sixteenth century by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, and Lucas Cranach. This period saw a great reduction in triptychs, both a result of interest in the single-point perspective applied to a single field--the pala--and the questioning of the presence of religious images in the churches of the Reformation. Nevertheless, certain artists productively exploited the format. Dürer’s Paumgartner Altarpiece effectively contrasts the central panel representing the Nativity in one-point-perspective with the wings, which show outsized saints emerging forcefully from black backgrounds in a manner suggesting sculpture. Baldung’s Freiburg Altarpiece has closing shutters and is painted on the reverse, allowing the artist to explore a variety of approaches to the format of the triptych. And Cranach, in his Wittenberg Altarpiece, uses the triptych to represent the central tenets of Lutheranism, including in the predella a representation of Luther himself preaching before a congregation--all directed to the central image of Christ crucified.

Jacobs is attentive to theological significances of the details in the paintings she examines. She is also sensitive to the formal properties of these images, the collocations of figures, the meaning of gestures, and the references to canonical works of both the Netherlands and the German lands. She effectively explores the affordances of the triptych format, its Medialität. And she respectfully analyzes the many contributions of these German works of the fifteenth century. Her emphasis on the crossing of boundaries--geographic and formal--gives resonance to her study and helps enunciate the sacred character of religious altarpieces.

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Note:

1. Erwin Panofsky, Early Painting in the Netherlands: Its Origin and Character (Harvard University Press, 1953), volume 1, p. 33.