Artist: Michael Ostendorfer
Topic: Virgin
Date: 1520
Size: 555 x 390 cm
Museum: Kunstsammlung der Veste Coburg (Coburg, Germany)
Technique: Wood
The picture shows the internal panels of the Altarpiece of the Doctors of the Church: Sts Augustine and Gregory on the central panel, Sts Jerome and Ambrose on the side panels.The Altarpiece of the Church Fathers was created in 1483 for the Neustift Monastery near Brixen. With it Pacher reached a point at which the borders between painting and sculpture in the north were no longer clearly distinct, the altarpiece translates the subject of a carved shrine into panel painting. It thereby follows on from Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition from the Cross (Prado, Madrid), but goes far beyond the earlier painting in its optical missing of the two genres.The altarpiece is a depiction of the four great Fathers of the Church. On the far left, Jerome is portrayed as a cardinal with the lion from whose paw he drew the thorn. Next comes Augustine, accompanied by a child in a reference to one of the legends surrounding his life: one day by walking by the sea sunk in thought, the saint came across a child scooping up water with a spoon. In reply to his enquiry as to the sense of his activity, the child replied that it was just as pointless as Augustine's own attempts to understand the holy essence of the Trinity with his rational mind. Third comes Pope Gregory the Great, who is seen delivering Emperor Trajan from Purgatory, and finally, on the right, the archbishop Ambrose, busy writing. The dove of Holy Ghost appears beside all four saints as a symbol of their divine inspiration.The foreshortened floor tiles combine with the apparently projecting baldachins to confuse the eye, as real and pictorial space seem to overlap, The virtuosity of the foreshortening is not matched by the modelling of the figures, however, who acquire their volume primarily from the suggestive power of the vaulted canopy above them.
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