The dazzling images of Konrad Witz

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Konrad Witz

By Bodo Brinkmann, Katharina Georgi, Stephan Kemperdick

You can hardly blame Basel for wanting to produce an impressive monograph about one of the jewels of their old master collections (along with Hans Holbein the Younger) and the most celebrated Swiss painter of the 15th century.  So when they mounted a major exhibition (6 March-3 July 2011) of their beloved Konrad Witz (c. 1400-c. 1446), they decided to do things seriously and in depth, starting with the 14 panels by or near the master in their own collection.

The main curators are among the most distinguished in the German-speaking museum world, and they know these pictures intimately: Bodo Brinkmann, the current Basel old masters curator, and Stephan Kemperdick, formerly of Basel and now at Berlin. Basel’s pictures were newly conserved for the occasion. Infrared images were produced not only in Basel but also in Frankfurt and Cologne, so the underdrawings of Witz are revealed here for the first time. The resulting publication gives a lavishly illustrated and technically sophisticated examination of all extant paintings, even those that could not be lent for the occasion (including murals, reproduced full-size in the exhibition).   This volume, splendidly produced by the Museum, thus becomes a lasting treasure for scholars, a tome that can truly be called definitive.

Even newcomers to Witz’s art will marvel at his command of oil paint technique, producing dazzling effects of sheen, reflections, and textures of the natural world, evoking read comparisons to a contemporary, Jan van Eyck.  Kemperdick’s opening essay relates Witz to Netherlandish painting and employs striking details to suggest direct ties between the Swiss master and his Flemish peers in the early 1430s.  But he also insists on how this Upper Rhine painter maintained ties to south German traditions in painting and retained differences of approach, despite his fascination for mimetic effects. 

While there is also an overview of the technical analysis of the Basel paintings by Peter Berkes, Sophie Eichner, and Amelie Jensen, their findings emerge most forcefully in the individual entries, which form the bulk of the exhibition catalogue.  A few more graphic works survive: a drawing (no. 13; Berlin), an illuminated manuscript, The Hours of Louis of Savoy (no. 21; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale) and an unfinished court hunting deck (nos. 28–33), as well as several copies after works described as Witz originals.

First and foremost among the entries, the complex Mirror of Salvation Altarpiece (c. 1435; Basel but also Berlin and Dijon), is still preserved in panel fragments out of a reconstructed whole, proposed in the entry.  The best hypothesis about the original location of this major work is St Leonhard’s Abbey, a major Basel centre for the church council held there (1431–49; discussed in an essay by Ursual Lehmann).  Its typological themes of Old Testament and ancient subjects derive from popular late mediaeval religious manuals, led by the eponymous Speculum humanae salvationis.  Its presumed lost centre is now taken to be a sculpture of a seated Virgin and Child in a cabinet-style tabernacle.  But this scrupulous entry retains its character as a hypothetical reconstruction of all of these data.  What now is indisputable, confirmed all the more by the underdrawings, is a single workshop for production of the altarpiece.  The approximate dating now allows a decade before the other major, dated Witz masterpiece, the Geneva St Peter Altarpiece of 1444, signed and preserved in its original frame.

The St Peter Altarpiece, located in the Geneva Cathedral, has a known donor, the cardinal of the city, whose insignia appears on the frame. Sponsored by his patron saint, he appears on the inner wing before an enthroned Virgin and Child.  Outside, closed wings featured a landscape for The Miraculous Draft of Fishes opposite a townscape, St Peter Liberated from Prison, two of Witz’s most celebrated and large-scale paintings (not least for the presumed image of Lake Geneva in the former).  Dazzling reflections off water and armour characterize Witz’s mature handling of oil technique.  In all likelihood the missing centre would have been sculpted, but the full width of the original altarpiece when open would have reached seven metres.   Witz’s commissions were major enterprises, and this one would have assumed additional importance for its pictorial support of the papacy, specifically the Savoyard Duke Amadeus, who soon became Pope Felix V, elected at the Council of Basel in 1439.

Other single paintings and altarpiece fragments enrich this oeuvre, but special note must be given to several mural fragments (c. 1440; Historisches Museum, Basel, nos. 35-41) from Basel’s Predigerkirche, which once formed part of an extensive ‘Dance of Death’ cycle for the lay cemetery.  These influenced later cycles in Switzerland, particularly the Niklaus Manuel Deutsch Dance from Bern nearly a century later.

An important final section addresses a large grey area of small paintings close to Witz or loosely designated followers.  Some have been termed the ‘Hans Witz’ group (for example two identical compositions by different painters of a Pieta, both in the Frick Coll., New York; no. 46); others the ‘Master of 1445’ or ‘Master of Sierentz,’ while a larger group remains anonymous.  And the catalogue also explores related styles in both France and Germany.  Particularly noteworthy here are the paintings by the Master of the Aix Annunciation, today usually identified as Barthélemy d’Eyck.

As the final segment suggests even more strongly, this catalogue should provoke scholarly use and seminar debates for decades to come.  This book will delight all museums that own these pictures, even as the imagery  will delight any lovers of innovative and accomplished oil painting in its incunabula phase.  Curators, institutions, and publishers are all to be thanked for restoring Konrad Witz to his proper distinction in the history of European painting.

Konrad Witz  by Bodo Brinkmann, Katharina Georgi, Stephan Kemperdick is published by Kunstmuseum Basel and distributed by Hatja Cantz 2011.  392 pp. 230 colour/57 mono illus, $85.00. ISBN 978-3-7757-2761-7