Mary as the Queen of Heaven

Hans Baldung was born in 1484 or 1485 in Schwäbisch Gmünd. Unlike most German artists of his day, he was not born into his profession, coming instead from a prosperous family of lawyers, physicians, and scholars. It is not known where or when Baldung received his first artistic training, though it is thought to have been in Swabia. In 1503, the year of his earliest surviving work, he entered the Nuremberg workshop of Albrecht Dürer, who arguably overshadowed his art-historical legacy for too long. It is in Dürer’s studio that Baldung earned his nickname ‘Grien’ perhaps because of his preference for the color green, as seen in a number of his early works, or simply to distinguish him in a workshop with a few other Hanses. By 1505 Dürer held him in sufficient regard to entrust Baldung with the running of his workshop during his two-year sojourn to Italy. The two artists maintained their own friendship after Baldung struck out on his own, and when Dürer died in 1528, a lock of his hair was sent to Baldung in Strasbourg.

Following a presumed two year stay in Halle, Baldung returned to Strasbourg in 1509 and married Margarethe Herlin, who came from a prosperous merchant family, the following year in addition to opening his own workshop. In 1512 he won the lucrative commission to paint the high altar for the Münster in Freiburg-am-Breisgau. The majestic eleven-panel Marienaltar took nearly four years to complete, but it rewarded Baldung with lifelong fame and financial security. He remained in Freiburg for a year after the altar’s completion before returning to Strasbourg in 1517, where he lived until his death in 1545. Unlike many of his fellow artists, the Reformation did not bring professional or financial hardship for Baldung. His output, while somewhat diminished, continued until he died.

The unifying themes that run through Baldung’s art are bold and intense colors coupled with an energetic use of line, and a sense of drama, movement, and emotional intensity that, with the possible exception of Grünewald, was unsurpassed in 16^th century German art. Max Friedländer wrote that Baldung ‘always unites in the most concise form the outer physical appearance and the inner soul’, a statement that perfectly captures his portrayal of Mary in the present work. Baldung’s surviving works range from small-format devotional pictures to altarpieces, portraits, mythological and allegorical scenes, as well as other novel secular subjects. Across all these genres, the artist managed to combine painterly sophistication and astonishing pictorial inventiveness with a sound grasp, not only of iconographic traditions, but also of humanist ideas and contemporary theological discourse to produce highly complex, often surprising works, many of which are difficult to decode for today’s viewers. Images of the Virgin and Child constitute an important facet of Baldung’s work, and he returned to the subject throughout his life, approaching it from many different angles.

In this private devotional painting Mary is shown gazing down at the nursing baby Jesus, her crowned head held high. She is depicted hip length before a dark blue heavenly sky with a transverse oval of light. Her light flesh tones, banded crown, transparent veil, curly hair falling over her shoulders, red of her clothes, and finally the angel child approaching her from heaven characterize Mary as “Queen of Heaven and Angels” and as the pure, virginal mother of the son of God incarnate. Decorated with gems and cameos, her golden crown is banded with Royal trimmings in the shape of stylized lilies and stylistically references the crown of Charles IV (reign 1346–78), the first King of Bohemia to become Holy Roman Emperor (now preseved in the treasury of Aachen Cathedral).

Mary as the Queen of Heaven may appear to be a traditional choice of motif, when in fact, Baldung is highly original in his representation of the Virgin as both Queen of Heaven and the nursing mother, the Virgo Lactans. While seemingly familiar, the combination has little precedent in German art. In Baldung’s own oeuvre, it appears only one other time — in a woodcut he executed for Johann Schott’s 1514 Strasbourg printing of an Enchiridion Poeticum, or guide to Latin Poetry.

In the most recent Baldung exhibition, the painting is catalogued as being made around 1516/18, either in Freiburg or shortly after the artist’s return to Strasbourg. It is this period in which he created the majority of the witchcraft drawings and paintings for which he is most famous, as well as his masterpiece, the Hochaltar for the Freiburg Münster. As has been suggested, the painting may have been created for Baldung’s readmission into the Strasbourg painters’ guild [1].

A number of stylistic elements support this dating. Most importantly, the luminous halo, the swooping rhythmic folds of the child’s swaddling cloth, and the otherworldly setting are unmistakable evidence of the influence of Matthias Grünewald. During Baldung’s time in Freiburg, Grünewald was some 50 kilometers across the Rhine in Isenheim working on his own masterpiece, the altarpiece for the Monastery of St. Anthony. It is inconceivable that the two painters were unaware of each other’s efforts. The kneeling Virgin in the tabernacle of the Concert of Angels panel of Grünewald’s altarpiece is particularly reminiscent of the Virgin in our painting. Indeed, few pictures in Baldung’s oeuvre speak so strongly to the relationship between the two artists as this one.

The early history of Mary as the Queen of Heaven remains elusive. Its patron was most likely intended for a discerning and learned client, such as a lawyer or a cleric. The existence of a 1539 copy of the painting in the Barnes Foundation (BF316) suggests that the painting was accessible to other artists more than 20 years after its creation. Prince Wilhelm August Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen acquired the picture in 1907 from an anonymous Basel collector. The Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen collection of early German paintings was largely amassed in the second half of the 19^th century by Prince Karl Anton (1811–1885) and his son, Prince Leopold (1835–1905). Prince Wilhelm’s acquisition of the Baldung was one of the few significant additions he made to the paintings collection. Following his death in 1927, the painting was acquired by Frankfurt native Robert von Hirsch (1883–1977),  based on the advice of then-director of the Städel Museum Georg Swarzenski.

Robert von Hirsch, who owed his fortune to the family’s leather-making factory in Offenbach, moved to Basel in 1933. His house there was packed with treasures, with each room organized around a particular collection. In his ‘Old Masters Room’, the Baldung was hanging just to the left of the famous 14^th century Wehrdener Crucifixion (later donated to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) and below Bernhard Strigel’s Annunciation (now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). In his final years, von Hirsch had considered establishing a private museum to exhibit his collection after his death, but he ultimately decided to let the works re-circulate on the open market. In 1978 his posthumous sale at Sotheby’s, considered the ‘sale of the century’, achieved over £20 million. There is perhaps no greater testament to the quality of the works offered than the fact that, of the top 20 lots in the old masters sale, 18 were in museum collections until this acquisition by the Alte Pinakothek, which brings the total up to 19 [2].❖