A Match Made in Heaven
In March 2020, we visited Karlsrule for the monographic exhibition of Hans Baldung Grien—the learned Renaissance man who is one of the most significant and idiosyncratic artists of the Northern Renaissance. His small oil on panel, Mary as the Queen of Heaven, was on loan from a private collection at the time. We are thrilled that this jewel of a painting has now found a permanent home at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. As part of the Bavarian State museums, the Alte Pinakothek houses one of the largest and the most significant collection of German Renaissance paintings in the world, at its core, formed by the Bavarian dukes and electors, starting with Wilhelm IV during the lifetime of Dürer and Altdorfer, whose iconic works in this very collection define the spirit of the German Renaissance. This small-format devotional image—a critical genre hitherto missing from the museum’s holding of paintings by Baldung—fills the gap in the Alte Pinakothek’s unparalleled collection of German paintings. It is the first German Renaissance painting acquired by the museum for many decades.
Hans Baldung, called Grien
Hans Baldung, also known as Hans Baldung Grien, belongs to a small group of German Renaissance artists with international repute, along with Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538) and Mattias Grünewald (1470–1528). Unlike most German artists of his day who were born into the trade, Hans Baldung came from an intellectual family in Schwäbisch Gmünd, near Stuttgart. Around 1503 he entered the workshop of Dürer, who arguably overshadowed his art-historical legacy for too long, and in 1509 settled in Strasbourg where he opened his own workshop the following year.
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.
‘Magical Realism’
Mary as the Queen of Heaven dates to 1516/18, a decisive phase in the artist’s life and is probably his first use of the medium of oil on panel. It is during this period in which Baldung created the majority of the witchcraft drawings and paintings for which he is most famous, as well as his masterpiece, the high altar for the Freiburg Cathedral. As has been suggested, the painting may have been created for Baldung’s re-admission into the Strasbourg painters’ guild. The Madonna’s 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, who was working in Isenheim, some 50 kilometers away from Freiburg, on the altarpiece for the Monastery of Saint Anthony.
Baldung’s sensual Madonnas, lustful witches and macabre scenes show a bizarre originality unmatched in Renaissance Europe. While the present work is a private devotional painting, the depiction of the Virgin as both Queen of Heaven and nursing mother is incredibly rare in European art history. Baldung’s inventiveness doesn’t stop there: his eccentric treatment of light in the sky behind the nursing Mary indicates that we are looking at a heavenly vision. On the one hand, it could be the perspectival foreshortening of a nimbus conceived as a phenomenon of natural light. On the other hand, one could also think of the opening in the firmament through which, according to medieval ideas, one enters a light-filled tunnel that leads from the earthly to the heavenly sky. The cosmic light phenomenon about Mary would therefore refer to the divine origin of the baby Jesus and to the corporeal acceptance of Our Lady into the heavenly sphere.
Illustrious Provenance
The early history of Mary as the Queen of Heaven remains elusive, however, the existence of a 1539 copy of the painting in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (BF316) suggests that the painting was accessible to other artists more than twenty years after its creation. Prince Wilhelm August Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen acquired the picture in 1907 from a private Basel collector. The Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen collection of early German paintings was largely amassed in the second half of the 19th 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), a prominent Jewish leather goods manufacturer.
Advised by then-director of the Städel Art Institute Georg Swarzenski, von Hirsch assembled one of the most important private collections of the Weimar Republic, focusing on the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. When the National Socialists seized power in Germany in 1933, von Hirsch moved to Basel and was able to bring with him the majority of his art collection. 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 14th 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 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 ended up in museum collections until the present acquisition, which brings the total up to 19.