The feast of the Rosary

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The Rosary Festival (Albrecht Dürer)
The feast of the Rosary
Albrecht Dürer , 1506
Oil on poplar wood
162 × 194.5 cm
National Gallery Prague
Maximilian I.

The Rosary Festival , also known as the Rosary Altar, is one of the few altar paintings by Albrecht Dürer .

Albrecht Dürer painted this large-format altarpiece in 1506 on behalf of German merchants as an altarpiece for the Church of San Bartolomeo in Venice . This image made Dürer, who up until this point mainly created graphics and drawings, suddenly famous.

Dürer's painting has nothing to do with the Rosary Festival, which was introduced in 1572 . The painting title is modern. Rather, what is depicted is the Rosary Brotherhood as a universal prayer brotherhood.

description

The Madonna is depicted on a canopy held by putti . Two other putti hoist a crown over their head, an angel plays lutes at their feet . Mary, the Christ child, St. Dominic , to whom the origin of the rosary devotion is attributed, and other putti distribute rosaries to a crowd led by the emperor and the pope.

The Rosary Brotherhood was founded by Jacob Sprenger in 1475 as a prayer fraternity in Cologne. In 1475, King Maximilian I enrolled in the first Rosary Brotherhood in Cologne , who had liberated the city of Neuss in the same year after she had called Mary. The Pope should have had the facial features of Julius II , which Dürer avoided because Julius was an opponent of Venice.

The group of the kneeling Pope and Emperor with the Madonna forms a pyramid.

The members of the crowd can no longer all be identified. The fourth from the left is Burkhard von Speyer, possibly chaplain of the Church of San Bartolomeo, known from Dürer's portrait, created at the same time and now in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle .

background

The work combines the German iconography of the Rosary Brotherhood with Venetian influences such as the embedding in a landscape, the canopy over Mary, the angel playing the lute and the putti and thus represents a synthesis of Nordic and Italian art.

history

Dürer's self-portrait on the right edge of the picture
Figure study for the Christ child

Albrecht Dürer had come to Venice for the second time in the summer of 1505 and was commissioned by the German merchants based at Fondaco dei Tedeschi (near the Rialto Bridge ) to make a painting for their parish church. The picture should represent an ideal gathering of the Rosary Brotherhood.

Before starting his work, Dürer made numerous studies and describes the circumstances in which the work was created in his letters to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer . These letters show that Dürer had to interrupt his work for health reasons and that he was very satisfied with the picture. He wrote to Pirckheimer on September 23, 1506:

"I inform you that there is no better image of Mary in the whole country than mine."

Dürer's self-confidence is also shown in the fact that he depicted himself on the right edge of the picture. He is holding a piece of paper with the Latin inscription:

Exegit quinque mestri / spatio Albertus / Durer Germanus MDVI / AD

With this note Dürer indicates that he created the painting in just five months in 1506 (MDVI). The letter abbreviation AD is Dürer's signature, which is missing in almost every picture. As letters show, Dürer did not have a particularly high opinion of the performance of his Venetian colleagues. This judgment was largely reciprocal. Dürer repeatedly reports that the Italian painters claimed that his pictures were out of fashion and that he could not handle colors. ("... he is only good at the jump-off, but doesn't know how to deal with colors ..."). Only with the " Rosary Festival " did the opinion of the Venetian artists change and Dürer wrote:

"Now everyone speaks one, you have never seen beautiful colors."

After lengthy negotiations with the parish of San Bartolomeo and the Fugger family, Emperor Rudolf II bought the painting for the enormous sum of 900 ducats. Joachim Sandrart writes in his Teutsche Academie about the creation and sale of the work:

“When he was in Venice / for the reason reported below / he painted an artful table by S. Bartholome for a number of merchants who were curious in the Teutonic House, also in the church next to the German house / of this name / was / was erected / as well as other works / his wonderful praise rang out everywhere / and moved Käyser Rudolphum II, the most glorious and art-loving, / that he did not let up / bit such a leaf from the church / for as high a payment / as one desires / and is it to be copied / wrapped in carpets and various kinds of cotton / wrapped in woven cloth / and / so that it would not be bumped / jolted / or injured on the wagon / by order from Käyser / by strong men on poles all the way / bit to the Käyserliche Residenz in Prague /. ​​"

In 1606 the rosary altar came to Prague. After Rudolf's death, the picture remained there, unlike most of his collection. During the Thirty Years' War the Madonna of the Rosary was constantly on the move. So it happened that the painting was damaged during transport. When the Swedes looted the Prague Kunstkammer in 1648, they left the picture behind, which can be considered an indication of its poor condition. But it was already damaged in Venice, because Dürer, as a painter from the north, worked with untested material. As a result, the image in the center was soon damaged. In this way, an interesting detail, which copies of the painting prove: a fly on the Madonna's knee, which was supposed to give the impression that she was real. The painting has been in private ownership since the evacuation of Prague Castle in 1782 under Joseph II, when it was auctioned at an estimated price of one guilder. In 1793 it was bought by P. Wenzel Mayer, the abbot of Strahow Monastery. In the 19th century, the destroyed central section was restored from the head of the Madonna downwards. In the process, details like the folds of the white cloth on which the fly was sitting disappeared. The painting did not come to the National Gallery in Prague until 1930 .

Copies

literature

Web links

Commons : The Feast of the Rosary  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Royal Collection
  2. ^ Grebe: "Albrecht Dürer. Artist, work and time "
  3. ^ Grebe: "Albrecht Dürer. Artist, work and time "
  4. ↑ a b Auktionshaus Koller: Catalog for the auction of Old Master Paintings and Icons on September 18, 2009 ( Memento from September 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Albrecht Dürer
  6. ^ Teutsche Academie 1675, II, Book 3 (Dutch and German artist), p. 223