Paradise garden
The Paradiesgärtlein is a painting by the Upper Rhine master , which was probably made around 1410/1420. It was painted on a 26.3 cm high and 33.4 cm wide oak board and is in overall good condition. The painting shows a reading Mother of God and the Christ child playing on a psaltery , surrounded by several angels and saints in a garden. This is enlivened by natural animal and plant representations. The Paradiesgärtlein is owned by the Historical Museum of the City of Frankfurt and has been on permanent loan to the Städel since 1921 .
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| Paradise garden |
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| Upper Rhine master , around 1410/20 |
| Mixed media on oak |
| 26.3 x 33.4 cm |
| Städel |
Image description
Mary , the baby Jesus , saints and angels are located in a garden enclosed by a wall at the back and left (hortus conclusus) . The space is not limited to the front and right. The sky is deep blue. Only a single treetop, which is visible on the central axis above the wall, indicates a spatial environment. Our Lady is seated on a cushion to the left of the central axis in front of a lawn bench bordered with wooden planks. She's bowed her head and is reading a book. She wears a golden crown of leaves on her head. It is disproportionately large compared to the other figures.
In the lower right corner of the picture, three male saints are grouped around a tree. A young man in a brown cloak embraces the tree and bends down while an angel and a knight sit on the ground. There is a blackbird behind his leg . The angel and knight are the only identifiable saints in the picture. The latter's armor is heavily tailored, he wears chain mail and a gold doublet , and a straw cap on his head. He turns his back to the viewer, he shows his face in profile and looks at Maria. In the grass beneath him lies a slain dragon that identifies the knight as Saint George . The angel is the only figure looking out of the picture. His head rests thoughtfully on his right hand. His mouth is open. The wings are golden and multicolored, the corolla indicates his rank. The little devil at his feet identifies him as Archangel Michael , who conquered the devil.
On the left are the three female saints and the Christ child. In the lower left corner of the picture, fish move towards the drainage channel in a spring enclosed by a wall. A kingfisher sits on the gutter with a fish in its beak. A saint wrapped in a blue robe bends over the spring and draws water with a ladle attached to the basin. Her head is covered with a white veil. To her right sits a saint dressed in red with a white cloak and wearing a wreath of flowers on her head. She holds out the psaltery to the Christ Child, clad entirely in white , who is plucking with two picks . The child wears a nimbus formed from fine, cross-shaped rays , the only one in the picture. Between the two front saints is the third saint, Dorothea , in the middle distance on the left edge , who picks cherries from the second tree in the painting in her red ruffled overgarment so that the white undergarment can be seen. You can see her face in profile. At her feet is a basket filled with cherries.
Next to the Madonna is a hexagonal stone table. with a soup cup filled with wine . Apples lie in a fruit bowl. A single apple, apple wedges and a core are next to the peel. The garden is filled with realistic depictions of plants and animals, as Columbine , Bach prize , strawberry , lady's mantle , daisies , wallflowers , Evergreen , cherry , clover , lily , daffodils , lilies , hollyhock , daisy , Samtnelke , peony , rose , cowslip , Iris , mustard , red dead nettle , violet , plantain , chrysanthemum , asters , St. John's wort and levkoje as well as kingfisher , great tit , bullfinch , oriole , chaffinch , robin , great spotted woodpecker , waxwing , goldfinch , tail tit , blue tit , hoopoe , dragonflies and white flies can be determined.
Condition and painting technology
The picture carrier of the Paradiesgärtlein is a slightly convex oak panel , which has probably been thinned. On the right side the painting edge is preserved, while on the other sides there are no clear findings. However, no major cropping of the painting surface is to be assumed. The edge of the board and the painted edges are cemented and have powder gold plating on a red background. Below there are remains of an older gilding. The overall condition of the painting is good. A larger, older retouching on the upper edge of the sky was carried out with light greenish paint, applied to silver or mixed with silver tinsel. In addition, other minor retouchings can be seen, such as small breakouts in individual cherries or finger joints and crackling . Plastering in the red and in the shadow areas of the blue robes led to a loss of plasticity in the painting. The oil gilding and silvering are partially rubbed off.
In breakouts in the sky and the adjoining parts of the battlements, a silver, sometimes golden metal foil comes to light. This suggests that the background of the little paradise garden was initially laid out by the artist on silver leaf coated with a yellow glaze . This should create the impression of gold ground . The blue sky with a lower layer of azurite and an upper layer of ultramarine is also original. The birds and other details are on this blue ground. The breastplate of St. George and the wings of the Archangel Michael are made of polished gold leaf , the other golden elements, on the other hand, consist of oil gilding . The silver parts are made with silver leaf. The structure of the chain mail was created by carving the base and using hallmarks . In addition, some internal forms of painting were scratched. In addition, some linear preliminary drawings can be demonstrated.
On a sheet glued to the back of the board, the number 260 is written in large 19th century script, including the name J: Burgmaier and below it the number 55. The narrow, golden frame is modern and comes from master pastry chef Prehn, in his Collection the picture was.
Research history
Localization
Franz Kugler was the first to deal with the Paradise Garden in 1841 . He published his findings in 1854 in his writings History of Painting since Constantine the Great 1847 and Small Writings and Studies on Art History, Part Two . Kugler already referred to the tablet as the Garden of Paradise , located it in Cologne and ascribed it to a contemporary of Stefan Lochner . At the same time he saw echoes of the Veronica master's painting style in the picture. Even Heinrich Gustav Hotho and Johann David Passavant verorteten the Garden of Eden to Cologne. However, this localization was not without controversy. So put Alfred Lichtwark the painting to the altar of the Frankfurt Peterskirche related and situate it to the Middle Rhine. Carl Aldenhoven thought the painting was Westphalian.
In 1905 Carl Gebhardt localized the Paradiesgärtlein in the journal Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft for the first time on the Upper Rhine. However, this location took some time to establish itself. In 1911 Karl Simon assumed that the picture had been taken in Frankfurt am Main . And Curt Glaser also saw the picture in 1924 as being in the Middle Rhine with Burgundian influences. The localization on the Upper Rhine, on the other hand, was supported by Ernst Buchner and in 1926 by Ilse Futterer , who related the work to the pictures on the inside of the Staufen Altarpiece from Tennenbach . Futterer favored Strasbourg as the place where the painting was created. The localization to the Upper Rhine, more precisely to Strasbourg, has largely prevailed.
Classification in the work of the Upper Rhine master
In 1905, Carl Gebhardt first associated the little paradise garden with the picture Madonna with the strawberries in the Solothurn Art Museum . He also tried to cautiously identify the master of these pictures as Hans Tiefental , who is documented in Basel , Strasbourg and Schlettstadt . Ernst Buchner supported the assignment to the Solothurn Madonna, while Ilse Futterer noticed great similarities between the two paintings, but did not certainly assume the same hand. In 1928 Walter Hugelshofer introduced the Annunciation in the collection of Oskar Reinhart in Winterthur in the group of works ascribed to the Master of the Paradiesgärtlein . In the same year Ilse Futterer expanded this group to include the pictures of Joseph's Doubt and the Birth of Mary in the Musée de l'Œuvre Notre-Dame in Strasbourg. The Frankfurter Paradiesgärtlein and the two Strasbourg tablets are generally regarded as handwritten works by the Upper Rhine master, while the other works are attributed to him or are located in his workshop.
interpretation
There is no self-contained interpretation for the paradise garden . The context that has not been handed down and the image design run counter to this. Many authors identified a tension between religious and secular content in the painting. As early as 1899, Lichtwark wrote of a “amalgamation of the mood of paradise and the garden of love”. The picture actually contains elements that can be found in engravings by the master of the love gardens , which were created only a little later than the Paradise Garden . The elevated position of the garden, recognizable by the tree protruding over the battlements, the garden bench and the selection of plants suggest a castle garden. In addition, there is a very clear religious reference through the depicted.
The little paradise garden can not be assigned to a specific type of image. Although it sounds again and again in the picture, it is then broken again by the artist. The picture theme is related to the Hortus conclusus , but the idea of the closed garden is difficult to maintain due to the lack of any delimitation on two sides of the picture. In fact, the garden is particularly open, which led to the thesis , which has not yet been tested in terms of mentality , that the viewer should feel included in the picture. The image type of the Madonna in the Rose Hag was also cited as a point of reference in research. Even though Maria is sitting there on a cushion in front of a lawn bench in the garden, she is clearly more emphasized than in the Paradise Garden due to the central position in the middle of the composition . Nameless angels and only in rare cases saints also belong to the figures of such images. The emphasis on the rose as a mariological symbol does not exist in the Frankfurt picture. The more recent research doubts whether the vegetation of the paradise garden can be interpreted mariologically at all. She takes the view that the plants were based on studies from nature and that a naturalistic representation was sought. The idea of paradise is also inconsistent. This interpretation is made difficult by the difficult identification of the two trees as the tree of life and the tree of knowledge . The cherry tree has often been identified as the tree of life and the fruitless one as the tree of knowledge, which is not convincing in terms of the biblical narrative. Likewise, there is no complete delimitation that is common in depictions of the Garden of Eden . However, the depiction of the animals is even more irritating for such an interpretation. The artist painted two dragonflies in the foreground , which in popular belief were associated with evil and therefore would not have been included in a representation of paradise. Equally unusual is the depiction of hunting and killing, as represented in the picture by the fish caught by the kingfisher or the blue tit pecking for an insect behind Maria.
Interpretation with the biblical number symbolism
Gothic images can be interpreted with the biblical number symbolism. The hexagonal little table, which has a single square base, is striking. Biblically, the square indicates a sacred unit. So is z. B. the breastplate of the biblical high priests square (Ex 28.15f). The number six points to the perfect creation of God if the number one - the unity with God connected with it - is preserved (Gen 1,1-2,3). The first biblical account of creation describes how God, the One, created the world in six days. So you can see immediately on the picture of the little paradise garden that "paradise" is being described on the left. Mary as the epitome of oneness with God sits on a red chair, the red color stands for love, here for the Bible that she is reading and is holding in her right hand, the "good hand".
Images that describe biblical things often have to be viewed the wrong way round, after all, the view from the cross is different from the view to the cross. The "good side" of this picture is on the left when viewed from the viewer, and on the right when viewed from God or Christ on the cross. Colloquially, this can be found in a saying: The person's heart is in the right place. In the Middle Ages, at a coronation ceremony of the king, the right side as seen by the king was the preferred side, and that is where the more important guests sat.
On the left-hand side of the picture, only seen by the viewer, something positive is described. A woman dressed in blue and white like Mary draws golden water from a well with a golden ladle. She draws from the well or the source of the knowledge of God, the gold indicates this. The red (love) fruits that hang on the tree of life above the woman are just being harvested. You can recognize the tree of life by its trunk, it is coiled and actually consists of two trunks. He has become one , the tree of knowledge (of morality) and the tree of life, which can only be one thing in common because it stands in the "one center of paradise" (Gen 2,9). The "middle" can only exist once. The right side of the picture, seen only by the viewer, shows sad, hanging faces, tired clinging to the fruitless tree of knowledge. Nonetheless, the whole picture describes the inner path of knowledge. Only intellectual knowledge of theology is and remains fruitless and heartless. But if the knowledge of one's own dark side comes into play - this is the case in the picture of the little paradise garden - the fruits of the happy life grow, which are harvested on the left edge of the picture. In the picture at the bottom right, a demon or little devil has sat down with the sad figures as a picture for dark and evil, that is to say, one's own shadow (according to CG Jung) is recognized, but the step into a happy life is still ongoing . The music, the spirit of the Christ child will entice and cheer you up.
Provenance
The origin of the little paradise garden is unknown and is often located in a monastic context. Before 1821, the table was owned by Johann Valentin Prehn, a Frankfurt confectioner. In his collection it was part of the Small Painting Cabinet, 2nd Department. After Prehn's death in 1821, the picture passed into the possession of his children. Until 1834 it belonged to Ernst Friedrich Carl Prehn, after his death Johanna Rosina Sänger, nee Prehn, and her husband Johann Friedrich Sänger. The two bequeathed the Small Painting Cabinet with the Paradiesgärtlein to the city of Frankfurt in 1839. This showed the painting from 1842 in the city library. In 1878 it was transferred to the collection of the Historical Museum . The Paradiesgärtlein has been on permanent loan to the Städel since 1922 .
literature
- Lottlisa Behling , The Plant in Medieval Panel Painting. Weimar 1957, pp. 20-21.
- The paradise garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300–1500 (= catalogs of the paintings in the Städelsche Kunstinstitut Frankfurt am Main. Vol. 4). Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 2002, ISBN 3-8053-2920-2 , pp. 93-120.
- Esther Gallwitz: Small herb garden. Herbs and flowers from the old masters in Staedel (= Insel-Taschenbuch 1420). Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1992, ISBN 3-458-33120-4 .
- Henry Keazor : "Manu et voce". Iconographic notes on the `` Frankfurter Paradiesgärtlein. In: Klaus Bergdolt , Giorgio Bonsanti (Ed.): Opere e giorni. Studi su mille anni di arte europea. Dedicati a Max Seidel. Marsilio, Venice 2001, ISBN 88-317-7531-6 , pp. 231-240. ( online, pdf )
- Sabine Schulze (Ed.): Gardens. Order - inspiration - happiness. Städel Museum u. a., Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2006, ISBN 978-3-7757-1870-7 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Henry Keazor : "Manu et voce". Iconographic notes on the Frankfurt Paradise Garden. 2001 p. 231. ( online, pdf )
- ↑ a b The Paradise Garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300-1500. 2002, p. 93.
- ↑ a b c The Paradise Garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300-1500. 2002, p. 97.
- ↑ a b The Paradise Garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300-1500. 2002, p. 100.
- ↑ a b The Paradise Garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300-1500. 2002, p. 98.
- ↑ a b The Paradise Garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300-1500. 2002, p. 115.
- ↑ The Paradise Garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300-1500. 2002, p. 114.
- ↑ The Paradise Garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300-1500. 2002, pp. 113-114.
- ↑ The Paradise Garden. In: Bodo Brinkmann, Stephan Kemperdick: German paintings in the Städel. 1300-1500. 2002, p. 113.