Master of the Golden Table

Master of the Golden Table: Adoration of the Magi , around 1410/1418. Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover

A late Gothic painter or a painter's workshop is called the master of the Golden Table (also referred to as the second painter of the Golden Table) who probably painted three of the four wings of the so-called "Golden Table" of the Michaeliskirche in 1420/1430 Lüneburg created.

The work of the master on the golden table

The "Golden Table" was a high altar retable and a valuable reliquary in the new building of the Benedictine Abbey Church of St. Michaelis in Lüneburg. The shrine in the second transformation with its 22 compartments around the older golden table was artfully decorated with detailed carvings. The wings of the second change each show ten large-format and six small-format female saints, the wings of the first change are decorated with paintings from the life of Jesus . Large parts of the reliquary were lost in an art theft in 1698. The two wings with the paintings of the master of the golden table can be seen today in the Landesmuseum Hannover . They are considered a remarkable example of late Gothic artistry in northern Germany, especially when considering the partially reconstructable combination of carving and painting to form a "total work of art", which also shows a high level of craftsmanship in handling gold as a material .

Location of the workshop and assignment

Research is debating where the so-called second master of the Golden Table originally comes from. There are stylistic similarities to Cologne paintings from around 1400, so that a Cologne influence is suspected. On the other hand, some absolutely "Unköln" details can also be observed, so that a definitive origin of the master from Cologne cannot be confirmed. The paintings show clear stylistic and painterly similarities to the miniatures of three manuscripts from Lüneburg, which were made shortly before 1400. It is therefore possible that a highly qualified artist workshop was located in Lüneburg around 1400, which did the book illuminations and painted the golden panel. In the so-called Wevelkoven Missal , an older miniature has been preserved that has to be assigned to another workshop, very similar to the Golden Plate, where the inside of the left outer wing and two image fields on the inside of the right outer wing are also from an older artist or an older workshop can be attributed. Where this workshop and the painters came from is still the subject of research.

restoration

From 2016 to 2019, the Golden Plate in the Landesmuseum Hannover was researched by art historians and art scholars and then restored. The results of the project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation were presented at a colloquium in April 2016 .

literature

• Curt Habicht : The golden table of the St. Michaeliskirche in Lüneburg (= Lower Saxon art in individual representations. Volume 2). Angelsachsen-Verlag, Bremen 1922.
• Helmut Reinecke: Lüneburg book paintings around 1400 and the painter of the golden tablet. L. Röhrscheid, Bonn 1937.
• Marie Kempfer: The color as a criterion for workshop relationships presented on ten altars from the period between 1370 and 1430. In: Giessener contributions to art history. Vol. 2 (1973), pp. 7-49.
• Master of the Golden Table . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 37 : Master with emergency names and monogramists . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1950, p. 121-122 .
• Götz J. Pfeiffer: The painting of the golden table. Approaches to a reorientation of research. In: Cornelis Bol (Red.): A saint figure on the golden tablet from St. Michael in Lüneburg. Published by the Kulturstiftung der Länder in conjunction with the Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover (= Patrimonia. Volume 324). Kulturstiftung der Länder, Berlin 2007, pp. 34–43.
• Rainer Blaschke: Studies on the painting of the Lüneburg "Golden Plate". Dissertation, Bochum 1976.
• Antje-Fee Köllermann, Christine Unsinn (eds.), Turn of the Times 1400. The Golden Plate as a European Masterpiece , Petersberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-7319-0512-7 .
• Antje-Fee Köllermann (ed.), The Golden Table in Lüneburg (= Low German Contributions to Art History NF 5), 2019.

Web links

• Master of the Golden Panel of Lüneburg ( Memento from March 6, 2005 in the Internet Archive ), In: The Grove Dictionary of Art , on artnet.com, in the Internet Archive on archive.org, as of March 6, 2005, viewed 2. May 2011

Individual evidence

1. ↑ cf. z. B. Kulturstiftung der Länder in connection with the Lower Saxony State Museum Hanover (publisher): A saint figure on the golden tablet from St. Michael in Lüneburg . Patrimonia 2007
2. ↑ Reinecke 1937 and Köllermann / Unsinn 2019
3. ↑ Köllermann / Unsinn 2019 and Köllermann 2019
4. ↑ The Golden Plate from Lüneburg. Research on the technology, shape, context and meaning of a retable around 1400 ( Memento of the original from January 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed February 29, 2016. 
5. ↑ International Colloquium: The Golden Plate in Context. Research on the technology, shape and meaning of Northern European reredos around 1400, from April 7th to 9th, 2016 in Hanover, accessed on September 4th, 2017.