Master of the Wippinger Altar

Wipping wing altar, around 1505

In art history , the master of the Wipping Altar is sometimes referred to as the carver who carved the figures of a late Gothic altar in the style of the Ulm School around 1505 . The emergency name of the artist who is not known by name can be traced back to the current location of the winged altar, which is now the Protestant Church of Our Lady in Wippingen, a village near Ulm . The Wippinger Altar is considered to be one of the masterpieces of the Ulm School. The altar figures show a Madonna and Child in the middle of the shrine , whose crown is presented by two little angels as a symbol of her heavenly reign; as the central figure she is surrounded by the saints Jacob and Matthias. The figures are painted and gilded.

It is believed that the Wipping Altar originally stood in a side chapel of Ulm Minster . In the course of the Reformation and the relatively orderly removal of altars from the church in the city, the donor family may have picked up the altar and brought it to Wippingen; however, this cannot be proven with certainty.

Stylistically, the master of the Wipping Altar is at the transition to the Renaissance . But even if the influence of new painting techniques and image viewing seems to appear in his painting style , the theme of his altar is still late medieval. The altar is still a cult image in the sense of the Catholic doctrine of the Middle Ages, one of the works that were donated in large numbers by private individuals at the end of the 15th century and an example of how wealthy secular donors like the citizens of Ulm at that time the pious view of Have the real presence of the saint in the picture taken up in their foundations. The figures of the Wippinger Altar are lively and realistic and want to invite the viewer to contemplation. At the same time, with their rich gilding, they show the wish of the donors to participate in the splendor of heaven.

Possibly the master of the Wippinger Altar came from the school of Daniel Mauch , whose workshop was one of the most important in Ulm alongside that of Michel Erhart at the beginning of the 16th century . Occasionally the Wipping Altar was also seen as an early work by Mauch, but the style of the Madonna cannot necessarily be linked to other works in Mauch's catalog of works and this assumption is therefore controversial.

The late Gothic paintings of the wings of the altar, depicting the adoration of the Magi and the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt on the inside, as well as the predella of the altar with a depiction of the root of Jesse, are made by a painter from the school of the Ulm painter Hans Attributed to Multscher . Multscher maintained an extensive and respected workshop in Ulm from 1427 until his death in 1467. The combination of carving and picture to form an easily understandable religious message is typical of the shrine altars in southern Germany at the time of the master of the Wipping Altar before the Reformation.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Augsburger Allgemeine: Masterpieces from Ulm School . Online edition September 13, 2010 , accessed October 2011.
2. ^ Gudrun Litz: The Reformation picture question in the Swabian imperial cities . Tuebingen 2007.
3. ↑ Susanne Wagini: Mauch, Daniel . In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 16 (1990), p. 424 f.