Relief portrait of Tiedemann Giese
The relief portrait of Tiedemann Giese is a wooden half-relief from Königsberg from around 1520 to 1530, which is now in the Grunewald hunting lodge of the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg .
history
The relief was found bricked up by construction workers in a wall of the Königsberg Castle and then attached as a supraporte above the door to the tiled hall in the Albrechtsbau of the castle. It was then taken to the castellan's room, where it remained unobserved for decades. Alfred Rohde , director of the municipal art collections in the south wing of the Königsberg Castle, exhibited the picture as part of the municipal art collections in the Königsberg Castle.
On April 9, 1945, the surgeon Oskar Ehrhardt was able to recover the picture from the ruins of the destroyed Königsberg Palace. He hung the picture in his room in the Königsberg Elisabethenkrankenhaus. When he was evacuated in 1948 he had to leave the picture in Koenigsberg, where a Russian soldier sent it to a Dr. Franke sold. He brought the picture to Leipzig and Berlin in 1948. In 1958 it was acquired by the West Berlin palace administration (inventory no. Skulpt.slg. 5526).
Description and meaning
The partially colored relief made of linden wood (97 × 61 cm) shows the half-portrait of a man in a hat, looking to the left in front of the backdrop of a ruined architectural backdrop. He is holding a skull in his left hand. In his back a small figure, Death, waits on a balcony with a slingshot in his left hand, half hidden behind a pillar. The picture is to be understood in the sense of vanitas and memento mori , it shows the sitter in the "meditatio mortis".
Artist and portrayed
The art historian Hermann Ehrenberg suspects the sculptor Jakob Binck as an artist in 1899 who is said to have created a self-portrait. In 1929, by comparing it with a drawing in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, Georg Habich succeeded in identifying the sitter as Tiedemann Giese , a theologian, canon and later bishop working in Königsberg and a friend of Nicolaus Copernicus . The attribution to Hans Schenck (called Scheutzlich), who worked at the court of the Dukes of Prussia and the Margraves of Brandenburg, including 1526 to 1528 in Königsberg, is also from Habicht .
literature
- Hermann Ehrenberg : The art at the court of the dukes of Prussia . Leipzig, Berlin 1899, pp. 45-47 ( digitized version ).
- Georg Habich : relief portrait of Tiedemann Giese in Königsberg. In: Yearbook of the Prussian Art Collections 49, 1928, pp. 1–23.
- Ernst Friedrich Bange : The small sculpture of the German Renaissance in wood and stone. Munich 1928, p. 45f. Plate 41.
- Georg Habich: The German show coins of the XVI. Century . Volume 2, 1. Munich 1932, p. 315f.
- Theodor Müller : German sculpture from the Renaissance to the Thirty Years War . Koenigstein i. Ts. 1963, pp. 12, 55.
- Anton Legner : Portrait of Tiedemann Giese (?) . In: The Art of the Danube School 1490–1540. Catalog of the Upper Austrian provincial exhibition in St. Florian Monastery and in the Castle Museum Linz from May 14th to October 17th 1965 . Oberösterreichischer Landesverlag, Linz 1965, p. 284 No. 699 ( digitized version ).
- Herbert Meinhard Mühlpfordt : Königsberg sculptures and their masters 1255–1945 . Holzer, Würzburg 1970, pp. 152–153.
- Man around 1500. Works from churches and art chambers . Berlin 1977, pp. 58-63.
