//RHENISH PRIMITIVES

The museum is best known for its remarkable holdings in painting and sculpture offering visitors a comprehensive overview of 15th- and 16th-century art from the Upper Rhine, a genuine golden age for Rhenish artists.

Artists of the Upper Rhine

Inspired by the international Gothic style that developed in Europe around 1400, characterised by supple, elongated forms and gestures of lyrical preciosity, a movement promoting an inward-focused realism emerged towards the middle of the 15th century in Rhenish art. At the time, this region was part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The artists of the Upper Rhine, grouped by art historians under the term “Rhenish Primitives”, worked in Strasbourg, Colmar, Freiburg im Breisgau (Karlsruhe was only founded in the 18th century) as well as in Basel, and tended to travel often between these centres, as commissions warranted.

Heavily influenced by Flemish artists, this very uniform school offers a rich variety of painted wooden panels and polychrome sculptures (cult of the Virgin and of the saints) from the end of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Works representing the international Gothic style characterised by delicate silhouettes emerging from gold ground panels (Crucifixion, around 1410), are succeeded by painted panels that are more “intimiste” in inspiration (the Stauffenberg Altarpiece, around 1460, offered to the Antonite order of Isenheim by a bailiff from Rouffach, Hans Erhard Bock von Stauffenberg). The Pietà expresses a contained sadness: only a few tears trickle down her cheek.

Other works, such as Gaspard Isenmann’s Altarpiece of the Passion (1465), from the Collegiate Church of Saint Martin in Colmar, adopt a more caricatured and dramatic approach to representation. On the panel depicting the Arrest of Christ, two scenes are superimposed: Saint Peter raising his sword to cut off the ear of a servant of the high priest while Jesus is already preparing to restore it to the mutilated victim.

Late 15th century, Martin Schongauer

The most celebrated late 15th-century artist represented in the collections is the Colmar native Martin Schongauer, whose engravings were already admired during his own lifetime by Albrecht Dürer.

The Orliac Altarpiece (around 1470), commissioned by Jean d’Orlier (Orliac), who served as preceptor of the Isenheim convent from 1459 or 1466 to 1490, is presented in the chapel. The donor is shown kneeling at the feet of Saint Anthony. The panel depicting the Annunciation exemplifies the painter’s refined technique. The angel’s majestic gesture is in harmony with the delicate attitude of the Virgin listening attentively to Gabriel’s words. Martin Schongauer was called “the handsome Martin” in recognition of his graceful and refined execution..

Germany in the early 16th century

Early in the 16th century, the representation of human reality became one of the mainstays of painting. In his Melancholy (1532), Cranach the Elder embodies a Reformation ideal and evokes a particular mood, that of being engulfed by a dangerous sentiment illustrated by an enigmatic feminine presence. Cranach belongs to an artistic current originating in the south of Germany between 1500 and 1530, called the Danube School.

The Portrait of a Lady (around 1510) by Hans Holbein the Elder is the only painting by this artist held by a French museum. Beyond the technical prowess demonstrated through its fineness of detail, the artist aims to express his model’s personality.