//SCULPTURES

Bei The museum’s collection of late Gothic polychrome wooden sculptures allows visitors to explore the function of these works, their iconography and their style.

Certain sculptures (Marbach’s Virgin with Child ) and reliefs (Scenes from the Childhood of Christ by Master HSR) are from disassembled altarpieces, where the first were used to decorate the pedestal and the second included in the panels. The unity of several sculpted groups was spared by the turbulent history of Alsace, such as the Bergheim Altarpiece and some small and easily transportable domestic altarpieces (Annunciation Altarpiece, Saint James Altarpiece).

These sculptures offer a varied iconography, related to the Passion of Christ (the Rouffach Lamentation, the Life of the Virgin (Assumption of the Virgin) or illustrating the lives of saints, such as the Martyr of Saint Catherine (around 1520), an element from an altarpiece attributed to the entourage of Master HL.

All three of the Upper Rhine’s main centres of sculpture production are represented in the museum’s collections. For Strasbourg, the legacy of Nicolas de Leyde is apparent in the Niedermorschwihr Virgin and in the work of Nicolas de Hagueneau, who was responsible for the sculpted portion of the Isenheim Altarpiece. The exceedingly beautiful sculptures of Christ as the Man of Sorrows by Martin Hoffmann and the Virgin on the Road to Calvary by Martin Lebzelter illustrate the heights reached by sculptors in Basel. This centre influenced workshops in Colmar, which also responded to the contributions of engravers (Baptism of Christ after Schongauer and Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul inspired by Dürer from the Franciscan Church in Colmar). Works from Swabia (Saint Sebastian) and from other districts of Bavaria (Saint Anne by the Rabenden Master) round out this grouping of sculptures from southern Germany.