The altar Paumgartner – Wikipedia

L’ Altar paumgartner It is an oil painting on linden wooden table (155×126 cm the central compartment, 157×61 each side) of Albrecht Dürer, datable to 149-1504 and preserved in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. It is the largest altarpiece of the artist.

The work was commissioned by some members of the Paumgartner family for the church of Santa Caterina in Nuremberg, officiated by the Dominicans. The dating of the altar is based on stylistic considerations, putting it, of a short or very short lax, to Adoration of the Magi of the Uffizi.

A seventeenth-century news has it that the two lateral saints, with the portraits of the paumgartner in the guise of saints, have already been performed in 1498, while the spatial organization of the figures in the central compartment suggests rather than 1502-1504.

The central panel shows the Adoration of the child , flanked with two panels of holy knights in full figure: on the left St. George , with the crusader banner and with the dragon with a breathtaking head, on the right Sant’Eustachio , in whose flag you see the miraculous apparition to which during a hunting, a crucifix between the horns of a deer. Since the lateral tables were close, according to the Nordic tradition, the painter also made two monochrome representations on the rest of the side counters, of which, however, only one remains today Virgin announced ; l’ Angelo Annunciante , which completed a Annunciation , is lost. There were also other fixed compartments with the images of Santa Barbara It is Santa Caterina , lost. The suggestion of the clients had to contribute decisively to creating that formal imbalance that the altar has when the wings are open, being the two figures of saints painted in almost natural size and not proportionate to the figures of the central table which are more reduced scale .

The clients, as frequently happens in the German area, are represented tiny on the sides in the foreground of the central panel, with heraldic shields that clarify their identification. On the left you can see Martin Paumgartner with his children Lukas and Stephan; On the right his wife Barbara Volkamer with his daughters Maria and Barbara. Furthermore, in the faces of the lateral saints, according to an ancient tradition, Stephan and Lukas Paumgartner should be depicted respectively. Probably also the disproportion of the figures is explained by the desire to be recognized. If the traditional annotations are exact, the two standing saints can be considered the oldest portraits with a whole.

The central scene is set in a deep landscape, with the difficult scheme of the arched openings that appear to be a glimpse on the two sides of the scenario, as in a narrow city road. These two scenes, which recall the arcades, are connected to the center by a ruined arch beyond which a distant landscape ranges. The center of the composition is the Bambin Jesus, lying on a flap of the guise of Mary and surrounded by angels. The mother watch it, in a large blue dress that creates a stain of color and volume of Italian flavor, and St. Joseph, kneeling in the foreground and placed of a pitch, along a diagonal that leads the viewer’s gaze in depth, also helped from the profile of the club resting on the ground. Some oblique and parallel lines mark the plans: from Giuseppe’s stick and the three small figures of the donors, to the head of Joseph and that of Mary, to the wooden roof and the tables. Further back the shepherds appear here and there, who came to worship the child, popping up in the center (while they go up the step to get to the threshold of the scene) and from the left building.

The perspective is still of a Flemish type, taken from the works of Dieric Bouts and Hugo Van der Goes, with the high horizon and a certain verticalism due to a wide angle vision. However, there is no lack of attempts to approach an Italian vision, with the perspective escape of the two side scenes and with the uniform element of the central arch, present in many paintings linked to the Italian humanistic tradition. The deficiencies in the spatial construction of the buildings in the central table indicate that, in the years around 1500, Dürer knew only the basic rule of perspective, according to which all the lines that run perpendicular to the surface of the picture seem to converge at a point in the center of the framework same.

At the top, a sky clear with a large sunny disk, while suspended, within a bright nimbus, an angel lavish himself to give the announcement.

• Pork costume (a care of), Dürer , Milan, Rizzoli, 2004.