Collectors’ Focus
The German tradition of softwood carving that flourished at the end of the 15th century produced some of the most extraordinary works of the Northern Renaissance – and sculptures by the greatest masters in this field fetch high prices
Emma Crichton-Miller on German limewood sculpture
The limewood sculptures of southern Germany are among the most revered artworks of the Northern Renaissance. The art historian Michael Baxandall established the canon in his magisterial book The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany ( ). He identified a group of master craftsmen working between and in a broad area of what today is southern Germany, extending into Alsace, northern Switzerland and Austria, whose works represent a significant creative high point, on a par with the achievements of Italian Renaissance sculptors. Their sculptures were largely but not exclusively carved in limewood, usually painted, and marked by a combination of technical brilliance and direct human expressiveness. This body of work achieved its high status through the artists’ ambition and skill, through its novelty and influence, but also through, in Baxandall’s words, ‘the complexity and the co-ordination we experience in it, its transparency through to a human condition’.
The sculptors he identifies – Michael Pacher, Michel and Gregor Erhart, Tilman Riemenschneider and Veit Stoss, the Master H.L. (who ‘stands for an extreme twirly tendency’), Daniel Mauch and Hans Leinberger, among others – used the highly prized, locally available Sommerlinde, the large, broad-leafed species of native lime tree, held in medieval German folklore to have magical powers. The wood combines softness for virtuoso carving (in comparison with the harder oak available elsewhere) with a tendency to split rather than warp. Matthew Reeves of the London dealership Sam Fogg explains that the visual drama of limewood sculpture derives from the need to mitigate against splitting by hollowing out the timber, creating paper-thin draperies and carving spaces within the composition. ‘They are finding a practical solution by creating forms that open out rather than blocking in,’ he says.
The work sprang from the wealth, craftsmanship and traditions of patronage concentrated in cities such as Würzburg, Ulm, Augsburg, Strasbourg, Nuremberg and Salzburg in the th and th centuries. The most magnificent examples are the large-scale altarpieces still found in churches throughout the region, though there was also a market for smaller sculptures for patrons’ personal use. Kenneth Clark saw in the dedicated piety expressed in the work of Riemenschneider (c. – ) the spirit of northern Europeans more generally at the end of the th century, on the cusp of the Reformation. But reforming zeal effectively ended this sculptural tradition in the s and ’ s: where sculptures were not expressly destroyed, the mood turned against vivid portrayals of religious subjects.
Interest in these works revived only in the th century. By the end of the century,
according to Florian Eitle-Böhler, director of Julius Böhler Kunsthandlung in Starnberg in Bavaria, every large house in Germany was full of pieces. What mattered was age and subject matter. Since the s the market has grown more discriminating. Baxandall argued that there was a striking gap between the best work and the rest. On today’s market, Eitle-Böhler comments: ‘At the high end there is very little to come by; at the medium level, there is very little interest.’
At the peak stand works such as Riemenschneider’s A Female Saint (c. – ), now in the collection at Compton Verney in the UK, and the first work by the artist ever to be offered at auction. It set a record for medieval sculpture when it sold for just under m at Sotheby’s New York in . This was one year after it had featured in a major exhibition of Riemenschneider’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In another, possibly related, work exhibited there, a figure of St Catherine (Fig. ), became the second Riemenschneider to come to auction in the United States or the UK, attaining a new record of . m (top estimate m), reportedly paid by Jeff Koons. The Met’s exhibition curator had pointed out in that the elaborate ornamentation embellishing both sculptures’ surfaces indicated that these figures were meant to remain unpainted, a radical feature of Riemenschneider’s distinctive oeuvre, in a context where most wooden sculptures were carved to be painted.
Eitle-Böhler has available a smaller Christ Crucified in fruitwood attributed to Riemenschneider, for , . He suggests younger collectors are beginning to show an interest in these emotionally expressive works. Among high points in the market he cites a bright polychrome St Sebastian ( – ), carved in Kau euren by the sculptor Jörg Lederer, which he sold to the late American collector Hester Diamond in and which is coming up for sale at Sotheby’s New York in a single-owner sale in January . The same sale includes an elaborate Dormition of the Virgin by Lederer, which his gallery had also previously handled, but which Blumka Gallery had acquired before selling to Diamond. Tony Blumka confirms: ‘It has to be very beautiful and top quality to sell well.’
The other market leader, equally rare, is Veit Stoss (c. / – ), beloved for his vivacious drapery and theatrical compositions, who found fame in Kraków and Nuremberg. In July an extremely fine small-scale boxwood Corpus Christi (c. –
), attributed to Stoss, fetched . m at Sotheby’s London – nearly four times the top estimate of , . It is now in the Getty. ‘Yes, people go for names, but they know they may not get them,’ says Margi Schwartz, director of European sculpture and works of art at Sotheby’s New York. ‘People are looking at the face and the drapery. If the work is beautiful, if it is full of emotion, then they will bid on anonymous works or those labelled “workshop of”, “circle of”.’ She cites the truly masterful St John the Baptist by the Master of the Harburger Altar (c. ), for which the Getty paid , at Sotheby’s London in December , double the high estimate of
, . Donald Johnston, international head of the European sculpture department at Christie’s, remarks that collectors, mostly based in Europe, the United States and Latin America, are asking for original polychromy: ‘This is difficult because throughout history owners have wanted to keep their sculptures pristine.’ He cites the good price ( , on an estimate of , – , ) achieved at Christie’s New York in May for a beautiful pair of parcel-gilt polychrome wood altarpiece reliefs depicting the Circumcision (Fig. ) and the Adoration of the Magi (c. – ), attributed to Hans Klocker and workshop. Johnston suggests that the price was the result of ‘the quality, the scale, the fact that these were a pair, and one a favourite scene, but also that there were passages of probably original polychromy’.
Johnston is also a rare Riemenschneider sceptic. He acknowledges that ‘when he pulls out the stops, these are masterpieces’, and admits the appeal of those ‘slightly downturned, outward corners of the eyes which give a melancholy look’, but he places Veit Stoss higher, and also lesser-known figures including the Master H.L. (‘a virtuoso’).
Matthew Reeves says of Riemenschneider: ‘A mythology has built up around him. We have glorified him as the quintessential limewood sculptor.’ He admires the daring of Michel Erhart, evident in the masterpiece he created with his son Gregor, the Blaubeuren Altarpiece ( – ), but also in smaller works. ‘Erhart is a sculptor who thinks about painted surfaces; he is creating depths, forms, carved details, thinking about the combination of thin paint layers and sculptural anatomy.’ A bust by Erhart he handled three years ago sold for ‘several hundred thousand pounds’. Reeves has available a striking St John of the Crucifixion (c. – ; Fig. ) from the South Tyrol, carved in a softwood – possibly Swiss pine – in a style strongly indebted to the great pioneer of limewood sculpture Michael Pacher (c. – ), who forged a unique idiom from a fusion of northern Italian Renaissance influences and northern gothic realism. Reeves notes of the market: ‘In the present climate, private collectors have overtaken museums, which are under pressure to support their staff. Private clients are able to snap up the masterpieces.’ o