Late Medieval Paintings: Methods, Materials, Meanings’ Richard L. Feigen & Co.

Mid-winter is the ideal season to experience Sam Fogg’s curated exhibition ‘Late Medieval Paintings: Methods, Materials, Meanings’ at Richard L. Feigen & Co. Presented are a collection of saleable early renaissance panel paintings from across Europe dating from the mid to late 15^th century. Remote in time, the paintings on display, however, are a part of the seedling that became our painting inheritance. Painted on spruce, pine and oak panels with minutely layered amounts of oil paint, the images were originally a part of larger altarpieces or religious depictions. Virgins, saints, crucifixions and scenes of torture co-exist in a pictorial and disciple’s universe of suffering and grace.

Painting, like the rest of Europe in the late fifteenth century, was ripe for a sea change. Spiritually, Europe was still in a medieval mindset. Nominally Catholic, the continent would soon explode in religious warfare and sectarianism. Advancements in technology allowed sailors to travel further and further away from Europe down throughout the African coast and into a ‘New World’ on the other side of the Atlantic. Painting, for a long period a cloistered, secluded practice, was also on a precipice. An innovative technological advancement, adding linseed oil binder to suspended pigments, ushered in an unfathomably rich historical turn. Hitherto, painting in Europe had relied on fussy, fast drying mediums like fresco and egg tempera for limited, flat results. Oil paint offered a startling new technology. Slow drying and viscous, oil paint could more authentically capture every droplet of blood on the Savior’s wounds, every leaf on a far-away apple tree or the bristles of a lady in waiting’s ermine trimmed cloak.

While the exhibition includes Italian examples and a magnificent Spanish painting by Juan Ximenez, the central focus is on Central and Northern Europe, particularly Switzerland and the German City-States. For reasons both cultural and practical, German Renaissance artists never moved away from the panel. Instead, their province, as the Italians became the super-sized canvas and the Moghuls the miniature piece of paper, became the hard backed support of the panel painting. Oil paint and wood housed and fed the ambitions of the Northern European Renaissance. Many of the painters in this exhibition are anonymous and are known simply as the ‘Master of…’ Unknown, their paintings, exhibiting clerical exactitude, a believer’s fervor and an imponderably exuberant joy for the lengths that their medium offered, would be gloriously perfected by three later artists, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald and Albrecht Altdorfer. The panel paintings on display, rarely seen anywhere let alone in a New York gallery, offer a chance to peep inside an art historical crevice to witness a moment before everything changed.

The Mastery of the Drapery Studies, France, Strasberg

The Trinity with the Virgins, Saint John, Stephen, Lawrence and a Donor, 1479

Oil on Spruce Panel

31 7/16 x 55 inches

Master of the Holy Kinship, Cologne

The Torture of the Maccabean Brothers, Before 1517

Oil on Oak Panel

40 3/16 x 28 1/9 inches

Master of the Rheinfelden Altarpiece, Northern Switzerland, Canton of Aargau, Zurich or Basel

The Nativity, Circa 1480

Oil on Spruce Panel

47 ¼ x 31 9/16 inches

Master of the Burg Weiler Altarpiece, Wurttemburg

Martyrs of the Theban Legion, Circa 1480

Oil on Spruce Panel

20 x 14 3/16 inches

Juan Ximenez

Triptych of the Man of Sorrows with the Virgin and Saint John

Circa 1500-1510

Oil on Scotch Pine Panel

30 5/8 x 44 1/8 inches

Jean Bourdichon

The Virgin in Prayer, Circa 1480

Oil on Panel

17 5/16 x 13 9/16 inches