[GBay] Rez.: Weilandt: Die Sebalduskirche in Nuernberg (Jung)

[Thomas Paringer <T.Paringer_AT_kbl.badw-muenchen.de>]

Betreff: [Fwd: REV: Weilandt: Die Sebalduskirche in Nuernberg (Jung)]
Datum: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:53:07 +0200
Von: Bernd Krause <bgeschichte_AT_aol.com>
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From:    Jacqueline E. Jung <jacqueline.jung_AT_yale.edu>
Date:    Fri, 20 Sep 2010
Subject: REV: Weilandt: Die Sebalduskirche in Nuernberg (Jung)



Gerhard Weilandt: Die Sebalduskirche in Nürnberg. Bild und Gesellschaft
im Zeitalter der Gotik und Renaissance. Petersberg, Michael Imhof, 2007,
782 S., ISBN 978-3-86568-125-6, € 135.00

Reviewed by Jacqueline E. Jung, Yale University, jacqueline.jung_AT_yale.edu


Gerhard Weilandt's monograph on the parish church of St. Sebald in
Nuremberg is a monumental achievement: twelve pounds of meticulous
research, lucid analysis, new revelations, and glorious pictures (413 in
all, most in color). It consists of a 424-page investigation of the
building and its paraphernalia, 56 pages of notes, a 246-page catalog of
the accoutrements of the fifteen altars that stood in the church before
the Reformation, a bibliography, and three separate indices. Anyone who
has tried to piece together the early biography of a Gothic church from
often paltry material and documentary evidence, or has faced the limits
on word-count and image reproductions imposed by many academic presses,
will peruse this book with a combination of admiration and envy. Would
that we all had such richness -- both in historical materials and
financial sponsorship -- at our disposal!

Following a brief introduction, Weilandt's study opens with a diachronic
account of the church, beginning with the first glimmers of cult
activities surrounding St. Sebald, an erstwhile hermit who, legend had
it, wandered Franconia preaching Christianity. His relics, purportedly
deposited in Nuremberg by wild oxen and drawing crowds by the late
eleventh century, lay at the heart of an earlier basilica dedicated in
1274; because he was not canonized, however, it was not to him but to
St. Peter that that church's high altar was dedicated. This fact, long
unrecognized in the scholarship, is crucial to Weilandt's purposes.
First, it allows him to establish a starting point for a trajectory of
increasing self-consciousness and civic pride on the part of the
church's patrician patrons, as their institution gradually shifted from
the aegis of the metropolitan see of Bamberg -- an affiliation declared
in the building's double-choired design, which drew upon the plan of
Bamberg Cathedral, and its dedication to Peter -- to a more independent
stature, reflected in later renovations that effaced the visual
connections to Bamberg and in the rededication of the high altar.

Second, Weilandt shows that the Petrine identity of the original high
altar forms the iconographic linchpin of the program of imagery made for
the church in the first half of the fourteenth century. Integrating the
myriad figural representations that embellish the exterior and punctuate
the interior of the building within a larger system of liturgical and
commemorative practices is indeed Weilandt's chief goal throughout the
book. Thanks to the wealth of survivals, the thoroughness of the
church's pictorial documentation in prints and pre-War photographs, and
the detail with which contemporaries such as Sebald Schreyer, who served
as 'Kirchenmeister' from 1482-1503, recorded the layout of the building
and its furnishings, Weilandt is able to give an extraordinarily precise
account of the building as an integrated whole. His chronological
overview shows how the themes of the earliest portal programs, made in
the first quarter of the fourteenth century, alerted beholders to the
altars that lay beyond, and how the standing figures of saints inside
the church, sponsored by a handful of families during a major decoration
campaign in 1340-50, likewise served as signposts for nearby altars. The
church's visual program shifted in emphasis following the renovations
undertaken shortly thereafter, including the expansion and new
dedication of the east choir in 1379. In keeping with the heightened
self-assertiveness of Nuremberg's governing families, the high altar was
rededicated to the local St. Sebald -- a bold move that triggered a
flurry of pilgrimage and cult activities, a spate of new images of him
throughout the church, and, ultimately, his canonization in 1425. One
such statue stood on an exterior buttress; together with a standing
Madonna and a relief of a 'Judensau,' all made around 1380, it faced the
city's marketplace where, just over twenty years earlier, the
Frauenkirche had been erected over the local synagogue -- dark reminders
of the Christian community's violent triumph over their Jewish neighbors.

Such externally directed political statements were rare in the
Sebalduskirche, whose wealthy patrons were more concerned with asserting
their social stature in the present and ensuring the cultivation of
their memories in the future. To that end several families commissioned
standing statues of the Man of Sorrows to be placed near their burial
sites in the ambulatory and aisles. The sudden creation of these nearly
identical sculptures in the last quarter of the fourteenth century
Weilandt attributes to the intensified interest in the Lord's body
following the introduction of Corpus Christi in Nuremberg around 1340, a
feast whose importance at St. Sebald was highlighted by the expansive
sacrament niche (ca. 1374) in the north ambulatory. While the
Eucharistic aspect of the Man of Sorrows has long been recognized,
Weilandt's argument for the image as embodiment of the concept of 'God's
mercy' ('Barmherzigkeit' or 'misericordia,' in medieval terms) is a new
one. Far from serving as 'Andachtsbilder' through which beholders could
experience compassion with the sufferings of Christ, the figures of the
'Schmerzensmann' summoned people to the sites where prayers for mercy
were especially needed. In this view, the coats of arms on the figures'
consoles were not so much boastful declarations of the respective
family's piety as indices of the dead who relied on the grace of God and
devotions of the living to effect their speedy release from purgatory.

Weilandt's chapter on the Man of Sorrows as "pictorialized concept"
('bildgewordener Begriff') is the longest of several discussions that
challenge our conventional picture of late medieval devotional art as a
tool for personal emotional engagement and empathetic response. Both
here and in his analyses of the altarpieces and epitaphs in the aisles
and ambulatory Weilandt demystifies the images, showing again and again
that the selection of narrative scenes and iconic saints was grounded in
the altars and relics that resided nearby and in the liturgical
celebrations that unfolded in their proximity. The images, he insists,
cannot be fully understood outside of the network of other images,
objects, and actions in which they were once enmeshed.

This means that the physical location of any given object was crucial in
understanding its meaning, and the second main section of the book is
lays out the church's sacred topography synchronically, as it stood
between the new dedication in 1379 and a final renovation campaign
beginning in 1493. Weiland begins by reminding readers of the medieval
understanding of the church as a likeness ('Abbild') of paradise -- not
by literally reproducing the forms of Heavenly Jerusalem but by
encompassing a unified whole even while retaining a strongly
hierarchical structure. The subsequent chapters lead us through the
various parts of the church, bringing together diverse permanent and
ephemeral furnishings -- stained-glass windows, sculptures, altarpieces,
tapestries, candle-holders, vestments, and even illuminated indulgence
briefs -- to demonstrate how the spaces coalesced into distinct "zones
of worship" ('Verehrungszonen'). In keeping with the medieval hierarchy
of space, Weilandt begins with the east choir, which lodged the dual
power-stations of the high altar, where both public and private masses
were held, and the shrine containing St. Sebald's relics, a
silver-encased box with a sloping roof and a peephole at one end, which
attracted throngs of pilgrims throughout the church's medieval life.
Sebald's status as the "thirteenth apostle" was emphasized, in this
zone, by the presence of St. Peter and the other eleven Apostles in
images near the shrine. But the dominant figure visualized here was
Christ -- specifically, Christ Crucified, whose repeated appearances in
the altarpieces and vestments used at the high altar underscored both
the significance of the Christological feast days and the real presence
of His body in the consecrated host.

For all its emphasis on the holy founders of the Christian ecclesia, the
choir at St. Sebold was not a phyiscally exclusive space; we read of
numerous instances of laypeople participating in services in the choir.
Whereas a series of low choir stalls set the inner choir apart from the
ambulatory where pilgrims circulated, a row of three altars marked
marked the threshold between choir and "church" -- the public space of
the nave. The central altar at this threshold zone, set directly under a
monumental crucifix, was dedicated to Sts. John the Evangelist and John
the Baptist, the northern one to the Apostles, and the southern one to
the Virgin Mary. Given these saints' status as mediators between God and
the world, it was appropriate that the holy phalanx both guarded the
Sebald shrine and created a lively zone of worship that was accessible
to lay visitors. Weilandt suggests that the lovely clay statue of the
Evangelist from around 1440, now in the ambulatory, once graced the St.
John Altar, forming a pendant to the 'Strahlenkranzmadonna' that stands
against the neighboring pier; the latter, he argues, shares with the
figures of the 'Schmerzensmann' a status as a "pictorialized concept,"
in this case the new idea of the Immaculate Conception. Together with
other sculptures, winged retables, and embroidered antependia that
featured Mary and the Apostles, the lateral expanse of the threshold
offered beholders a series of points of conceptual ingress into the
realm of the sacred.

Whereas the nave, flanked by a coterie of sculpted Apostles on the
piers, remained largely devoid of paraphernalia so as optimally to
facilitate processions and to accommodate the crowds who gathered there
to attend masses and sermons, the aisles and ambulatory accumulated a
rich array of furnishings during the late Middle Ages. Not only side
altars with winged altarpieces and a changing array of antependia but
also painted, sculpted, and woven epitaphs, multimedia family emblems
known as 'Totenschilder,' Man of Sorrows statues, wall paintings, and
stained glass windows stood as enduring testaments to the commitments of
the town's patrician families. The bays of the ambulatory, above all,
became sites of intense competition among patrons who strove to outshine
each other by commissioning ever-larger and finer-quality works by
Nuremberg's best artists. In the jockeying between the Behaims and
Volckamers in particular, which yielded an array of windows and
sculptures in the south ambulatory, this reader had to award the prize
to the latter, who left us not only a magnificent series of painted
epitaphs showing the deaths of Mary and of Christ, now exhibited in
Bamberg and Boston, but also Veit Stoss's spectacular Passion reliefs
and wood statues of the Man and Mother of Sorrows  -- masterworks of
late Gothic carving.

For all the self-interest involved in commissioning art for these most
heavily traversed areas, the patrons based iconographical decisions not
on their own affinities but on the images' positioning: their proximity
to altars and relics, their visibility during certain processions, their
relation to other works within and across spatial axes. The loss of this
integration of art into a larger liturgical system in the years around
1500 is the theme of Weilandt's third and final section. At this time we
find an expanded range of patrons' social status, with people of
middling stature edging into the once exclusively patrician cohort, and
a shift in the forms of representation they chose. Imagery increasingly
gave priority to personal wishes; the saints that hovered in an
altarpiece's wings, for example, were now the patron's namesakes, not
the holy people present in nearby relics. Not only those who
commissioned new works shed concerns for integration in favor of
celebrations of autonomy; so too did artists, and nowhere more
spectacularly than in the structure Peter Vischer and his workshop
fashioned to house the shrine of St. Sebald. This is the focus of the
book's final chapter.

Through careful examination of documentary sources, early sketches, and
a showstopping textual discovery, Weilandt illuminates aspects of the
design and iconography that have long puzzled experts. He first shows
how the shrine's concept emerged from a rivalry with Bamberg Cathedral,
whose clergy had recently hired Tilman Riemenschneider to craft an
elaborate alabaster tomb for their sainted patrons Henry II and
Kunigunde. The Sebald shrine, whose bronze material literally as well as
conceptually outweighed that of the Bamberg tomb, and whose
microarchitectural elements willfully complicated those that at the
portals of that Cathedral, represented the final step in the Nuremberg
patriciate's declaration of freedom from the metropolitan see. In
contrast to Riemenschneider's creation, Vischer's asserts its Humanist
credentials though a proliferation of pagan imagery around its base -- a
feature difficult to reconcile with its religious function. Here
Weilandt brings out a smoking gun: a poem known as the "Historia
Herculis", composed around 1515 and dedicated to Peter Vischer's sons,
which casts Hercules as a pagan analogue to St. Sebald. In a
tour-de-force of iconographical analysis, Weilandt shows how the tomb's
enigmatic vignettes match certain characters and situations in the poem,
coalescing to form an extended visual demonstration of the conquest of
vice by virtue -- the major theme of the poem. Upon this basis Weilandt
builds a reading of the entire shrine as a paean to virtue, arranged in
an anagogical ascent from the base matter of the world (embodied by the
snails that serve as supports) through the pagan allegories to the
triumphal realm of the Apostles who guard Sebald's body and the
fantastic architecture of the heavenly city that shelters the whole.
Peter Vischer himself found a place in this company; in contrast to his
colleague Adam Kraft, who shouldered the great tabernacle in the
neighboring parish church of St. Lawrence, Vischer stands at the same
level as Sebald, brandishing his tools as signs of the virtue of work.
In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, it was no longer the
existing "zone of worship" that determined the shape of the church's
main treasure, but rather the industriousness and ingenuity of the artist.

For all the triumphalism of Sebald's new shrine, the book ends on
something of an elegiac note; as in Hans Belting's 'Bild und Kult,' we
see how much was lost as the "era of art," autonomous creations that
called attention to the skill and imagination of their own makers,
supplanted the "era of the image" -- which here refers not to works with
a particular auratic presence (as with Belting's cult images) but to
works that served a functional purpose within a larger ritual, symbolic,
and political system. The book may leave readers melancholy for another
reason: it is so successful in demonstrating the interdependence of all
the elements of the Sebalduskirche that one is forced to recognize the
impoverishment of our understanding of Gothic churches that have been
stripped of their liturgical accretions and our understanding of
altarpieces, sculptures, and epitaphs that have been relegated to
museums. Those of us who work on other Gothic buildings may despair of
ever reconstructing their original appearances and functions as
intricately Weilandt does here, but his book should at least inspire new
efforts in that direction. For the result is not only an unusually vivid
biography of an unusually splendid church but also a celebration of
human agency. Once the book is closed, what lingers in the memory are
not only the dazzling images of vaults soaring over altarpieces and
statues but also the many families we've come to know -- those distant
generations of Hallers and Behaims and Volckamers and Schreyers, whose
hopes and worries, insecurities and pride still resonate in the things
they left behind.


Redaktion: Philipp Zitzlsperger (philipp.zitzlsperger_AT_amdnet.de)

_______________________________________________________________________

Copyright (c) 2010 by H-ArtHist (H-NET) and the author, all rights
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