(active Wittenberg and Prague circa 1500–1520s)
Two wings of an altarpiece:
The Visitation; and
The Nativity,
oil on panel, each 42 x 13 cm, framed, a pair (2)

Provenance:
with Johann Friedrich Frauenholz (1758–1822), Nuremberg;
Otto Wesendonck collection, Berlin/Zurich 1895, no. 329 (as Michael Wolgemut);
on loan to the Provinzialmuseum, Bonn, since 1909;
sale, Lempertz, Cologne, 27 November 1935, lot 75 (as School of Barend van Orley);
Private collection, France

Literature:
W. Cohen, Katalog des Provinzialmuseums, Bonn 1927, p. 101, no. 204

We are grateful to Michael Hofbauer for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.

The present pair of altar-wings exude the influence of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1573) and suggest an accomplished hand within the workshop of a Bohemian pupil of Cranach, the so-called Master of the Leitmeritz Altar (present day Litoměřice, Czech Republic), likely identical with the Monogrammist I.W.

Executed around 1520-25, the present Visitation and Nativity, may be compared to two other Bohemian Church-commissioned works that also use Cranach pictorial types, Saint Mary’s Altar, 1526, formerly in Zelina and now conserved in the Kadaň City Museum, and a votive panel, dated 1530, in the Museum of the Diocese of Leitmeritz. Jagiellonian Prague and its environs in the 1500s was a region in artistic flux, and the Master of the Leitmeritz Altar remains highly significant as one of the first representatives of the Renaissance there, working in opposition to the Gothic Bohemian School of the preceding century. Completing his training first in Cranach’s workshop in Wittenberg, Saxony, the master returned to execute the important altar from which he takes his name in Leitmeritz between 1502 and 1505. Leitmeritz, the third most ancient diocese in Bohemia, was an important religious centre, and although the master’s monumental altar now only exists in fragments, he was commissioned to paint a second work in the Wenceslas chapel in St. Vitus’s Cathedral, Prague. In the present panels, the Renaissance details of the broken ornate column, the dynamically posed bodies beneath swirling drapery and particularly the handling of Mary’s hair, show the enduring and revolutionary impact of this master’s interpretation of the inimitable style of Cranach on Bohemian religious art.