Heller Altar



Central element

Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin
 
This altarpiece was commissioned by Jakob Heller (1460-1522), a wealthy merchant, member of the town council, and mayor of Frankfurt, either before or after Durer's second trip to Italy. On 28 August 1507, Durer informed Heller that he could not finish the work, which was intended for the elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, because of an illness that included a high fever. The panel was probably begun in April 1508. The preparatory works for the panel and frame—background preparation, gilding—had already been carried out by other artisans. In mid-March 1508, the external sides of the wings had been prepared for painting, and the drawing of the central panel was ready. In a letter dated 21 March, Durer told Heller that the coloration of the background of the panel had also been completed. In a letter of 26 August 1509, Durer assures him that he can deliver the finished work to Hans Imhoff so that it arrives in Frankfurt. Jakob Heller paid 130 florins; however, Durer obtained seventy more, after prolonged negotiation. Nine letters bear witness to the progress of the work; copies have been published by Rupprich 1956-1969).
The center panel of the altar, with the monochromatic gray on gray wings— these made by the workshop—to which were later added two more wings painted by Grunewald (these, too, monochromatic) was dedicated to Saint Thomas Aquinas. It was placed in front of the first pillar to the right of the entrance of the Dominican church in Frankfurt, dedicated to the Beatissima Maria Virgo ad coelus assumpta. Heller had a grill stationed in front of the polyptych with two huge, tall candles perpetually burning. One hundred and five years later, in 1614, the brothers sold the central panel alone to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria for 8,000 florins. The amount was the changed into an annuity of 400 florins, which was paid until 1781. In 1729, the painting was destroyed by a fire in his residence in Munich. Fortunately, a copy of the work remained in the Dominican church. It had been executed by Jobst Harrich of Nuremberg (ca. 1580-1617) when the original had been sold. But even this one was not to remain there long. The wings of the polyptych were already detached in 1742. The remaining parts were sawed apart and the various pieces housed in different places throughout the Dominican convent. After its secularization, the Museumsgesellschaft saw to the reunification of the pieces, and in I 877, the entire Heller Altar went to the Historisches Museum. The restorations performed on the panel in 1791 and again in 1956 stripped the uppermost layer completely. Hardly anything at all remains of the work by the Durerian copyist Harrich or from the master. The evaluation of the center panel of the largest altarpiece painted by the artist can only be based on a compositional, perhaps a formal and, limited chromatic study (Pfaff, 1971). The theme and composition were previously discussed and established by Heller for Durer, so that not another word was mentioned in the ensuing correspondence. There is still mention, on the other hand, of the preciosity of the colors, chiefly the sea blue. A drawing from 1503 (W 337) could perhaps represent the first outline of the work. The theme of the assumption and of the coronation of the Madonna was familiar in Nuremberg painting of the fifteenth century (Panofsky, 1977). But Durer gives it a particular Renaissance interpretation. The doubting Saint Thomas (or Saint John, perhaps as the favorite apostle is absent from the group) bows over to the inside of the emptied sarcophagus in the foreground and clings to the linens that wrapped the body of the Madonna. He demonstrates the difficulty he has in convincing himself that the assumption is truly happening. His lowered head is painted by Diirer in a sharp foreshortening. The other apostles are standing or kneeling around the sarcophagus. Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in the foreground, turn their backs to the observer opening the view onto Saint Thomas and the landscape behind the group. In the center-ground of the landscape, Durer stands as usual with the explicative tablet and his gaze fixed straight ahead. The background presses into the far distance, toward a lake enclosed by hills, peppered with buildings. A broad and tranquil landscape contrasts with the monumental, concentrated and restless group of apostles. While the doubting Saint Thomas is still looking for proof of the Assumption, the other apostles, arranged in an ascending semicircle to the left and right, have already recognized it. In the sky, in a semicircle of clouds, accompanied and held by a flock of cherubs, the Madonna rises toward the Eternal Father and Jesus Christ, as they wait to crown her. The faces and gestures of the men express an endless bewilderment at the sight of the miracle that is unfolding before their eyes. The variety and vigor that distinguishes the apostles, who disagree among themselves, is opposed to the monumentality of the isolated group in the foreground, consisting of the princes of the apostles, Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Each detail of the panel—for example, the bare feet of Saint Peter, precluding a Caravaggio—has been carefully studied. Eighteen preparatory drawings that still exist demonstrate this (W 448-65). They are in pencil on paper, with an azure, green background. The famous Hands in Prayer also is part of these drawings.
The entire episode was conceived with an unusual grandiosity and an intimate participation. Durer expresses this in the vigor of the colors and, most of all, in the spaciousness and wealth of the clothes. It is modeled on a Raphael citation—twelve years his younger—and his Coronation of the Madonna, painted in 1502-3 and ordered by Alessandra degli Oddi for the chapel of the Oddi in the church of Saint Francis in Perugia. In Durer's panel, everything is more complex and splendid, but the comparison of the two paintings is nonetheless interesting. Durer had an opportunity to see the Raphaelesque painting while in Italy. If the commission for the painting was assigned him by Jakob Heller before his first trip to Italy, one cannot consider the Raphaelesque echo to be accidental.
Differing from the frontal arrangement of the apostles and horizontal composition that Raphael gives to his Coronation, Durer opposes to the compact group of apostles, arranged in a semicircle opening skyward, the convex semicircular arrangement of the choir
of cherubs (Panofsky, 1977). They descend gently from the clouds that encircle the scene of the coronation, plucking the lute and harp, and ringing a little bell, holding the tip of Maria's heavy azure clothing, holding up the Madonna herself. She, on her knees, dominates the upper part of the painting. Christ is a little higher up, to her left. Crowned with the papal tiara, and wearing a red cloak off his shoulders that, gaping at the side, shows the wounds of his Passion, he solemnly crowns Mary. To the right, on the same level as His son, is the Eternal Father. He is personified as a venerable old man, cloaked in a rich cape and wearing the imperial crown. He touches the crown suspended above the Madonna in blessing with His right hand, while His left holds the globe of the earth, another symbol of His power. Behind and beyond this celestial hierarchy shines a great halo, resplendent with the colors of the rainbow. From it descends the dove of the Holy Spirit, completing the glorious image of the Trinity that rises over the Madonna, who humbly bows her head in prayer.

Heller Altar
Assumption of the Coronation of the Virgin
1508-09
Historisches Museum, Frankfurt

Heller Altar (detail)
1508-09
Historisches Museum, Frankfurt

Wings, inner sides

Martyrdom of Saint James, the Apostle

Martyrdom of Saint Catherine


According to Anzelewsky (1991), the wings were painted by Durer with the assistance of his workshop, though his opinion is not universally shared. On the background of the scene of the martyrdom of Saint James is depicted the transportation of his remains to the palace of the queen of Spain, Lupa. According to the "Golden Legend," the disciples of Saint James the Elder, following his decapitation and under the guidance of an angel, secretly removed his remains during nightfall to save them from the Jews. They then brought them by sea to Spain. Here, they were gathered by Queen Lupa, who, with "wolfish wickedness," offered them a pair of wild bulls to transport the coffin. But the disciples tamed the ferocious animal, which took the corpse to the palace alone. Before the obvious miracle, the queen converted to the Christian faith and wanted the saint to consecrate the palace, transforming it into a chapel, the famous sanctuary of Santiago of Compostela. In a discussion on the truth of Christianity, the beautiful and cultured eigh-teen-vear-old Saint Catherine of  Alessandria stands up to at least fifty learned pagan philosophers. Maximinus, then the Roman emperor, condemned her to the torture on the wheel; but an angel—who is not represented in the painting—breaks the wheel to pieces, which explodes in the painting, its fragments hitting the people in the foreground and the emperor in the background. He, as the target of a violent rain of boiling pitch falling from a grim and threatening sky, falls with his soldiers to the ground. In the distance, two angels are seen burying the saint on Mount Sinai. He can be recognized by the cut-off crowned head resting on top of the outstretched body. Durer's involvement in the painting's execution is revealed not only in the depiction of the explosion of the wheel, but in the complicated expressions of the figures beneath the wheel and—a detail that has until now gone unnoticed—in the agonized scream of the man in the foreground, surely taken from Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari, which Durer must have seen during his Florentine sojourn at the master's workshop, in Leonardo's absence. Durer had already represented the same theme in a woodcut of 1496-97.