Art: Under the Whitewash

The R.A.F. went after the Baltic port of Liibeck one night in March 1942 because Lübeck was a vital link on the Wehrmacht supply line to Russia. It was no part of the R.A.F. plan that the fire bombs rained down on Lübeck’s beautiful 13th Century Marienkirche, but fire melted the church’s great bell, gutted the interior. Repair crews got a surprise: whitewash had peeled from the walls, revealing patches of vividly colored frescoes beneath.

Reinforcement of towers and masonry came first, but by last year trained workers began chipping away the rest of the Marienkirche’s whitewash. Slowly they uncovered panel after panel of 13th and 14th Century work. With crude but forceful strokes, the old Gothic craftsmen had covered the walls with stately saints and serene virgins, friezes of animals and flowers, medieval street scenes, vignettes from the Bible and Aesop’s fables. The colors, brilliant reds, blues, greens and yellows, were still unfaded.

A major artistic find, the frescoes are among the few Gothic wall paintings still in existence. For their fine state of preservation, Liibeck can thank sedate 15th Century churchmen who considered such lively church decorations old-fashioned and undignified, ordered them whitewashed in 1476. A generation or two later came the Reformation, the Marienkirche became a Protestant church, and the Lutherans kept up the whitewash treatment. In a short while, the underlying frescoes were forgotten by all but scholars.

This week Liibeck put its restored treasures on view as part of a combined celebration of the Marienkirche’s 700th anniversary and its reopening for Lutheran services for the first time since 1942. Despite other war damage still only partially repaired, the interior of the Marienkirche looks more as its original decorators intended than it has for 500 years.