Painting: Germany’s First Master

He was little more than a name till the late 19th century, and not until this year did scholars and the public have an opportunity to see all his works in one place. The place was Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, and the occasion the celebration of its 100th anniversary. The result was the realization that Meister Francke, an altar painter who worked in Hamburg around the year 1420, has far better claim than his later compatriots, Dürer, Cranach or Grünewald, to the title of Germany’s first great artist.

Scarlet Sky. Meister Francke was a dramatic storyteller who created his own style by combining the Gallic elegance of the courtly International Style with the burgeoning, often brutal realism of The Netherlands. Kunsthalle Director Alfred Hentzen spent close to $60,000 to assemble all of the master’s few surviving works, as well as a small treasury of related paintings, drawings and illuminated manuscripts by other late Gothic artists borrowed from 43 museums and libraries all over the world.

To German art lovers, the greatest curiosity was the St. Barbara altarpiece from Finland’s National Museum in Helsinki—Meister Francke’s earliest known work. Its eight richly painted panels sum up the characteristic ambiguities of Meister Francke’s style. In The Flagellation of St. Barbara, the brutal, peasant faces and awkward, potbellied figures of Barbara’s tormentors foreshadow the popular style of Bruegel or Bosch—though neither painter had been born when they were painted. By contrast, nothing could be more courtly than the boneless sinuosity of Barbara’s figure, the vapid sweetness of her untroubled expression or the richly brocaded gowns and hierarchic formality of the aristocratic spectators.

Christ as the Man of Sorrows displays the same blend of mannered elegance and gory realism. But the triumph of Meister Francke’s mature style is seen in the St. Thomas of Canterbury altar piece, painted after 1424 for a group of Hamburg merchants trading with England. The nine panels of this darkly glowing work depict episodes in the life of Thomas à Becket, together with scenes from the Passion of Christ and the life of the Virgin, achieving a peak of dramatic intensity hitherto unrealized in North German painting. In The Martyrdom of St. Thomas, the kneeling archbishop half turns toward his attackers. Blood streams down his forehead and splashes onto his white cassock; his miter rolls away across the tile floor. The decorative flatness of Thomas’ cope and the star-spangled, scarlet sky are in striking contrast to the bold modeling of his face.

Splendid Miracle. Little is known of Meister Francke’s life. He is believed to have been a Dominican friar who came from the Geldern region of The Netherlands and studied or worked in Paris or Burgundy before settling in Hamburg. Probably he spent his life in monkish seclusion (like his contemporary Fra Angelico in Italy), painting for the glory of God and the benefit of his order while the fame of his brush spread throughout the Hanseatic trading towns of Eastern Europe to the farthest reaches of the Baltic. Commissions came in to his monastery from as far away as Estonia and Finland.

After his death, legends attached to his work. The St. Barbara altarpiece was discovered in 1874 in a small stone church in the Finnish village of Kalanti, but nobody knows how it got there. Modern scholarship believes that it was hidden there for safekeeping during the Reformation by a successor of the Bishop of Turku, who originally had commissioned it for his cathedral. But the villagers of Kalanti tell another story. Tradition holds that the marvelous altarpiece drifted in from the sea—a suitably miraculous origin for a splendidly miraculous work.