For the second famous image of the Assumption in the German lands, we must go back to between 1505 to 1510 – still very much the era of the late Middle Ages. The Herrgottskirche (Church of Our Lord) in Creglingen is a chapel, built around 1400, that takes its name from the miraculous finding of a Host by a ploughman. A pilgrimage soon arose and this small church was decorated with a number of carved wooden altars that have miraculously survived until today. This, even though Creglingen became part of a principality whose ruler joined the Reformation later in the 16th century. But when the altar of the Assumption of Our Lady was created these developments still lay in the future.
The altar of the Assumption was called, at the time of its creation, the Corpus Christi altar in keeping with the dedication of the pilgrimage chapel. One of Tilman Reimenschneider’s greatest masterpieces, it’s also one of the earliest works of art to depict the Assumption of Our Lady – as opposed to the traditional Byzantine/medieval image of her Dormition. Yet the image of Our Lady in Creglingen is still that of the Middle Ages: calm, transfigured and sunk in contemplative prayer. The back of the altar is opened up, as if by the windows of a Gothic church, allowing light from the background to surround and illuminate the spiritual action taking place. Here we find no ecstatic, almost explosive rush towards the heavens (as in the Assumption of Egid Quirin Asam) but serene union with – even absorption into – God. One senses the lingering presence of the sprituality of the German mystics of the 14th and 15th centuries: Meister Eckhart, Tauler and Suso. And, of course, also of their contemporaries in other countries: think of Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing – just in England alone.
The creator of the altar, Tilman Riemenschneider, was the premier artist of the city of Wuerzburg located, like Creglingen, in the region of Franconia. At that time it was ruled by a prince-bishop, and Creglingen was under his spiritual (but not temporal) jurisdiction.Riemenschneider worked in both stone and wood. About this time, perhaps influenced by the first stirrings of the Rennaissance north of the Alps, Riemenschneider and other German artists started to abandon the medieval practice of painting religious statuary. Among this artist’s greatest works are his wooden altars. This kind of grand reredos, often featuring movable carved or painted wings, enjoyed a magnificent flowering in the Holy Roman Empire between 1450 and 1530.
The art of the great wood altars of Germany ended in the turmoil of the Reformation. In the tremendous religious struggles that followed, the precious contemplative heritage of the Middle Ages went underground. Yet that mystical spirituality did not go utterly extinct. It flamed up again and again in the Holy Roman Empire in the wake of the Catholic Reformation. It resurfaces, for example, in the Asam brothers’ mystical use of light at the church of St. John Nepomuk. And this spirituality lives once more in the poetry of Angelus Silesius (1624-1677) – such as in the following poem, which proclaims the bond between the Assumption and the Eucharist – the origin of Riemenschneider’s altar.
The Virginal Body that enclosed our Bread from Heaven.
Is truly no longer dead,
No ceder of Lebanon rots: otherwise it not be so fine,
For her to be, besides the Temple of God, His Ark of the Covenant.
Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Book III, 66 “On the Most Blessed Virgin” (1675)
See Kahsnitz, Rainer and Bunz, Achim, Die grossen Schnitzaltaere 238-253 (Hirmer Verlag, Munich, 2005)
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