The Elevation of the Magdalene

The identity of the Master of Messkirch has been debated for nearly a century. The name for this anonymous painter derives from his most important commission, a series of altarpieces painted between 1535 and 1540, under the patronage of the Barons and Earls von Zimmern, for the collegiate church of St. Martin in Messkirch, Germany. Based on the style of his paintings, it appears that he trained in a workshop of an Ulm School painter, after which he likely worked as a journeyman. He must have been familiar with the art of Albrecht Dürer, which at the very least he would have known through prints, as some of his more idiosyncratic imagery appears to derive from the Nuremberg master’s work, yet his closest stylistic affinities are to that of Dürer’s students, particularly Hans Schaufelein, Hans von Kulmbach and Hans Baldung Grien. In fact, it has been suggested that the Master of Messkirch trained with the latter of these artists in Freiburg (see J. von Ahn et al., Der Meister von Messkirch: Katholische Pracht in der Reformationszeit, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2017). Indeed, the Minneapolis Elevation of the Magdalene, with its bright palette of pale blues and greens, sensitively rendered, luminous landscape details, along with the characteristically foreshortened heads of the angels, is particularly reminiscent of Baldung’s aesthetic. The Master of Messkirch later appears to have worked as a muralist and panel painter in Sigmaringen from around 1520-1540, during which time he executed a portrait of Eitel Friedrich III of Hohenzollern (after 1525, Pinacoteca Vaticana). The arguments in favor of linking a number of artists with this enigmatic master, including Peter Strüb the Younger, Joseph Weiss, Marx Weiss the Younger of Balingen, and Jerg Ziegler, have failed to find scholarly consensus. In 1964, Alfred Stange proposed that the present painting was an early work by the Master of Messkirch (R. Fritz, loc. cit.) and that it might have been painted for the 1530 Falkenstein Altar Retable in Donaueschingen.