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Lot Essay
Menzel's profound fascination for the splendours of German Baroque architecture blossomed during his visit to Tyrol in the summer of 1859. After this first trip, he revisited Innsbruck and Salzburg in the 1860s and 1870s, where he continued to paint views of the magnificent Baroque churches and their spectacular interiors. The church interior was among Menzel's favourite subjects ever since the 1830s, when he painted the convent church in Berlin, and started a series of drawings of Gothic and Romanesque churches. His inexhaustible imagination was fired by the stunning visual opulence and the grand pomp of Catholic celebrations, culminating in one of his most celebrated oils, the Corpus Christi procession in Hofgastein of 1880 now housed in Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.
In this gouache, Menzel depicts the interior of the Klosterkirche in Ettal, one of the jewels of the Benedictine complex founded in 1330 and redesigned at the beginning of the 18th Century by Enrico Zuccallis. In line with his utterly original artistic vision, Menzel did not focus on the splendours of Martin Knoller's celebrated altarpiece, depicting the Virgin while she ascends to the skies, welcomed by the triumphant Christ of the fresco of the vault (fig. 1); instead, he focuses on a rb view of the chapel seen from the stairs of the Eastern altar. The church is semi-empty, populated only by the surreal figure of the sacristan and a group of believers, timidly appearing at the door - the real piece of bravura of this stunning work. Menzel has masterly conveyed the atmosphere of rarefied quiet of the church ante celebrationem: the moment before the rite, the meticulous preparation of the event. As in his later masterpiece Sermon in the Parish Church in Innsbruck (1881, Pal, Heinrich Merz Collection, fig. 2), 'Menzel creates an impression rather than a replica of reality' (M.U. Riemann-Reyher, Adolph Menzel, 1815-1905. Between Romanticism and Impressionism, Berlin, 1996, p. 411), by painting the church before any religious ceremony creating a dramatic contrast between the informal atmosphere and the spectacular backcloth of the dramatic Baroque interior.
To our knowledge Inneres der Klosterkirche zu Ettal has not been publicly exhibited since its purchase from Goupil and Cie.
In this gouache, Menzel depicts the interior of the Klosterkirche in Ettal, one of the jewels of the Benedictine complex founded in 1330 and redesigned at the beginning of the 18th Century by Enrico Zuccallis. In line with his utterly original artistic vision, Menzel did not focus on the splendours of Martin Knoller's celebrated altarpiece, depicting the Virgin while she ascends to the skies, welcomed by the triumphant Christ of the fresco of the vault (fig. 1); instead, he focuses on a rb view of the chapel seen from the stairs of the Eastern altar. The church is semi-empty, populated only by the surreal figure of the sacristan and a group of believers, timidly appearing at the door - the real piece of bravura of this stunning work. Menzel has masterly conveyed the atmosphere of rarefied quiet of the church ante celebrationem: the moment before the rite, the meticulous preparation of the event. As in his later masterpiece Sermon in the Parish Church in Innsbruck (1881, Pal, Heinrich Merz Collection, fig. 2), 'Menzel creates an impression rather than a replica of reality' (M.U. Riemann-Reyher, Adolph Menzel, 1815-1905. Between Romanticism and Impressionism, Berlin, 1996, p. 411), by painting the church before any religious ceremony creating a dramatic contrast between the informal atmosphere and the spectacular backcloth of the dramatic Baroque interior.
To our knowledge Inneres der Klosterkirche zu Ettal has not been publicly exhibited since its purchase from Goupil and Cie.