(Augsburg circa 1475/1480–1537)
Christ taking leave of his Mother, with a donor family kneeling in the foreground,
oil on panel, 112.4 x 87.7 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Matthiesen Gallery, London, 1953 (as Martin Schaffner);
sale, Christie’s, London, 21 June 1968, lot 19 (as Martin Schaffner);
sale, Christie’s, London, 4 December 2012, lot 1 (as Augsburg School, 16th Century);
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Christof Metzger, Vienna, for confirming the attribution of the present painting to Jörg Breu I, after examination in the original. He compares it with Breu’s Aufhausen Madonna, an altarpiece (circa 1515) in the pilgrimage church of Maria Schnee in Aufhausen near Regensburg.

Jörg Breu, who was born in Augsburg, is said to have been apprenticed to Ulrich Apt the Elder in 1493. Breu’s earliest works appeared in Lower Austria. Around 1500, he painted his first retable, with scenes from the legend of Saint Bernard (now in Zwettl Monastery). A winged altarpiece for Aggsbach, today preserved in Herzogenburg Monastery (signed IORG PREW VON AV), is dated to 1501. Having returned to Augsburg in 1502, Breu soon established himself with preliminary designs for woodcuts. His oeuvre is extremely extensive, and besides panel paintings, preliminary designs for prints and stained-glass windows, and drawings, also includes book illustrations and wall decorations. Breu’s strength – through which he, together with Ulrich Apt and Narziss Renner, stood out from the Augsburg painting school – lies in an impulsive and naturalistic rendering of physiognomies that went far beyond the figural canon of both Late Gothic art and the Early Renaissance and which can thus be considered a highly individual artistic accomplishment.

Ernst Buchner wrote about Jörg Breu (see exhibition catalogue, Alte Pinakothek, Munich 1983, pp. 93/94): ‘Not only, but also due to his date of birth, Breu belongs to the “grand generation” of Upper German painters who, born in the 1470s, were to bring about the most flourishing heyday of German painting and graphic art. For the development of Jörg Breu’s early style, the following criteria was essential: his being rooted in the art of the 1490s of his native country of Bavaria (Munich, Landshut) and the archbishoprics in the Bavarian and Austrian borderland (Passau, Salzburg); the impression left by Austrian art practice and the Austrian landscape; the strong impact of Dürer’s graphic art; and, finally, the peculiar working conditions away from home, unburdened by tradition and urban narrowness […].’

The present refined panel is typical of the output of the innovative artists who, drawn by the wealth of the banking families such as the Fuggers, made up the school of Augsburg – at the turn of the 16th century one of the wealthiest cities in the Holy Roman Empire. The narrow-beamed haloes recur in many works by painters active in that city, for example in Hans Holbein the Elder’s Kaisheimer Kreuzaltar (Staatsgalerie, Augsburg) and in Jörg Breu’s Adoration of the Magi (Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum, Koblenz). The landscape, with rising terrain and varied focal points, is reminiscent of Breu’s Departure of the Apostles (dated 1514, Städtische Kunstsammlungen, Augsburg). 

The subject of Christ taking leave of his mother does not illustrate a biblical passage. It derives from the Pseudo-Bonaventura’s Meditations on the Life of Christ (circa 1300), a source popular among northern artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The painting relies predominantly on Dürer’s print of the same subject (Bartsch 92, Hollstein, Meder 204), published as part of the cycle The Life of the Virgin in 1511, which the artist of the present panel conflates with a figure from a Crucifixion from Dürer’s engraved Passion Cycle dated 1508 (Bartsch 24, Hollstein 32). These printed cycles were spread widely in Southern Germany; Christ Taking Leave of His Mother was an especially popular subject and was used by a number of painters in mostly small panels, though very few combine different models as effectively and skilfully as here. The re-working of a composition was common practice and often dictated by the patron.

Hans Holbein the Elder’s votive panel for Ulrich Schwarz (1448/49–1519) and his family (Städtische Kunstsammlungen, Augsburg), commissioned in 1508, provides information for dating the present panel and gives clues as to its possible donor. The green dresses seen in this panel are also found in the donor frieze of Holbein’s panel, dating it to the first decades of the sixteenth century. The distinctive physiognomy of the male donor on the left bears a striking resemblance to the figure beside Ulrich Schwarz in the Augsburg votive panel. It shows him with his three wives and 31 children, a number of whom can be identified by inscriptions on the panel. In fact, the donor of the present painting could be identified as either one of Ulrich Schwarz’s sons, both named Hans. The elder Hans Schwarz (born 1474) was married twice, and only the name of his first wife, Dorothea Egelhöffer, is recorded (see A. von Hämmerle, Die Hochzeitsbücher der Augsburger Bürgerstube und der Kaufleutestube bis zum Ende der Reichsfreiheit 1381–1806, Munich 1936, p. 256). The younger Hans (born 1492) was a well-known sculptor and medal maker (see R. Kastenholz, Ein Augsburger und Medailleur der Renaissance, Munich/Berlin 2006, pp. 19–22). Four other Augsburg citizens also called Hans Schwarz are recorded between 1510 and 1530, further complicating the identification of the donor.

The late Ludwig Meyer identified the castle in the background as Veste Oberhaus in Passau. Jörg Breu is known to have travelled through Bavaria, having remained in Passau for a short period of time (see O. Benesch, Der Zwettler Altar und die Anfänge Jörg Breus, in: E. Buchner, K. Feuchtmayr [eds.], Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Kunst, Augsburg 1928, p. 270). He would no doubt have seen Oberhaus, which was recorded in Schedel’s Weltchronik (1490), with its characteristic wall running down the hill. A connection between the Schwarz family of Augsburg and Veste Oberhaus has yet to be established.
Another significant work within Jörg Breu I’s oeuvre is The Holy Kinship (sale, Dorotheum, 17 April 2013, lot 557).

Technical analysis by Gianluca Poldi:

The painting shows underdrawing, recovered by IR reflectography, under all the figures and the landscape. Made with a carbon black based ink and a thin brush, this underdrawing outlines all the elements of the composition: figures and landscape. Substantially drawn ‘alla prima’, after the linear contour, the artist worked at the shadows and volumes, all hatched with different degrees of care: a larger and less dense hatching is used in the wider areas of shadows, while a thinner and compact hatching, with careful parallel lines, differently oriented and rarely crossed, is preferred for the smaller surfaces to be detailed with shadows, such as in the faces.

The palette of pigments, studied by means of Reflectance Spectroscopy, includes azurite in all the blues, verdigris, a coccid-based red lake, vermillion, iron oxides, a lead-based yellow and lead white.