The Crucifixion of Christ with Mary and John Upper Rhine/Switzerland (?), 1st quarter of the 16th cent. Stained glass 88.3 x 61 cm On loan from the Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung 14 The figures of Mary and John stand close to the crucified Christ, looking up at his bowed head. John is dressed in his characteristic green tunic and red mantle. He crosses his arms over his chest in a gesture of mourning, while Mary folds her hands in prayer. The heads of all three figures are backed by nimbi highlighted with silver stain. The halos of Mary and John also bear inscriptions: SALVE REGINA MISERICORDIE VITA and O SANCTUS JOHANES EWA(NGELISTE). The words are to be understood as invocations to the two saints. The inscription in Mary’s nimbus also corresponds to the beginning of the Marian antiphon, a hymn to the Virgin in the Catholic Church. The density of the composition is heightened by the framing of two columns at the edges of the image, the shafts of which are formed by twisted branches. At the top of the picture, the depiction is backed by a blue background with suggested cloud formations. At the foot of the cross are Adam’s skull and bones on a stony ground, suggesting Calvary as the ‘place of the skull’. The 1911 auction catalogue of the Lord Sudeley Collection attributed this panel, together with two other stained-glass paintings, one of St. James the Great and St. Anthony and the other of St. Maurice, to Ludwig Funk (1470–1532), a glass painter active in Zurich in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It has been assumed that the crucifixion was based on a design by the painter and illustrator Hans Leu the Younger (1490–1531). However, there are no clear references to these panes, and there are no comparable stainedglass works by the glass painter Ludwig Funk. For this reason, the attribution to Funk seems doubtful. Instead, one can point to the general stylistic similarity of the figures, some of which have rounded faces, to stained glass from the Upper Rhine and Switzerland. Cat. Munich 1911, 1. – Grimme 1960/61, 39, 44, fig. 45. – Cat. LudwigsLust 1993, 119, no. 92 (Rainer Kahsnitz). Carola Hagnau/Jule Wölk 76
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