Corine Schleif: The Making and Taking of Self-Portraits. Interfaces Carved between Riemenschneider...

CORINE SCHLEIF

Arizona State University

The Making and Taking of Self-Portraits:

Interfaces Carved between

Riemenschneider and His Audiences

W hen I recently visited the church at Kalch­reuth, a small town near Nuremberg, I was fortunate to find a parishioner who not only unlocked the door but was happy to show me

Tilman Riem enschneider, assumed self-portrait in Christ among the Doctors, from the predella of the Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece, C. I 505- 15 ! 0 1

limewood Hcrrgottski rche, Creglingeni photograph © 2003 Volker Sch ier

around. Proudly she explained that the eucharistic tabernacle had been sculpted by Adam Kraft and that, as if to prove it, he had carved his own face on the figure of Saint Erhard. Later she showed me the altarpiece with panels by the painter Michael Wolgemut and asserted that he had incorporated a self­portrait by carving his face into the half­moon that supports a wooden Madonna in the shrine of the altarpiece. The incident made me aware of how important it is to viewers-even in situations removed from the pressures of the art market-not only to attach works to the so-called great masters but also to find these masters still attached to their works. As an art historian I must admit that I share some of these desires to find the artist in the work, not because of any urgency to recognize a heroic genius but in order to locate within art "lived realities"­of the artist's time, of intervening genera­tions, and of course of my own.

The only documented portrait of Tilman Riemenschneider is that on his tomb slab, carved presumably by his son Jorg and now in the Mainfrankisches Museum in Wurz­burg (fig. I). Nonetheless, it is not this work but rather two faces within the altarpieces

sculpted by Tilman Riemenschneider himself that are more often considered to be his true portraits, not because of any written evidence attesting to their identity but because they are believed to be self-portraits. As self-portraits the images are viewed as true embodiments of the artist. In other words, audiences per­ceive the artist himself behind the face , quite literally holding that steady pose, peer­ing out of the image into the viewer's own reality, while at the same time assuming a role within the narrative. It is an unmediated presence, not one captured by the artist's son or rendered by some other portraitist. The artist is seen not only to show himself but to be himself, and thus for many the figure expresses the statement "I am the artist. "

To what degree Riemenschneider saw him­self in these faces and whether he intended for his audiences to recognize him in these visages can never be proved or disproved. It cannot be denied, however, that the fig­ures once stood out in their conspicuous sixteenth-century costumes, and what is more, the facial characteristics, the full head of long, straight hair, and the striking hat do resemble those in the portrait of the artist on his gravestone. Like many art historians before me, I have posited that Riemen­schneider did design the figures to stand in for himself and to signify his own presence. For me these examples provide yet another interesting site for exploring devotional

215

avenues for self-imagining and late medieval strategies for self-imaging.

Many artists of Riemenschneider's time incorporated their own images into sacred narratives or into the margins of their com­missions for churches. They followed vari­ous medieval traditions, taking advantage of an unspoken artist's privilege. It appears that Riemenschneider exploited and devel­oped some of these customs, including that of dual identification. Through one likeness in the predella of the Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece carved for the Herrgotts­kirche in Creglingen in I 5o 5-I 5 I o he shows himself to be like one of the doctors dis­puting with the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple (figs. 2, 3). The main spectacle of the shrine of the retable is the Virgin ascending into heaven surrounded by the Apostles, who witness her rising from their midst. The tracery of the superstructure above the shrine contains an image of the Virgin kneel­ing as she is crowned by an angel, flanked by Christ and God the Father. Four scenes from the life of the Virgin carved in low relief occupy the interiors of the shutters on the shrine. In the predella, the Adoration of the Magi, on the left, provides the pendant representation to the Christ and the Doctors, on the right. These two scenes flank the central niche, now empty, that was carved to house a monstrance containing the mirac­ulous host that provided the raison d' etre for the altar and the church. It was on this spot that a peasant plowing his field in I 38 5 pur­portedly discovered a eucharistic host. More than one hundred years later the Riemen­schneider workshop was commissioned to sculpt the altarpiece. The face believed to be Riemenschneider's own, that of the doctor on the far right, takes its place in an incon­spicuous location in this rather dark niche of the predella. Originally, its main source of illumination was the warm flickering light of the candles placed directly in front of it on the altar mensa.

Through another likeness, in the stone relief Lamentation in the Pfarrkirche in Maid­bronn, sculpted in c. ISI9/I523, Riemen­schneider represents himself and Nicodemus to be alike (figs. 4, 5 ). 1 The latter example follows a long tradition of dual referencing through which artists, particularly sculptors, linked themselves to the biblical person

216 SCHLEIF

2 . Tilman Riemenschneider, Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece, c. rsos - rsro, limewood Herrgottskirche, Creglingen; photograph Bildarchi v Foto Marburg

r. Attributed to Jorg Riemenschneider, Tombstone of Tilman Riemenschneider, sandstone Mainfriinkisches Museum, Wiirzburg

SCHLEIF 217

Nicodemus, who was believed to have carved the first crucifix-from life, or more cor­rectly, from death-after assisting in remov­ing Christ 's body from the cross and preparing it for buriaP The practice is par­allel to that of painters' often identifying with Saint Luke, who was believed to have rendered the first and only true-to-life por­trait of the Virgin and Child, as they posed for him, enabling him to capture their like­ness .3 Art historians long neglected the iconography that connected Nicodemus with sculptors because it had failed to produce a tidy, stable structure matching discrete visual signifier and signified, which would have made a summary lexicographical definition possible-as had been the case for images of painters in the guise of Saint Luke in the act of painting or drawing the Virgin and Child. Like other artists, Riemenschneider must have imagined himself as the pious Nicode­mus and taken the opportunity to picture himself in one of his commissions, not fash­ioning an image of the crucified Christ but intimately involved in the Passion of Christ, bringing myrrh and aloes to anoint his body for burial. In the Maidbronn relief Riemen­schneider positioned himself more centrally than in Creglingen. As Joseph of Arimathea and the Virgin support Christ's lifeless body, Nicodemus, clutching his jar of ointment, stands immediately behind the three fig­ures, his head below the empty cross, at the centermost point of the relief.

Reestablishing an identificational link between the artist and one of the doctors with whom the twelve-year-old Christ con­versed in Jerusalem proves more difficult than recognizing the association sought between the sculptor and Nicodemus. It is tempting to speculate that medieval exegetes may have postulated that Nicodemus was indeed present among the doctors in the temple when Christ lingered there at the age of twelve, but no such texts can be found. 4

According to the account in Luke 2A2-SO, Joseph and Mary found their missing son "in the temple, sitting among the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them ques­tions ." I know of no parallel example in which an artist chose the figure of one of the doctors for his own identificational self­portrait. With the integration of this self­image Riemenschneider may have wished to

218 SCHLEIF

express the dialogical nature of his involve­ment in the message of the altarpiece. Cer­tainly he did not perceive his function as that of a mere conduit, silently and invisibly translating biblical narratives into carved scenes; rather, like the doctors in the gospel account, he teaches and answers questions. By indulging in this devotional fantasy and depicting it for his viewers, Riemenschnei­der presents his fundamental authority and authorship. He legitimates himself in his position as storyteller.

Riemenschneider's visual strategies are both subtle and complex. A comparison with those of other self-portraitists of his day proves helpful in exploring them. Although studies on self-portraits have often attempted

3· Tilman Riemenschneider, Christ and the Doctors. from the predella of the A ssumption of the Virgin altarpiece, r sos-rs ro, limewood Hcrrgottski rche, Creglingcn; photogmph Gundcrmann

4· Tilman Riemenschneider, Lamentation, c. 1519/ 1523, sandstone Pfa rrkirche, Maidbronn; photograph BiJdarchiv Foto Marburg

to establish formal categories and develop­mental progression, a careful look will demonstrate that artists' methods were often structurally defiant and historically disrup­tive.s Indeed artists' ways of working them­selves into narrative or non-narrative spaces were frequently more innovative and varied than the manner in which they handled the iconographic themes of their works. The challenges facing artists were far more com­plex than that of merely situating oneself

within the evolution of self-portraiture. In the epitaph commissioned by the Schreyer and Landauer families in 1490 for the exte­rior of the Sebalduskirche in Nuremberg, Adam Kraft placed himself in dialogue with one of the donors, Matthias Landauer (figs. 6, 7) . The two figures manifest dual identities with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, respectively, as they stand before the empty cross carrying the tools used to remove Christ's body, as well as the crown

SC HLEIF 219

of thorns and the now-broken nails. Thus Riemenschneider's self-images in the Cre­glingen and Maidbronn altarpieces parallel Kraft's identificational self-representation.6 In two altarpieces Albrecht Durer shows himself not as a participant but as a witness to sacred events and therefore does not mingle his identity with that of a figure from salvation history. In the Martyrdom of the

220 SC H LE IF

Ten Thousand, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, painted for Elector Friedrich the Wise in 1508, he presents him­self in dialogue with Conrad Celtis, isolated in the center of the landscape, with carnage occurring all around the two figures. In the Feast of the Rose Garlands, now in the Narodni Galerie in Prague, commissioned in 1505 by the German merchants in Venice for their church of S. Bartolomeo, Durer places himself in the midst of a throng of vener­ators (figs. 8, 9) . He engages in a dialogue with the viewer both by staring out of the picture and by holding a sign bearing a message about himself. Durer's direct address thus provides a more overt form of self­thematization than does Riemenschneider's.

Sculptors commissioned to produce works that were not primarily narrative contrived more literal ways of incorporating them­selves in their monuments, many of which expand on the traditions of the medieval self-portraits of master builders.? Adam Kraft and two members of his workshop chiseled nearly life-size figures of themselves kneel­ing under the weight of the eucharistic taber­nacle that they completed in the Nuremberg church of St. Lorenz in 1496 . Looking out toward visitors that approach them and lean­ing into the space of the viewer, they quite daringly confront each onlooker one on one (fig. 10).8 In the Sebalduskirche in Nuremberg

5· Tilman Ri emenschne Self-portrait as Nicodem from Lamentation, c. r 5 1523 Pfarrkirchc, Maidbronn; photc Bi ldarchiv Foto Marburg

6. Adam Kraft , Representations of Adar Kraft and Matthias Lane as N icodemus and josep Arimathea in the Schre) Landauer Epitaph, 1490· 1492, sandstone Seba lduskirchc, N uremberg; photograph Bild- und Tonarch Stadtctrchiv Ni.i rnbcrg

7. Adam Kraft , Schreyer Landauer Epitaph, 1490-1492, sandstone Scba lduskirchc, N uremberg; photograph Bild- und Tonarch Stadtarchiv Nlirnberg

8. Albrecht Durer, Feas t of the Rose Garlan ds, oil on panel, rsos-r so6 N3rodni Gale ri c, Prague

9. Albrecht Durer, Self­portrait in the Feast of the Rose Garlands, oil on panel, rsos- rso6 N:irodnf Gal erie, Prague

Peter Vischer included a small, less con­spicuous full-figure portrait of himself in the bronze monument encasing the shrine of the titular saint, under which he inscribed the message "begun by me Peter Vischer IS08." The size of the image matches that of the corresponding figure of Saint Sebald on the other end of the monument.9 In Vienna's Saint Stephen's Cathedral Anton Pilgram fashioned provocative whimsical likenesses of himself bending down from under the organ pedestal high above the nave (fig. I I) and opening a shutter to peep out of a small window under the pulpit (figs. I2, I3). Sev­eral earlier self-images sculpted in Swabia in the I48os have been attributed to Pil­gram and his shop: the three figures on the eucharistic tabernacle in the Kilianskirche in Heilbronn and single figures from Ohrin­gen, today in the Berlin Skulpturensamm­lung, in the Lorenzkapelle in Rottweil, and in the parish church in Heutingsheim. All show men in work attire who, like the figures of the Kraft workshop in the church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, are resting on one knee and originally supported a larger structure on their backs. 1D A similar figure in the collegiate church of St. Georg in

Tiibingen suggests that the artist is steady­ing the column that supports the pulpit above him. All peer out from beneath or within the confines of their own monu­ments. It appears as if they have just com­pleted their work but have not yet removed their work clothes or vacated the workplace, thus showing themselves as the eternally laboring inhabitants of the respective mon­uments. From what was often a marginal recess, each sculptor leans out or looks out to engage the viewer and join each in his or her psychological space.

Indeed, art historians as far back as Gior­gio Vasari have perceived the face peering out from within the monument or the narrative scene as the hallmark of the self-portrait. The form of the donor's "self-representation" had long been codified as that of a venerator, usually more or less in profile, kneeling on both knees. By contrast, for centuries artists had been seizing opportunities to work themselves into the interstices of their com­missions in unique and creative ways. At times they appear to have succeeded in upstaging the donors, who may or may not have assumed an embodied presence in the work. Looking out from the monument,

SCHLEIF 22!

artists could effect direct and intimate con­tact with the viewer. In a well-known essay Meyer Schapiro likened the profile view to the grammatical third-person pronoun in nar­rative, and the full-frontal face to the first per­son I , with its implicit complementary you inferred on the viewer.ll Artists often took advantage of this unabashed form of direct address.

In the late Middle Ages the mute stare had the power, as it does now, to captivate viewers. Like the demanding stare of the cat in front of the refrigerator door, the know­ing glance of the lover from across a crowded room, or the silent gaze of the stroke victim lying in a hospital bed, the steadfast look of the artist appeals to the empathic viewer to provide both sides of the dialogue. It was not a lack of language or some impairment but rather the obstacle of spatial distance and, even more, the impending temporal distance that required of the artist this mute speech

222 SCHLEIF

of the eyes and not the mouth. Through the self-portrait the artist could go down through time with the work and continue to com­municate with attentive viewers long after death had removed him from the world of the living.

Riemenschneider appears to manipulate contemporary conventions of integrated self­portraiture. His self-images do not peer out of the narrative but assume an ambiguous three-quarter view. In the Creglingen altar­piece he does not direct his attentions to the viewer but rather avoids eye contact, appear­ing to be momentarily detached from both worlds and caught up in yet a third, his own world, which seems to exist somewhere between the space defined by the narrative scenes of the altarpiece and the "real" world of the beholders. Only the doctor who is Riemenschneider does not gesture. He is in the middle of the verbal exchanges but appears momentarily withdrawn. Similar

ro. Adam Kraft and workshop, Member of Adam Kraft 's workshop under the eucharistic tabernacle, sandstone, I 49 3- I 496 Lorenzkirche, Nuremberg; photograph Bild- und Tonarchi v, Stadtarchiv NUrnbcrg

I r. Anton Pilgram, Self­portrait under the organ pedestal, sandstone, r 5 r 3 Saint Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna; photograph Bildarchiv Foto Marburg

12. Anton Pilgram, Pulpit, 3andstone, 1514- 1515 )aint Stephen's C.nhcd ral, Vienna; Jhotograph Bildarchi v Foto Marburg

13. Anton Pilgram, Self­Jortrait on the pedestal of the mlpit, sandstone, 1514- 1515 ;aint Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna; 1howgraph Bildarchiv Foco Mctrburg

observations can be made with respect to the figure of Riemenschneider as Nicodemus in the Maidbronn altarpiece. Although he is near the center of pathos, unlike the figures around him, he does not touch another per­son consolingly nor direct his attention toward the dead body of Christ. Unlike most of the figures on the periphery of the action, who through facial expressions and gestures show their distress, he exhibits no grief, but silently clutches his jar, his lips drawn tightly together. The man behind the face would appear to meditate on the meaning of the death of Christ or perhaps on his own role in presenting it . In both the Creglingen and the Maidbronn altarpieces, Riemenschneider calls attention to his figure by extricating himself from the other characters in the nar­rative and by isolating himself both com­positionally and emotionally. At the same time, he removes himself from the viewer by averting his glance even though inti-

mate details of skin and hair, as well as his sixteenth-century attire, would have brought him close. Through these very devices and by positioning one side of his smooth, ide­alized face in such a way that it easily catches full light to create a profile, he arouses the desire of the viewer. Thus it is the attention of the spectator that produces an aura or distance, no matter how familiar or per­sonal the portrait may be. The film theorist Kaja Silverman employs psychoanalytic insights in her discussions of various notions of the productive perception of the Other in terms of idealization. Her argumentation both expands and critiques notions of "aura" or distance introduced by Walter Benjamin and ideas about the "gaze" articulated by Jacques Lacan.12 Using these insights, we might observe that Riemenschneider had to conceive of himself from the outside look­ing ini in other words, he had to perceive himself as Other in order to fashion an image

S C HLEIF 223

of himself that could be grasped-by others. His image makes use of commonly shared visual vocabulary, including the specifics of iconography and visual strategies dis­cussed above. Viewers could have easily apprehended this particular image as an unreachable ideal: a man who is piously absorbed in devotion and/or virtuously engaged in a respectable profession and/or a self-conscious, responsible civic leader. Unlike the artists discussed above, Riemen­schneider does not share the viewer's psy­chological space and lock the viewer in dialogue; rather, through the aura of space, light, and emotional distance he invites his audiences to contemplate his face, his iden­tity, his role, his character, his fate. In a place and moment in which the audience expects the active, engaging subject of the artist as ever-living agent, the audience is presented with a reified subject-an object.

It is interesting to note that not all sub­sequent audiences have accepted Riemen­schneider's presentation of himself as object. Photographers have not infrequently placed the intrusive eye of the camera directly in front of his face and adjusted their light sources in order to engage the seemingly unwilling Riemenschneider in conversation. For example, the small guidebook published by the Katholische Kirchenstiftung in Maid­bronn contains a photograph taken from the far right that provides viewers with a full-frontal view of Riemenschneider's face, with the eye of the camera looking past Saint John's face, seen in profile, and over the Vir­gin's head (fig. 14). 13 Another example is from the title page of the children's book Meister Til a us der Franziskanergasse in Wiirzburg, by Marianne Erben, which reproduces a photograph of Riemenschneider's counte­nance in the Maidbronn Lamentation viewed from the lower right side with the other figures cropped out of the picture (fig. rs) . In the nineteenth century, before photographs were used to illustrate books, Carl Becker employed as a frontispiece for his mono­graph a portrait based on a frontal view of the Riemenschneider image from Maidbronn, here conceived as a bust in an engraving of a medallion (fig. r6) .14 Similarly, for the portrait used as the title piece for an article written by Wilhelm Koch the photographer beamed a light from the left in order to illu-

224 SCHLEIF

minate Riemenschneider's face from the Creglingen altarpiece frontally (fig. I7 ).1 5

Usually, however, through Riemenschnei­der's presentation of himself he coaxes the viewer into playing along as he views him­self as Other, himself as he would have others view him, and himself as others would want to view themselves. These converse ways of viewing fit well with additional, related dichotomies of the two altarpieces. Both works juxtapose material realities of their signifieds-characters engaged in a narrative event- with the material realities of their signifiers-truthful unpolychromed surfaces. 16 Both bring out the polarities between the dramatic exteriorities of the stories they tell from sacred history against their enduring and presentational interiori­ties for late medieval Christians in a church setting. Both vacillate between the histori­cal narratives of the body of Christ and their metahistorical realities in the Eucharist. This is particularly apparent in Creglingen, in which the miraculous host, discovered intact by the fourteenth-century peasant plowing his field, was conserved in a monstrance and displayed against Riemenschneider's cur­tain of honor carved from wood and sup­ported by angels in the middle of the predella, taking its place along with the flanking scenes carved from salvation history (see fig. 2). Here Christ is displayed as the premier reified object of Christianity amid figures of vital living subjects from holy history.

As some of the foregoing has perhaps made apparent, it is not easy to separate Riemen­schneider's self-image from Riemenschnei­der himself. As a result, it is difficult to remain in the past tense when writing about Riemenschneider's self-images. Indeed, when viewing a self-portrait it is even easier to con­fuse the material artifact with the living human being than with a portrait created by an artist who does not inhabit the body that is (re)presented. In his book Portraiture Richard Brilliant refers to the portrait as the "seemingly invisible sign." He· writes that "portraits contain images that with bewil­dering success pretend not to be signs or tokens invented by artists, but rather aim to represent the manner in which their subjects would appear to the viewer in life." 17 We might then observe that the self-portrait appears even more transparent than the

14. Tilman Riemenschneide Nicodemus/Riemenschnei~ and Saint John, detail from Lamentation, c. r sr9/ IS2J, sandstone Pfarrkirchc, Ma idbronn; pho tograp by josef Gundermann © 1981, from Max H. von Frceden, Tilman Riemenschneider. Beweinung in Maidbronn jMa idbronn, 198 1), fi~

SCHLEIF 225

Ein Riemenschneider-Buch fUr jungt Lnu von Marianne Erben

echler

portrait. The following examples demon­strate how, through the powerful gaze of the beholder, a wide range of meanings and mes­sages were and are projected onto Riemen­schneider's assumed self-portraits.

Even before the Creglingen altarpiece was considered to be by Riemenschneider, a self­portrait was recognized in it. Romantic local legends made an anonymous lonely shepherd responsible for the monument: since he lacked the resources to donate an altar, he decided to carve a retable in his spare time. This remarkable "natural talent" was believed to have left an image of himself holding a woodcarver's knife and seated in the right foreground of Christ and the Doc­tors; 18 the hand and alleged instrument are now missing (see fig. 3). The standing doc­tor peering out of the narrative in the same scene, who wears a typically Franconian hat and the Schau be (overcoat) common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, came to be viewed as the self-portrait of Tilman Riemenschneider soon after r822, when his tombstone was discovered in Wiirzburg (see fig. r). 19 In Maidbronn the situation was the same. The first monograph on Riemen­schneider, written by Carl Becker in r849, makes similar claims for the figure of Nicodemus in the Lamentation. Becker observes that the physiognomy bears the same characteristics as the beardless face on Riemenschneider's gravestone and that he stands out among the other biblical figures

226 S C HLEIF

since he wears the fashions of the artist's day.20

Responses to Riemenschneider's self­portraits often reveal that he was seen as the victim for a given cause. The reasons may be twofold: Viewers were aware of the events in his life-that as a magistrate of Wiirzburg he took sides against the prince-bishop and his

34 ~OJ1 stHmnn ~itmenfcf,neibrr al(! 'Jifd}ermdfter

wuru.\)g . .Zd!olirrr, li r~lln(ltn

•tn.nf .. .,INr•2dlfl:lllb•i• ••• btm « rrtUill!lfr 9th u \ltm ~'" 1~1.}10, •If• ••I ltr ,:Jrh lrhltr 'litltfril oil 1}\ldltro

adfl:tt,

Xilman ffiiemenf4Jneiber a~ ijlf4Jermeifter 'llon. tlOUbehn. _!oct), stotttruf)e

,-rtenn mir ~ute einli ber uiden, in inuncr BtOlJerer 3al)1 crfd)einenben ~afd· :(.V~llbtrtl)(rft aur .Danb ne~men, baS iiber ben grof;en 'll3iir4burgl'r Cl3ilbfc.f} ~ifm1111 c.'Y?i#mPnfrfmt ih"r Hntt>J:rirfltl":f_ fo trt.iTP.n mi r hPi (\'\urrhfi ,i\t h.,,. P .. h .. n • ..:f ... t A. .....

r s. Tilman Riemenschneider, frontal view of Nicodemus/ Riemenschneider from Lamentation, Maidbronn Illustration from titl e page of Marianne Erben, Meister Til a us der Franziskanergasse in Wiirzburg, 6th cd. IW<irzburg, 1996 )

r6. Charles Regnier, Tilman Riemenschneider, engraving Based on drawi ng by Franz Leinecker from title page of Ca rl Becker, Leben und Werk e des Hildhau ers Til mann Riemensch1Jeider, eines fast unbekannt.en aber vorl refflichen Kiinstlers amEnde de."> 15. und am Anfang des 16. /ahrlwnderts !Leipzig, 1849 )

ry. Tilman Riemenschneider from Assum ption of the Virgin altarpiece, Creglingen Frontispiece from Wilhe lm Koch, "Riemenschneider a ls Fischermeister," Meine Heimat 2

II94Ii

forces , sympathizing with the peasants in I 52 5, and as a result was arrested, impris­oned, fined, and tortured. 21 Another reason, however, may be that he presents himself more as object for contemplation than as active subject. The causes that viewers con­nect with Riemenschneider indeed reflect and promote their agenda particular to given historical situations and ideological leanings.

The most popular novel written about Riemenschneider is Dill Riem enschneider: Der Roman seines Lebens (Dill Riemen­schneider: a novel about his life), by Leo Weismantel, published first in I936, with numerous subsequent editions. The story contains many sculpted figures that Riemen­schneider has endowed with dual identities. One is the Eve for the south portal of the Wurzburg Marienkapelle, which he modeled after his beloved Magd Lene. Early in this tragic narrative Riemenschneider conceptu­alizes a pieta that he has been commissioned to carve, and in the process he imagines himself in the place of Nicodemus, sup­porting the dead body of Christ. Later in the story members of the workshop gather in front of the unfinished Maidbronn Lamen­tation and notice to their surprise that the image of Nicodemus is really their master. It is observed that Nicodemus was a doubter but that he also sought the truth. Riemen­schneider, who is then left alone with the work, identifies with Nicodemus, who still wishes to soothe Christ's wounds with his salve and save the holy body from decay. Dramatically, he places his hands on Christ's mutilated hands and begins to feel his own hands burn as if pierced by nails. Much later, after his own hands have been crippled by the blows of the torturers, he returns to finish his work and discovers that he is unable to hold his tools. 22

One of the most extreme interpreta­tions is Max Wegner's I937 Tilman Riemen­schneider: Der Deutsche, Kiinstler und Rebell (Tilman Riemenschneider: The Ger­man, artist, and rebel) . After claiming for many pages that Riemenschneider stood for what was specifically German and against anything foreign-for northern creativity and against the Italianate, for a conception of art rooted in the German Volk (people) and not based on confessionalism-Wegner

comments that in the Lamentation in Maid­bronn Riemenschneider has "placed him­self in front of the cross that looms up above him and tries to overpower him" ( ... und ihn beherrschen will). 23 Wegner's Riemen­schneider stands out as someone who im­plicitly resists Christianity, a force that challenges the Nordic values embodied in his sculptures. As the book title suggests, Weg­ner perceives Riemenschneider's likeness in Maidbronn as that of an artist rebelling against the Church.

In his book Tilman Riemenschneider im deutschen Bauernkrieg (Tilman Riemen­schneider in the German Peasants' War), published in I 9 3 7, Karl Heinrich Stein sees in the Maidbronn figure a martyr for his convictions. Stein draws a parallel between the life of Riemenschneider and that of Nicodemus as told in the Gospel of John (I9:39), according to which Nicodemus first came secretly to Christ by cover of dark­ness for fear that if his interest were known it could have negative consequences for him. Stein writes that Riemenschneider, like Nicodemus at the burial of Christ, was no longer ambivalent but willing to come out in the open and stand up for the peasants. Riemenschneider's face is "calm, serious and resolute." The hand that appears above the Virgin's head is full of veins, but unlike that of the noble and youthful Saint John, it is not at all gentle or slender but rather "strong and almost rough, as is fitting for someone who worked with a chisel and a hammer."24

Stein projects onto the self-portrait a robust and mature masculinity, strength of pur­pose, and a worker's dedication to manual labor. Stein's novel has been read as "a hidden appeal to resist" the pressures of the Nazi regime, in which case he may have here pro­vided his readers with manifest ways in which they could identify with the conscience­driven Riemenschneider.25 Neither Wegner's nor Stein's work is, strictly speaking, histor­ical fiction, yet both indulge in long passages detailing Riemenschneider's torture at the hands of the bishop's henchmen.

In I938 Paul Johannes Arnold published a novel on Riemenschneider's life: Tilman Riemenschneider: Der Lebensroman eines grof3en deutschen Meisters (Tilman Riemen­schneider: Novel of the life of a great Ger­man master) . He merely mentions the self-

SC H LEIF 227

portraits in Creglingen and Maidbronn but contends that all of the twelve Apostles sur­rounding the Virgin as she is assumed into heaven in the Creglingen altarpiece embody their maker's personal characteristics. For example, Arnold believes that one can read the future Kampf (struggle) and Sieg (tri­umph) of some of the Apostles in their faces, alluding to their martyrdom and to Riemen­schneider's later ordeals in Wurzburg. 26 Thus, Arnold semanticizes these faces with notions of Kampf and Sieg and narratizes them as a foreshadowing device or flash forward in Riemenschneider's biography. It cannot be ignored that at the time these terms belonged to the most inflammatory Nazi literature: by 1938 Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf had gone into over 330 printings .

A short mention of the self-portraits in a 1941 article in a regional historical journal provides yet another approach to them. Wil­helm Koch saw in the self-images "a fine and noble human being who could transcend the chaos around him and set his sights on the wider world beyond-a quiet, simple, intro­spective and gifted creator and master."27

Such analyses, common in historical and art historical literature, helped to raise the man behind the face to the level of the tran­scendent genius. Rhetoric such as this could function to veil the ideological appropriations of Riemenschneider, giving credence to notions that Riemenschneider was not a man of his own time and that the values he was thought to embody were indeed universal.

It is, however, worth noting that not one of Riemenschneider's contemporaries who likewise left their sculpted countenances behind for posterity was appropriated so often and so frequently with nationalist or nationalistic overtones during the years lead­ing up to World War II. Neither the small hidden bronze of Peter Vischer, the clever images of Anton Pilgram, nor the imposing figures of Adam Kraft and his twd assistants were so able to capture the sentiments of on­lookers and spur them on to weave elaborate narratives. Undoubtedly this conscription was due to a combination of the dramatic historical events that allowed writers to claim Riemenschneider as a victim, as well as the characteristics of his self-images.

Art historians too read messages into Riemenschneider's faces. In his monograph

228 SCHLE IF

published in 1941 Kurt Gerstenberg found that Riemenschneider showed himself to be "introspective, unpretentious, and full of humility" in the Creglingen self-portrait.28 Although Gerstenberg dispensed with the pathos and drama of the popular authors, he too made a hero of the man behind the face. In an earlier book Gerstenberg had written much that extolled the virtues of late Gothic art and architecture. By coining the term deutsche Sondergotik he had verbally fashioned the style of this period and claimed it as particularly German. For Gerstenberg the German late Gothic was more expressive and more emotionally motivated than earlier and later styles associated with France and Italy, which he referred to as "affected. "29 With the aid of Riemenschneider's self­portrait he could put a sympathetic face on the abstract qualities he believed he had been able to distinguish as the German Sondergotik.

The appropriations continued in the post­war years, although purposes varied greatly. For many authors Riemenschneider's self­portraits were not only heroic and humble but tragic. For Max von Freeden the face in the Maidbronn Lamentation bore the features of "suffering and devotion. "30 For G. Harro Schaeff-Scheefen the Creglingen figure exuded "not light-hearted and happy laughter but unending sadness, want, and sorrow," all because of Riemenschneider's choice to take on the social problems fes­tering at the time.31 Similar in tone is a novel published in 1964 by Wilhelm Pultz. Here Riemenschneider himself tells that he has included his own likeness among the mourners in Maidbronn and that it became "a very painful image of a man suf­fering great torment and for whom life is a burden."32

Less morose readings began to appear in the 1970s. In the self-portraits in Creglingen and Maidbronn, Hanswernfried Muth recog­nizes identificationallinks with individuals who "carried responsibility for the commu­nity." He perceives Riemenschneider's pres­ence in Christ and the Doctors as stemming from the artist's self-awareness of his role on the Wurzburg City Council. Like Nicodemus in Jerusalem, Riemenschneider was a city councilman who struggled with his faith. Muth further maintains that the lips of the

figure remain closed because Riemenschnei­der spoke through his art .33

Recent religious writings have likewise made use of the self-portraits. In 1981 the bishop of Wurzburg, Paul-Werner Scheele, writing together with Toni Schneiders, published Tilman Riemenschneider Zeuge der Seligkeiten (Tilman Riemenschneider witness of salvation), a booklet on the two figures that bear Riemenschneider's features. More directly than any previous authors, they assert that through these images Tilman Riemenschneider is "still with us, alive and working," and speaks to viewers directly, one on one. Both self-images were thought to show evidence of Riemenschneider's hard­ship, pain, and struggle: his trials and tribu­lations, his experience with the darker side of human existence, and his refusal to obey made him a qualified witness.34

In 1990 a short story colored by Lutheran theology and Church history appeared. Ursula Koch's Zerbrochene Hdnde (Broken hands) makes use of themes and motifs from Weismantel's biographical novel, which, as stated above, went through numerous print­ings. Weismantel paints a graphic picture of the tragic and traumatic events that fol­lowed Riemenschneider's torture, events that Weismantel stages at the site of the Maidbronn Lamentation. Returning to his workshop and left alone with the nearly completed stone sculpture, Riemenschnei­der desperately grasps Christ's hands, pierced by the nails, and compares them to his own hands, broken in punishment for his prin­cipled stand on behalf of the peasants. Koch describes Riemenschneider 's carved self­representations as "helpless and tormented. " She compares him to Luther and sees him as a proponent of evangelical as well as politi­cal and economic goals .35

Thus, the faces have been perceived to champion many causes, as various impulses were seen to move the man behind the faces . The cases explored above make it clear that the self-portraits were not appropriated in isolation but together with other aspects of his oeuvre, as well as with events from his political life.

All types of literature on Riemenschneider appropriate the self-portraits as pictorial centerpieces for a given text. In order to

employ them authors and editors had to first extract and separate the faces from their original contexts. These were the very con­texts that Riemenschneider fashioned-if indeed Riemenschneider did intend them as self-images-in order to establish his own identity and meaning(s) in the sixteenth century. Removing them rendered them autonomous (self-)portraits that could be more readily imbued with notions of the autonomous artist-genius of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The various con­temporary styles and m edia into which they were translated served to integrate them in current discourses and to harness them for contemporary agenda. Already in r849, Carl Becker illustrated his monograph with a picture of Riemenschneider's self-image (see fig. r6). As discussed above, Riemen­schneider's face was drawn from the Maid­bronn altarpiece, manipulated to achieve frontality, and rendered as an engraving of a medallion. He thus became classicized and valorized with a monographic textual treatment and an official-looking image not unlike those that Vasari had used in the second edition of his Lives, the book that inaugurated the history of art as the history of artists in the mid-sixteenth century.

Expressive ink drawings have also been produced in the style of their time. What appears to be a rough and forthright con­temporary woodcut illustration adorns the wooden cover of Arnold's 1938 book (fig. r8). An image from a narrative relief hewn in stone in the sixteenth century is transformed into an autonomous woodcut portrait super­imposed on a wooden panel of the 1930s. Thus, the face that had become Riemen­schneider was conflated with the material that was considered to be Riemenschneider, and his visage was rendered with a stylistic vocabulary connecting it to a contemporary populist medium, woodcut prints of the 1930s. These hard, bold lines gave force to Arnold's characterization of Riemenschnei­der as a champion of contemporary German nationalism.

In a fictional story published by Anton Dorfler in r 9 6 s Riemenschneider's face from the Maidbronn altarpiece takes the shape of a hasty 1960s pen-and-ink sketch (fig. 19). Facing readers before they open the

SCHLEIF 229

book, Riemenschneider thus becomes a man of the author's day and not of his own.36

Most often, however, a black-and-white photographic portrait illustrates the article or book. An example that can stand for many is the image from the Creglingen altarpiece that Wilhelm Koch used as a frontispiece to his article mentioned above (see fig . 17). As with the other media, the translation into the photographic medium has on the one hand effected a further alienation: it produces a print of a sculpted image of a once living person. On the other hand, the photographic medium functions as an efficient equalizer. All of the following appear remarkably the same: the black-and-white still photograph of a person, the black-and-white still photo­graph of a veristically rendered polychromed

2 3 0 SC HLEIF

Verlag Friedl Brehm· Feldafiug/Obb.

sculpture of a person, and the black-and­white still photograph of a veristically ren­dered monochrome stone or wooden figure of a person-with or without coloration on the pupils, lips, and cheeks. The picture of a picture looks like the picture of a person. Thus, this medium helps to render the sign of the self-portrait all the more transparent.

On the cover of the children's book Meis­ter Til aus der Franziskanergasse (Master Til from Franziskaner Street), by Marianne Erben, the black-and-white photograph of Riemenschneider's face from the Creglingen altarpiece appears to be pasted over a colored photograph of a model of the old city of Wiirzburg (fig. 20).3 7 The image of Riemen­schneider might well have been clipped out of a black-and-white newsreel or documen-

r 8. Tilman Riemenschneider, book cover From Paul Joh ;.mncs Arnold, Ti lman Riemensch1wicler. Der Lebensroman eines grossen deutschen Meisters [Berlin , 19 ) 8); photogra ph by Volker Schier

19 . Hans Priihofer, Tilman Riemenschneider, ink drawing Fron tispiece from Anton DOrfl cr, Meister Ti/[ Fclda fing, 196;)

20. I pho1 Riel Ass' alta moe Fron a us c Wiir

10. Book cover with photograph of Tilman Riemenschneider from the Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece, Creglingen, and model of Wiirzburg From Marian ne Erben, Meis ter Til aus der Franziskanergasse in \Vurzburg. 6th cd. IWurzburg, 1 yy 6)

Marianne Erben

MEISTER TIL aus der Franziskanergasse

tary film and thus provides the "real life" contrast to the toylike quality of the tiny wooden buildings and paper trees.

In 1981 Joachim Tettenborn's play about Riemenschneider was performed at the Marienberg fortress in Wiirzburg. The script calls for a photographic image of Riemen­schneider's self-portrait to be projected on a screen. If the contrast were not sufficient or if too much daylight were present, a large poster could substitute for the slide projec­tion. On the cover of the playbook a photo­graph of the Creglingen self-portrait looms up behind a row of small, brightly colored figures that resemble paper cutouts (fig. 2 I).

Clearly the dramatist was playing on mod­ern visual habits of perceiving photographs as documents of the "real" and the "pres­ent." In the foreword, Dieter Hoffmann

wrote that Tettenborn was presenting "the immortality of the creative spirit, which survives the pettiness of human misuse of power." Hoffmann recommended that the 450th anniversary of Riemenschneider's death-his Todestag-become the 45oth day of his survival-his Uberlebenstag.38

Despite these many expositions about and appropriations of the self-portraits in art historical literature and fiction, many recent writings disavow their validity. In disserta­tions published in 1990 by Iris Kalden (now Kalden-Rosenfeld) and in 1998 by Holger Simon these images are not discussed as self­portraits. The former believes the figure in Maidbronn may represent Tilman's son Jorg. Both authors draw attention to the use of stock images and facial types employed by the Riemenschneider workshop . Likewise

SCHLEIF 231

in his book Riemenschneider: Zwolf Blicke fiir ein Gesicht (Riemenschneider: Twelve views of a face), which appeared in 1998, Andreas Nohr questioned the authenticity of the self-portraits but supported the viewer's need to find them.39 Other literature ignores the issue altogether. I would posit two reasons for the recent disavowal of the self-representations. Current art historical writing promotes the commodification of

232 SC H L EIF

Riemenschneider's oeuvre as a brand name.40

Authenticity of the pieces is, however, deter­mined through scientific (wissenschaftliche) scrutiny of the material objects, a method­ology that often detaches them from the human beings and human processes that brought them about. The works are made to yield to the dismemberment of art histori­ans as they separate drapery motives and facial types and to the dissection of conser­vators who analyze bits of pigment micro­scopically. Through a modern technology that purports to determine not only origins but essences, are we perhaps reducing our subjects and objects of inquiry to pieces of specific linden trees felled in given years, carved with edges and surfaces of certain stylistic specificity, and rendered mono­chrome or polychrome, holzsichtig or stein­sichtig, and are we thus diminishing them as "facts" without histories? Perhaps by dis­avowing the artist's image we are likewise bringing about, to adapt Roland Barthes' metaphor, the wrongful death of the artist.41

It has been said that to "kill" an image is to kill the possibility that the image will cause someone to remember the person behind (the mask of) the image.42 Certainly Barthes was promoting an expansion of notions of authorship related to a questioning of what has been termed the "humanistic subject"­or notions related to the concept of genius­but not the demise of the human subject and all that is vital and dynamic about human subjectivity. I might suggest that the self­image, whether or not the extent to which it is the production of the artist or the viewer can ever be "proven," is a sight/site at which we may fruitfully inquire into the complex ways in which art 's makers and takers con­ceive and perceive themselves and each other.

21. Book cover with Tilman Riemenschneider from the Assumption of the Virgin altarpi ece From Joachim Tcttcnborn, Tilman Riem enschneider. Ein Spiel aus seiner Zeit IWiirzburg, 198 1); photograph Stadtarchiv Wllrzburg

NOTES

I owe special thanks to Christoph Gundermann for providing excellent prints of the negatives made by his father and grandfather in the early days of the Gundermann photo studio in Wurzburg, to Dhira Mahoney for her critical insights on the argumen­tation of the essay, to Volker Schier for securing in WLirzburg libraries many of the pictorial and textual sources that were difficult to obtain in the United States, and to Juliann Vitullo for her helpful reading of an early draft of this essay.

1. Two additional identificational figures have been suggested in the Mary Magdalen altarpiece in Miin­nerstadt, in Th e Last Communion of the Magdalen and the Burial of the Magdalen (see, for example, Koch I94I, 236) .

2. For an extensive discussion with numerous examples from medieval and Renaissance iconogra­phy that show dual references to Nicodemus and artists see Schleif I993·

3· See Kraut I986 for examples and iconographic history.

4 · I am grateful to Tim Bugslag, who kindly searched the online Patrologia Latina, which I did not have at my disposal.

5· Art historians from Benkard (I927) to Koerner (I993) have viewed the autonomous self-portrait as a culmination of the enterprise. Most recently Victor Stoichita named four new categories of integrated self-portraits: the textualized author (medieval illu­minators that inhabited their own initials), the masked author, the visitor-author, and the trans­posed self-portrait, all of which lead up to the autonomous self-image. He stresses at the outset, however, that " there are many different ways of real­izing contextual self-projection" (Stoichita 1997, 200-226). In my I993 artic le I questioned notions intrinsic to terms such as crypto- or masked, which have often been used to describe self-portraits created by artists who project their own identity onto that of a holy person. One problem is that these categories implicitly valorize the so-called true self-portrait.

6. Schleif I993·

7. Gerstenberg I 966.

8 . Schleif 1990, 61-73; Klamt 1997.

9· Wuttke 1967.

ro. Ullmann I984, 288-290.

II. Schapiro 1973.

12. Benjamin 1974; Lacan 1978; Silverman 1996, 93-!04, 125- 163.

I3. Freeden 198 1, fig. 8 .

J4. This and other engravings in the book were executed by Charles Regnier based on drawings by Franz Leinecker (see Becker I 849). For an analysis

of Becker's book and its impact see Borchert I999, !26-!28.

15. Koch I94I, 234·

I6. Some have referred to the appearance of the sculptures as holzsichtig (having the look of wood) and steinsichtig (having the look of stone). More recently it has been shown that the wood surfaces were treated to give a monochrome appearance or to enhance the neutral appearance of the material (see Oellermann in this volum e).

I 7. Brilliant I 99 I, 20.

r 8 . Tiinnies I900, I36.

19 . Tiinnies 1900,40, 139.

20. Becker 1849, 17.

21. For historical details see Tiinnies I900, 34-39; Bier I982, 19; and Brady in this volume.

22 . Weismantel 1941, 86, !28, 2I5, 243, 294.

23. Wegner I937, 42 .

24 . Stein I936 (here reprint 1937), 375-376.

25. See the discussion of this novel in Borchert I999, !41.

26 . Arnold I93 8, I 58 .

27. Koch 194I, 236.

28 . Gerstenberg I941, 136.

29. Gerstenberg I9I3, II5.

30. Freeden 1951, 9·

31. Schaeff-Scheefen I959, 130-132.

32. Pultz I965 , ro3 .

33· Muth and Schneiders 1978, 104, 172.

34. Scheele and Schneiders 1984.

35· Koch I999, 44-54·

36. Diirfler 1965.

37 · Erben I996 .

38. "Tettenborn," wrote Hoffmann, "hat damit Geschichte, das Gestern und Heute, auf einen Nenner gebracht: Unsterblichkeit des schiipferischen Geistes, die auch die Kleinlichkeit menschlicher Machtausubung verlebt" (see Dieter Hoffmann, "Vorwort," in Tettenborn 1981, unpaginated).

39· Kalden I990, 94-99, 140; Simon 1998, 90; Nohr I998, 281.

40. Michael Baxandall has shown that the patrons of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sculpture already valued the sculptures from leading workshops as brand-name commodities (Baxandall I98 sa, II6- 142).

41. Barthes 1977.

42. Brilliant I99I , I9.

SCHLEIF 233

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF ART•6s•

Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

Symposium Papers XLII

Tilman Riemenschneider,

C. I460-I53I

Edited by Julien Chapuis

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Distributed by Yale University Press,

New Haven and London

Editorial Board JOHN OLIVER HAND, chairman SUSAN M. ARENSBERG

SARA H FISHER

THERESE O'MALLEY

Editor in Chief JUDY METRO

Managing Editor CAROL LEHMAN ERON

Production Manager C HRI S VOGEL

Editorial Assistant CAROLINE WEAVER

Copy editing and design by Princeton Editorial Associates, Inc.

Copyright© 2004 Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part !beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law, and except by reviewers from the public press), without written permission from the publishers

This publication was produced by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the Publish­ing Office, National Gallery of Art, Washington

The type is Trump Mediaeval, set by Princeton Editorial Associates, Inc. , Scottsdale, Arizona

The text paper is Gardamatt

Printed by Conti Tipocolor, Florence, Italy

Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

Abstracted and indexed in BHA !Bibliography of the History of Art) and Art Index

Proceedings of the symposium "Tilman Riemen­schneider: A Late Medieval Master Sculptor," sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The symposium was held 3-4 December 1999 in Washington

! SSN 0091-7338

ISBN 0-300-10134-1

Frontispiece: Tilman Riemenschneider, Mourning Wom en and Saint John !detail), from a Passion altarpiece for a church in Rothenburg, c. 1485(1490,

limewood with original polychromy. Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich; photograph by Walter Haberland