Chance can be enormously fickle sometimes. Why does 'X' win Euromillions or the Powerball jackpot running into hundreds of millions of Euros or Dollars and 'Y' has to survive on £53 (c$80) per week because they are disabled or old? Is it just chance, luck, or does one make one's own luck? Is it my fault that I am poor? Or is it just the way the cookie crumbles? It seems to me that there is no easy answer, black or white, right or left, and even the divine had few, if any, answers; 'For ye have the poor always with you' - KJV, Matthew 26:11 - which does seem to be a mite strong on the 'ducking the poverty issue' front. On the one hand, there will always be poor people suffering in this life while on the other hand 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God' - KJV Matthew 19:24 - which is not what I would call a 'win-win' situation for the average punter!*
I was reminded of this not because of the wrecking ball that the Conservatives (and the Mugwumps of the LibDems) are sending through the UK benefits system at the moment, although that is extremely dire, but rather how two broadly contemporary artists have such wildly differing legacies; works that survived their deaths and have made it down to the present day intact and largely attributable after nigh on half a millennium.
Mathis Gothardt Neithardt, known as Matthias Grünewald, although it is not clear whether they were in fact two distinct artists working on the same project at the same time**, worked out of the Main/Rhein region of Germany between about 1503 and 1528 or 1532; only 13 paintings survive and about 25 extant drawings can be confidently attributed to him. The works are exclusively religious in nature, which was not unusual for the period. It is said that some works were lost in the Baltic Sea en route for Sweden as war booty but I cannot track down either the exact number or a description of the works in question. Like the numbered Swiss bank accounts opened by high ranking Nazis both before and during the war, we are unlikely to find out the contents anytime soon.
Even allowing for the flotsam and jetsam in the Baltic, this seems to be an unusually small number of extant works in comparison with other artists at the turn of the sixteenth century, although Grünewald did eschew the trappings of the renaissance. While Grünewald did experience bouts of poverty during his life, of which we know very little, and he may not have recovered the full price for the Isenheim Altarpiece, he appears to have been a respected member of the artistic community and was unlikely to have suffered from a lack of commissions any more than any other 'old master' at the time.
Contrast this, if you will, with Albrecht Dürer who was active from about 1490 to 1528; nearly 200 paintings in oil and watercolour (Dürer was perhaps the first 'en plein air' watercolour landscape artist)***; about 370 woodcut prints, not including the illustrations for the 4 books on proportion nor the treatise on fortifications; close on a hundred engravings; a small handful of etchings and drypoints and over 900 drawings, ranging from the quick pen and sketch done with a few lines (eg 'mein Agnes') to the highly finished pen and ink working drawings heightened with white which form the so-called 'Green Passion' (because they are drawn on green tinted paper).
Although wildly different in style, Grünewald stayed true to his late Gothic heritage while Dürer wholeheartedly embraced the humanist and Lutheran doctrines of his friend Willibald Pirckheimer and Philipp Melancthon; the Renaissance styles of Mantegna and the Venetian colourists; he visited Northern Italy twice at the start of the sixteenth century and was the embodiment of the 'northern renaissance' man, it is, however, still difficult to explain the wide disparity in the extant works.
Perhaps it was only luck or location. Dürer was closer to 'the action' in Nürnberg, lying closer to Northern Italy and the revolution in art taking place there than Grünewald in the Rhein/Main valleys. Perhaps his desire to concentrate so much of his output into engravings and woodcuts meant that so many of his prints were in circulation that the law of averages meant that at least one of each print would survive. Perhaps what would seem to be an obsession with never throwing his working drawings away meant that Hans von Kulmbach, one of his assistants, had the opportunity to catalogue them all; it is likely that a good proportion of them passed to Dürer's brother but he appears to have sold them since they do not appear on either his wife's or his own estate after their deaths. Some, at least (more than a hundred) went to the Albertina in Vienna, possibly via the collection of Willibald Imhoff, who appears to have been the owner of many of the watercolours; the 'hare' and the 'roller' included.
Perhaps in the end, it was a combination of so many things that Dürer enjoyed as a result of his skill but also of location and his willingness to travel that gave us such a rich bounty of treasures; the multiple copies of woodcuts and engravings; the society that Dürer moved in amongst some of Luther's most staunch supporters, the intellectuals, collectors and burghers of the city; a desire to travel which saw him visit, for months at a time, the Netherlands, Basel in Switzerland and Venice twice.
Perhaps Grünewald was just not modern enough to make his own luck and his own legacy or perhaps he just did not care.
The answers to the recent quiz:
1. The first line of the song 'Question' by the Moody Blues
2. Likewise, the first line of Bob Dylan's 'Blowin in the wind'
3. A novel by Primo Levi
4. A common tongue twister
5. A non-sequitor; the answer is 'None, phone support; it's a hardware problem! '
6. A poem by me without the (necessary) punctuation
7. The chorus to Tom Jones' number one single in 1960 something
8. Sonnet no. 18 by William Shakespeare (Or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford or Kit Marlowe or Ben Johnson or Uncle Tom Cobbly and all etc etc)
9. Track 2, side 1, 'Chicago Transit Authority' by Chicago
10.Short story collection by Heinrich Böll
* Be honest. Has it ever occurred to you that Matthew wasn't perhaps the life and soul of the wedding party at Cana.
** Unlikely, the individual panels appear to be very consistent in style, but possible, given the project was the Isenheim Altarpiece which measures some 11' X 19' and comprises 11 panels. It appears that the work took a little over two years. I would urge anyone visiting South West Germany or South East France to pay a visit to the Unterlinden
Museum in Colmar and take a peek at the most harrowing and disturbing vision of the 'crucifiction' in western art.
*** One altarpiece (the 'Heller') is known to be lost to fire in the eighteenth century; a copy by Jobst Harrich still exists. It is a pity that the original is lost for the preparatory drawings for it (most notably, 'betende Hände', 'praying hands'), in ink on blue tinted paper heightened with white, are some of the best preparatory drawings in Dürer's oeuvre
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