Feast of the Rosary

The Feast of the Rosary (or The Rosary Altar ) is one of the few altarpieces Albrecht Dürer.

Albrecht Dürer painted this large-scale altarpiece in 1506 on behalf of German merchants as an altarpiece for the church of San Bartolomeo in Venice.

This image made ​​Dürer, who created especially graphics and drawings up to this point, suddenly famous.

Description

Shown is the Madonna on a throne canopy held by putti. Two other Putten let a crown floating above her head, an angel playing lute at her feet. Mary, the Christ Child, St. Dominic, the origin of the rosary devotion is attributed, and more Putten distribute rosaries in a crowd, led by the Emperor and the Pope.

The Rosary Confraternity was founded by Jacob Sprenger in 1475 as a prayer brotherhood in Cologne. In the first Rosary Confraternity in Cologne enrolled in the first place in 1475 Emperor Maximilian one who had liberated the city of Neuss in the same year, after they had called Maria. The Pope would have had to have the facial features of Julius II, but what Dürer avoided, because Julius was an opponent of Venice.

The group of the kneeling Pope and Emperor with the Madonna forms a pyramid.

The members of the set can not all identified.

Background

The Rosary is celebrated on October 7 in honor of the " Virgin of the Rosary ". The Feast of the Rosary was instituted by Pope Pius V in 1573, who thus wanted to express his gratitude for the victory of the Christian fleet in the Battle of Lepanto. The painting Dürer has nothing to do with this later introduced hard. The paintings title is modern. Shown is rather the Rosary Brotherhood as a universal prayer Brotherhood.

The work combines the German iconography of the Rosary Confraternity with Venetian influences as being embedded in a landscape, the canopy over Mary, the lute -playing angels and cherubs and thus represents a synthesis of Nordic and Italian art

History

Albrecht Dürer had come in the summer of 1505 for the second time to Venice and received from the Fondaco dei Tedeschi ( near the Rialto Bridge ) based German merchants commissioned to produce a painting for their parish church. The image should represent an ideal meeting of the Rosary Confraternity.

Dürer made ​​before the beginning of his work, numerous studies and describes the circumstances when the work in the letters to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer. These letters show that Dürer had to stop work for health reasons and was very happy with the picture. So he wrote on September 23, 1506 Pirckheimer:

I agree with you that there is no better image of Mary around the country than mine.

Dürer's self-confidence is also reflected in the fact that he presented himself at the right edge. He holds a piece of paper with the Latin inscription:

This list Dürer points out that he had created the painting in just five months of 1506 ( MDVI ). The initials AD is Dürer's signature missing on almost any image.

How letters show Dürer had no very high opinion of the performance of his Venetian colleagues. This judgment was largely based on reciprocity. Dürer repeatedly reported the fact that the Italian painter claimed that his paintings were out of fashion and he could not deal with colors. Only with the " Feast of the Rosary " changed the opinion of the Venetian artists and Dürer wrote:

In 1606, the Rosary Altar came to Prague. During the Thirty Years War, the Feast of the Rosary Madonna was constantly in motion. So it came about that the painting was damaged during transport.

But it was already damaged in Venice. Because Dürer worked in Venice as a painter from the north with not a tried and tested material. This meant that the image was damaged in the center soon. This is also an interesting detail, attesting the copies of the painting a fly disappeared on the knee of the Madonna, which was to give the impression that it was genuine. When the painting was damaged, the fly disappeared.

Emperor Rudolf II bought the painting after lengthy negotiations for the enormous sum of 900 ducats. He had to leave in 1606, a copy produced which remained until the 19th century.