Hans Süss von Kulmbach

Mary Cleophas and her Family; Mary Salome and her Family

Germany, Nuremberg

Dated 1513

These two panel paintings depict the Virgin Mary’s two half-sisters (also called Mary) with their husbands and children in domestic settings. According to medieval legend, after the death of Joachim, Anne married two more times and had two other daughters. The daughters of these two marriages were called Mary like their half-sister, the mother of Jesus. St. Anne’s second daughter, Mary Cleophas, was married to Alphaeus, and bore four sons, three of whom would become Apostles. On the left of the panel depicting the family of Mary Cleophas is Judas Thaddaeus identified by his club; in the centre, James the Less with his staff, his hair being deloused by his mother; on the right, Simon the Zealot with a saw; and behind, Joseph the Righteous. In the panel representing the family of Anne’s youngest daughter, Mary Salome, are the future Apostles James the Greater with his staff, and John the Evangelist with his chalice. Their father, Zebedee, is shown writing, a reference to his fatherly role as teacher. A variation on the composition of the Mary Salome panel by Hans Süss von Kulmbach is preserved in the St. Louis Art Museum.

The panels must originally have belonged to an altarpiece dedicated to St. Anne and her apocryphal descendants: the Holy Kinship. As the cult of St. Anne became important in the late Middle Ages, especially in the Rhineland and the Low Countries, altarpieces with images of St. Anne with the Virgin and Christ Child, and the Holy Kinship became very popular. Each of our panels was originally a double-sided wing panel and was, at some point before the mid-1920s, split to separate the painted front and reverse sides. The painting originally on the reverse of the Mary Cleophas panel depicted St. Anne and Joachim at the Golden Gate, and is now preserved in the Barnes Foundation Museum, Merion, Pennsylvania. An Annunciation to Joachim, originally on the reverse of the Mary Salome panel, is now lost, known only from a photo in the Max J. Friedlander Archive in the Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague.

The exact configuration of the altarpiece to which these panels belonged is not known. The ensemble may have presented a comprehensive portrait of the Holy Kinship, including scenes of St. Anne with her husbands, St. Anne with her daughters, and Christ with St. Anne and the Virgin, perhaps in a central position.

Hans Süss von Kulmbach (c. 1480-1522) belongs to the first generation of German Renaissance artisans to engage with humanism and the focus on domestic settings in our paintings illustrates this clearly. Kulmbach had been a pupil of the Italian printmaker and painter Jacopo de Barbari (c. 1460/70-c. 1516) as well as a journeyman under the employ of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), before setting up his own workshop in Nuremberg in 1511. His early works show the formative influence of both Dürer and Jacopo de Barbari, who worked in Germany in the first years of the 16th century. Although de Barbari’s painterly brushwork permanently influenced Kulmbach’s style, he is best remembered as Dürer’s foremost disciple in Nuremberg. By the second decade of the century, as Dürer himself took on fewer major commissions, Kulmbach emerged as the most important and prolific designer of stained-glass windows and painter of altarpieces for the city’s churches. At times, Kulmbach’s works have been confused with those of Dürer; however, his work is distinguished by a more liquid and luminous manner of handling paint, and by the simplicity and tenderness of his interpretations of religious themes.

PROVENANCE

Count Cauda, Berlin, 1925;
Julius Böhler Gallery, Lucerne;
Hugo Perls (1886-1977), Berlin, 1928, inv. 19;
Jacques Goudstikker, Schloss Nyenrode, acquired in 1928, inv. 2137;
Taken by the Nazi authorities, 13th July 1940;
Recovered by the Allies at the Munich Collection Point, no. 6354, in 1945;
In the custody of the Dutch government, NK 1444;
Restituted in February 2006 to the heirs of Jacques Goudstikker;
Christie’s London, Important Old Master Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker, July 5, 2007, lot no. 6;
With Arnoldi-Livie, Munich;
Private collection, New York, since 2008

EXHIBITED: Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Gemälde alter Meister aus Berliner Privatbesitz. Kaiser-Friedrich-Museumsverein, July – August 1925, no. 208; Catalogue des Nouvelles Acquisitions de la Collection Goudstikker, October – November 1928, no. 21; The Hague, Mauritshuis, on loan since 1960 (inv. nos. 904-905)

PUBLISHED: E. Buchner, in U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler, XXII, Leipzig, 1929, p. 93; H.P. Bremmer, Beeldende Kunst, 18, 1930-32, nos. 2 and 4; ill., figs. 11, 25; F. Winkler, Hans von Kulmbach, Leben un Werk eines fränkischen Künstlers der Dürerzeit, Kulmbach, 1959, p. 69; C. Wright, Paintings in Dutch Museums. An Index of Oil Paintings in Public Collections in the Netherlands by Artists born before 1870, London, 1980, p. 227; A. van Suchtelen,, Y. Bruijnen, and E. Buijsen, Art on Wings. Celebrating the Reunification of a Triptych by Gerard David, The Hague, 1977, pp. 84-89, nos. 10a and b; N. Sluijter-Seiffert, Mauritshuis: illustrated general catalogue, Amsterdam, 1993, pp. 83-4, nos. 904-5.