He was little more than a name till the
late 19th century, and not until this year did scholars and the public
have an opportunity to see all his works in one place. The place was
Hamburg's Kunsthalle, and the occasion the celebration of its 100th
anniversary. The result was the realization that Meister Francke, an
altar painter who worked in Hamburg around the year 1420, has far
better claim than his later compatriots, Drer, Cranach or Grnewald,
to the title of Germany's first great artist.Scarlet Sky. Meister Francke was a dramatic storyteller who created his
own style by combining the Gallic elegance of the courtly International
Style with the burgeoning, often brutal realism of The Netherlands.
Kunsthalle Director Alfred Hentzen spent close to $60,000 to assemble
all of the master's few surviving works, as well as a small treasury of
related paintings, drawings and illuminated manuscripts by other late
Gothic artists borrowed from 43 museums and libraries all over the world.To German art lovers, the greatest curiosity was the St. Barbara
altarpiece from Finland's National Museum in Helsinki—Meister
Francke's earliest known work. Its eight richly painted panels sum up
the characteristic ambiguities of Meister Francke's style. In The
Flagellation of St. Barbara, the brutal, peasant faces and awkward,
potbellied figures of Barbara's tormentors foreshadow the popular style
of Bruegel or Bosch—though neither painter had been born when they
were painted. By contrast, nothing could be more courtly than the
boneless sinuosity of Barbara's figure, the vapid sweetness of her
untroubled expression or the richly brocaded gowns and hierarchic
formality of the aristocratic spectators.Christ as the Man of Sorrows displays the same blend of mannered
elegance and gory realism. But the triumph of Meister Francke's mature
style is seen in the St. Thomas of Canterbury altar piece, painted
after 1424 for a group of Hamburg merchants trading with England. The
nine panels of this darkly glowing work depict episodes in the life of
Thomas Becket, together with scenes from the Passion of Christ and
the life of the Virgin, achieving a peak of dramatic intensity hitherto
unrealized in North German painting. In The Martyrdom of St. Thomas,
the kneeling archbishop half turns toward his attackers. Blood streams
down his forehead and splashes onto his white cassock; his miter rolls
away across the tile floor. The decorative flatness of Thomas' cope and
the star-spangled, scarlet sky are in striking contrast to the bold
modeling of his face.Splendid Miracle. Little is known of Meister Francke's life. He is
believed to have been a Dominican friar who came from the Geldern
region of The Netherlands and studied or worked in Paris or Burgundy
before settling in Hamburg. Probably he spent his life in monkish
seclusion , painting for
the glory of God and the benefit of his order while the fame of his
brush spread throughout the Hanseatic trading towns of Eastern Europe
to the farthest reaches of the Baltic. Commissions came in to his
monastery from as far away as Estonia and Finland.
