NORTHERN RENAISSANCE WOOD SCULPTURE

While some of the world’s greatest artists were creating some of the world’s greatest art in Renaissance Italy, north-central Europe was developing differently. Italian art made spectacular use of its native marble. Germany and the lowland areas (then called Flanders) lacked marble but were rich in forests; thus, wood was their primary medium for sculpture. "Almost all those pieces were unsigned, and therefore largely unattributable," says Anthony Blumka of Blumka Gallery in New York. But scholars can make a geographical attribution based on the kind of wood used: The German artists worked in limewood—also known as linden—while the Flemish used oak, a less accommodating substance to carve.

The Church was the primary patron, commissioning altars, statues of saints and other devotional objects. Civic authorities sometimes commissioned sculpture of their municipal saints, and wealthy citizens created private chapels. "Sometimes secular themes can be found," says Arcadia Fletcher of Sam Fogg in London, "with chivalric, humorous and didactic subjects." Most pieces were carved in the round from a single block of wood. Typically, Blumka says, "these works were painted in gilt and polychrome—and later over-painted to the taste of the times—but only traces remain on extant carvings. Paint tended to obscure some of the finer details of the carving."

The giant of late medieval northern sculpture is the illustrious Tilman Riemenschneider (1460–1531). In his Würzburg workshop, this very prolific artist and his apprentices produced beautiful, sensitive and technically proficient limewood sculptures that are highly valued today. Although many of his works were painted, Riemenschneider was one of the first northern sculptors to abandon color in favor of a translucent varnish glaze that produced a monochrome finish revealing the natural wood. To work without color, the sculpture had to be even more subtle and refined. Although most of Riemenschneider’s work is in museums, a figure of St. Catherine sold at Sotheby’s in January 2007 for $6.3 million.
 
Other northern master sculptors working around the same time include Niklaus Weckmann, Daniel Mauch, Michael Erhart, Niclaus Gerhaert von Leiden, Adam Kraft, Hans Thoman, Hans Leinberger, Veit Stoss and Peter Vischer the Elder. Riemenschneider notwithstanding, Fletcher says, "the prices for German Renaissance sculpture are very low in relation to other fields—for example, Italian Renaissance sculpture—and range from ($100,000 –$1.6 million)."

Small altars and even smaller portable examples for personal devotion appear in the market at rare intervals, but more typical are fragments of large carved altarpieces. In its original state, an altarpiece would have had a central section flanked by hinged wings, each encased section containing sculpted figures of the holy family, saints and Biblical figures. Fletcher says that prices for smaller carved works would likely start around $60,000. "Size only plays a part because large sculptures normally were made for altarpieces in important cathedrals and hence are carved to a high quality on a large scale." Small-scale carving tends to be subsidiary, parts removed from larger works, although there are many exceptions—small figures with highly sophisticated carvings designed to be appreciated at close range and viewable from every angle. "Pieces that retain their original polychrome are important and highly desirable," adds Fletcher, "as so much medieval European art was stripped of its paint during the 19th century."