The Cologne School.In the art of the Cologne School more especially, the relationship between the panel paintings and the miniature illuminations of manuscripts is very close, both in the general decorative schemes and also in the extreme minuteness and delicacy of the larger paintings.
Fig. 43. Retable painted by Martin Schöngauer, in the style of a manuscript illumination.
Fig. 44. All altar-piece of the Cologne school, showing the influence of manuscript illumination on the painters of panel-pictures, especially retables.
| Retable at Cologne. |
Retable at Cologne.Fig. [44] shows a beautiful example of this, a small panel, now in the Archiepiscopal Museum at Cologne, representing the Virgin and Child seated on a flowery sward with a trellis covered with roses as a background, and lovely child-angels playing on musical instruments all round. The whole panel is a perfect gem of brilliantly decorative art of the purest and most perfect kind, quite free from the too pictorial realism which at this time, about 1460, was growing rapidly among the miniaturists of France and the Netherlands.
Half a century later, in the early part of the sixteenth century, the same tendency to paint pictures like a magnified manuscript illumination is frequently to be observed.
| Triptych by the elder Holbein. |
Triptych by the elder Holbein.Fig. [45] represents one wing of an altar triptych by Hans Holbein the elder, painted about the year 1514. This beautiful figure of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary is interesting as showing the influence of Italian art, which at that time was widely spread throughout Germany and France; it also, in its minutely delicate touch and in the grotesque ornaments at the top and bottom, shows a strong tendency to use the forms and methods of the manuscript illuminator.