The interior of Bartholomäus Bruyn’s triptych transforms the Annunciate Virgin, the humble “handmaiden of the Lord,” into the Queen of Heaven. The tightly woven central composition even suggests that a Quaternity has replaced the Holy Trinity. This would certainly align the patron with those Catholics who, just before the Protestant Reformation, argued for the promotion of the cult of Mary—in particular her own Immaculate Conception in her mother Anne (who is significantly represented on the right wing of this triptych). Later Rector of Cologne University, Peter von Clapis in fact fought vigorously against any incursion by the new Protestant faith in Cologne. On the left wing, Saint Ivo, patron saint of lawyers, also supports the jurist von Clapis.

The three panels of the triptych’s interior show an eclectic painter at an early stage of his career following local traditions as well as absorbing novel features from the nearby Lowlands. Bruyn’s composition for the central grouping of The Coronation of the Virgin is ultimately derived from a fifteenth-century Cologne tradition, exemplified by the St. Ursula Master’s workshop painting of the subject.

The diminutive donors seen in the center panel are found as well in other early sixteenth-century German religious works by artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer. This seems a rather conservative or pious feature, since donors equal in size to the holy figures had become an established tradition in the Lowlands a hundred years earlier. Bruyn does however look to the Lowlands for some striking innovations, here in the form of an expansive continuous landscape, as well as in his feathery style of brushwork. The landscape is carefully color-coded to convey distance. As is also true in contemporary Flemish examples, these are deliberately composed studio vignettes of the outdoors, complete with picturesque details of human habitation. This same landscape is repeated in at least one other painting by Bruyn.

Bruyn went on to become the most important portrait painter in the city of Cologne in the first half of the sixteenth century, in part because of the later lack of commissions for sacred art in a time of religious unrest. Bruyn’s strength and originality in portraying the human physiognomy can already be seen here in his sensitive, almost portrait-like delineation of the saints’ faces.

Craig Harbison
Professor Emeritus
University of Massachusetts, Amherst