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Veit Stoss | Death and Assumption of the Virgin

Church of Saint Mary, Kraków, Poland, 1477–1489

The sculptor Veit Stoss  trained in the Upper Rhine region but settled in Kraków (in present-day Poland) in 1477. In that year, he began work on a monumental altarpiece for the church of Saint Mary in Kraków. In the central boxlike shrine, huge carved and painted figures, some nine feet high, represent Death and Assumption of the Virgin. On the wings, Stoss portrayed scenes from the lives of Christ and Mary. The altar forcefully expresses the intense piety of Gothic culture in its late phase, when artists used every figural and ornamental motif in the repertoire of Gothic art to heighten the emotion and to glorify sacred events.

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In the Kraków altarpiece, Christ’s disciples congregate around the Virgin, who collapses, dying. One of them supports her, while another wrings his hands in grief. Stoss posed others in attitudes of woe and psychic shock, striving for realism in every minute detail. He engulfed the figures in restless, twisting, and curving swaths of drapery whose broken and writhing lines unite the whole tableau in a vision of agitated emotion. The artist’s massing of sharp, broken, and pierced forms that dart flamelike through the composition— at once unifying and animating it—recalls the design principles of Late Gothic architecture. Indeed, in the Kraków altarpiece, Stoss merged sculpture and architecture, enhancing their union with paint and gilding. (x)

tagged → #art #art history #poland #sculpture #art piece #1400s #gothic