On 31st July, Annen Museum of Germany unveiled two panels which were part of the polyptych of Mary Magdalene, a 16th-century work by Erhard Altdorfer (Regensburg, c. 1480-Schwerin, 1561). These works were lost for around 200 years, but they have now joined the complex of which they were a part, further expanding the St. Annen Museum’s collection of pieces by Erhart Altdorfer.
Being an important work found in Lübeck, these works were commissioned in 1519 by the tailors’ guild for Lübeck’s Burgkirche, the city’s church. Depicting two episodes from the life of Mary Magdalene in vivid and carefully composed scenes, her arrival in Marseille and the conversion of a pair of princes, these panels hold immense value in art as they intermix the quality of sculpture and painting with fine wood carvings. These central motifs of an apocryphal narrative describe the saint’s life between Christ’s Ascension and her time as a hermit in Provence. The artist further painted a scene of the victory at the Battle of Bornhöved, visible in one of the two panels, which now hangs in Ohio but once formed the right-hand compartment of the collection.
The panels came into light when these two missing pieces of the polyptych were put on sale in the market in 2024. The museum, however, tracked them down and added them to their collection, further giving completeness to the work that has been paying homage to the patron saint of the Hanseatic city for more than five hundred years.
The polyptych remained in the Burgkirche until 1819, as it was demolished due to decay. However, the altarpiece was moved a year earlier to the upper choir of St. Catherine’s Church in Lübeck. Since 1840, Mary Magdalene’s polyptych was listed in the collection of what is now the St. Annen Museum under inventory numbers 18 (side dossal) and 19 (predella). Just when the side panels were presumably separated from the main work, it was placed on the art market. But it was the museum’s efforts that tracked the panels at the appropriate time.
The return was possible thanks to the support of the Kulturstiftung der Länder, or Cultural Foundation of the German states, the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, the Possehl Foundation, the Friedrich Bluhme and Else Jepsen Foundation, the Verein der Freunde der Museen für Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte der Hansestadt Lübeck (Association of Friends of the Museums of Art and Cultural History of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck), and numerous committed private donors.
Featured Image: @Mweilc, via X.
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