The not so Poor Clares of Cologne

The always interesting British Library Medieval manuscript blog has continued its series on items included in their current Medieval Women exhibition with a particularly informative and attractive post about the surviving part of a liturgical manuscript from a house of Franciscan nuns in Cologne. These sisters belonged, as the article explains, to the group often known as Urbanists. They followed a mitigated version of the Franciscan rule which was granted to them by Pope Urban IV in the mid-thirteenth century. This attracted women from wealthy backgrounds and enabled them to retain some of their wealth rather than following the Franciscan model of a rule of absolute poverty. In the case of these Sisters from Cologne they put their inherited money into creating lavish liturgical manuscripts.

The beautifully illustrated blog post can be seen at An unknown leaf from the Poor Clares of Cologne

St Gereon and companions

I have lifted this from John Dillon's post on the Medieval Religion discussion group, with a few minor alterations and additions:


Today, October 10th, is the feast day of St. Gereon and companions, legendarily members of the Theban Legion who were not at Agaunus with St. Maurice but who voluntarily submitted to the Emperor Maximian in Köln (Cologne) and were executed there.

Some views of their church in Köln, the Basilika Sankt Gereon:

View from the west

View from the east

http://www.romanische-kirchen-koeln.de/index.php?id=29

http://www.sacred-destinations.com/germany/cologne-st-gereon
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Gereon
A virtual tour (use the links below the plan [at bottom of the page]):
http://www.stgereon.de/st-gereon-72.html

According to the late-eleventh or very early twelfth-century Vita sancti Annonis archiepiscopi Coloniensis, St. Helena had founded this church. Here is a view of an uncovered fresco from 1190/1191 over the entrance to the Confessio with Gereon at left and Helen at right (holding the earliest known representation of the church's polygonal nave, the Dekagon, completed in 1227):

http://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Gereon_von_Koeln2.jpg

http://tinyurl.com/ncppoo4

Context within the church (the sarcophagi contain skeletal remains unearthed in an Inventio in 1121 and proclaimed to be those of Gereon and some of his companions):
c8.alamy.com/comp/DTAC4A/kln-st-gereon-krypta-DTAC4A.jpg


Further period-pertinent images of Gereon and companions:

a) Gereon (at left?) and another martyr of the Theban Legion (Maurice? Gregory Maurus?) as depicted in a mid-thirteenth-century fresco in the baptismal chapel of Köln's Basilika Sankt Gereon:

https://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Gereon_von_Koeln6.jpg

The fresco in an early twentieth-century grayscale drawing:

http://tinyurl.com/qcztls3

b) St Gereon and St Maurice as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century glass window in Köln's Hohe Domkirche Sankt Peter und Maria:

http://koelner-dom.de/index.php?id=17386&L=1

c) Gereon (second from left in central panel; at far left in the same panel, St. Gregory Maurus) as depicted in an earlier fifteenth-century altar of the BVM and saints of Köln (between 1410 and 1430) in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin:

https://farm7.staticflickr.com/6210/6159854849_6336bcc975_o.jpg

Detail view (Gregory Maurus and Gereon):

http://tinyurl.com/qxd3x6p

This altar was formerly in the church (since 1920 a basilica minor) of St. Gereon in Köln. The two figures on the other side of the central panel are St. Helen, holding a model of the Dekagon, and Köln's bishop St. Anno, holding a model of the church's choir and east end.

The Clever Boy wonders if the figure of St Gereon is a tribute to king/Emperor Sigismund in that the face and beard are nor dissimilar to images of Sigismund and the hat like that shown in virtually all images of the Luxembourg king and later Emperor.

d) Gereon and companions as depicted by Stefan Lochner in an earlier fifteenth-century panel painting (c. 1440) on his Dreikönigsaltar in the cathedral of Köln:

http://tinyurl.com/3jlxqx

The altarpiece as a whole:

http://www.wga.hu/art/l/lochner/adorat.jpg

e) Gereon (second from left) and companions as depicted by the Master of the Assumption (Meister der Verherrlichung Mariae) in a later fifteenth-century panel painting (c. 1460) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/roelipilami/14931956501/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/roelipilami/14935025195/

f) Gereon as depicted (second from left -- counting Christopher and his charge as one) by the Master of the Assumption (Meister der Verherrlichung Mariae) in a later fifteenth-century panel painting (c. 1480) in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Köln:

http://www.wga.hu/art/m/master/zunk_ge/zunk_ge2/14anne.jpg

The other figures are St Peter vested as Pope and the Virgin Mary with St Anne and the Christ Child - added by the Clever Boy.

g) Gereon as portrayed (at right; at left St. Ursula; at centre, the martyrdom of St. Barbara) in a wing of an early sixteenth-century pendant (1504) in the form of a silver gilt and enamel triptych in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

http://tinyurl.com/ol97y83

h) Gereon as depicted in a panel of the early sixteenth-century Typological Window of the Nativity (Typologisches Geburt Christi-Fenster; c. 1508) in Köln's Hohe Domkirche Sankt Peter und Maria:
1) according to the cathedral's website (German-language) - St Maurice:

https://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Mauritius9.jpg

2) according to heligenlexikon.de and to the cathedral's website (English-language) - St Gereon:

https://www.heiligenlexikon.de/Fotos/Gereon9.jpg

Neither site indicates the source for its identifications of the four saints in this register.

The window as a whole:
German-language text:
http://koelner-dom.de/index.php?id=17382
English-language text:
http://koelner-dom.de/index.php?id=17382&L=1

i) Gereon as depicted (at right; at left, St. Helena; at centre, St. Maternus of Köln) in an earlier sixteenth-century glass window panel (c. 1520-1530) in the church of St. Maria Lyskirchen in Köln:

http://www.romanische-kirchen-koeln.de/index.php?id=689

The Adoration of the Magi

Whilst looking for images of the Epiphany yesterday I came across Stefan Lochner's depiction of the Adoration of the Magi, dated to c.1440-45. It is the central panel of his triptych of the Virgin and Child with the saints of Cologne, which is in the Lady Chapel of Cologne Cathedral - which houses the relics of the Magi. As I had used his Madonna of the Rose Bower on my Christmas Day post I thought I would reproduce his Epiphany picture, partly becuase I like his paintings and particularly as in it he re-uses the same image of Our Lady:

The following are notes on Stefan Lochner from the Web Gallery of Art site:

This German late Gothic painter, considered to be the greatest representative of the school of Cologne. He is known primarily for his highly mystical religious paintings.

Little is known of his early life, but he is thought to have studied in the Netherlands, possibly under Robert Campin (tentatively identified with the Master of Flémalle), whose influence is evident in the treatment of the drapery and the careful rendering of detail in what may be Lochner's earliest extant painting, St Jerome in His Cell (heirs of Edith von Schröder Collection).

Lochner settled in Cologne about 1430. The earliest work he did there was an altarpiece for the church of St Laurenz (centrepiece with the Last Judgment now in Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne; the wings are dispersed). The abundance of minute observation reflects his continued interest in Netherlandish art. But in the central panel he bound the various themes into a unified composition through the use of a dominating rhythmic design.

In the later 1430s Lochner must have been in the Netherlands again, where he encountered the art of Van Eyck. The first work to reflect this influence is the Madonna with the Violet (c. 1443; Erzbischöfliches Diözesan-Museum, Cologne). Van Eyck's influence is most noticeable in Lochner's chief work, the great town hall altarpiece much admired by Dürer. In this Altar of the Patron Saints, now in Cologne cathedral, Lochner adds to the idealism of the older painters of the Cologne school with a wealth of naturalistic observation in the figures, while the sculpture-like draperies lend them a monumental dignity. In 1447 he became a member of the town council, and from the same year dates the splendid Presentation in the Temple (Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt), which was originally in St Katharinen. The exquisite Madonna of the Rose Bower (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) was painted soon afterward.

Lochner became one of Cologne's greatest painters, combining naturalism with a masterful sense of colour and design into a festal solemnity of representation. His work forms perhaps the most successful visual interpretation of late medieval German mysticism before Grünewald. Book illumination was also done in his workshop.