My phone has thousands of pictures on it. By way of justification, a goodly percentage of the shots were taken in museums. These I made to help me recall images of art works and capture their explanatory labels. Before cell phones changed our lives, I did this the old-fashioned way, a pedagogically better process that involved encountering a work of art, stopping in front of it, copying down the title, artist, date, and then noting highpoints from the prose on the label. Somewhere along the line, I got lazy, greedy, and the digital clicks took over.
But before that happened, the old process worked just fine. With my notes in hand, I consulted art folios and reference books to learn whatever else was useful to know. In specific cases, that process went a step farther and I decided to obtain a slide for my classroom lectures or lectures given to arts audiences. All of this took time, thought, and money, since making slides cost $2.50 a pop (envision $5.00 per slide today). Still, each slide helped me fill my personal library’s slide-drawers.
Oh, how I loved those slide drawers. One of my happiest moments involved finding an affordable gunmetal-grey, three-tiered slide box which held 600 slides. I still have it, as well as plenty of smaller cases, although slowly I am purging their contents. My slides are hopelessly faded and useless now in every case (excepting family pictures when I mistakenly put slide-film in the camera),
When I became a professor at SMU, I gained access to all of the university’s libraries, including its marvelous Slide Library. This small room could not have been more pedestrian, lined on every wall with racks of slide-drawers. Their contents were catalogued in a weird system I never understood (apparently, every art-history professor requesting slides be made employed an individual numbering system). But the hodgepodge system was well-worth penetrating. Suddenly, I had more illustrations than I ever imagined at my fingertips.
Now, I have more images at my fingertips than I can ever use. How indiscriminately, but happily, I snap poorly framed pictures with the intention of rifling back through them for the needed ones. And I do go back through many of them, but certainly not the 20,000 shots of paintings, sculptures, mobiles, architecture, fountains, and decorative articles, plus their informative labels.
On the other hand, there are moments when the ability to photograph a piece of art copiously brings tremendous delight. That was the case yesterday when, five minutes from our drop-off point in Rothenburg, I entered St. James Church. Built between 1311 and 1484, St. James now is a Protestant church (which looks and feels totally incongruous). Its blend of Romanesque and Gothic architecture graces a square inside Rothenburg’s famous medieval walls. With its original stained glass (1350-1400), so tall, so intense in content, the mind simply cannot manage to take it in.
The high altar in the east chancel dazzles. Gratefully it was not destroyed when the church was forced to become Protestant after the Thirty-Years War. The surviving architectural and decorative features stem from the church’s centuries’ long status as a pilgrimage church on the route to St. James Church in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Then there’s a superb, newish Rieger organ (1968), a Baroque-style tracker organ with two consoles whose pipes are configured in soft gold-wood cabinets that jut out and seem to be growing from the instrument. The whole organ complex fills the back of the church, creating a sharp, but harmonious, contrast with what remains of its Gothic interior.
But the real treasure of this church stands behind the organ in the upper-level Western gallery: an altar carved between 1500 and 1505 by the extraordinary Würzburg master Tilman Riemenschneider. Reached by ugly cement staircases at the back of the nave, the altar is largely obscured by the organ. Even the tall, partly stained-glass windows peeking over the organ case cannot be seen from the floor. But when one emerges from the staircase, a gossamer New Testament carved in wood scales upward, framed against those windows.
How many times did I read about this altar in my music-history textbooks? More times than I wanted, surely. But textbook descriptions, even when accompanied by pictures, fail to convey the real nature of any masterpiece of art. The first question screams: how did a human being manage to carve this? I have seen spectacular carvings in churches. But to see wood turned into a web of lace, with fabric-like canopies in wood sheltering detailed carved figures, all topped by a filagree wooden spiral bracing a rock-crystal reliquary, well, no matter what words I write or pictures I take, the effect cannot be conveyed.
Plus, this altar is not a museum piece. It is in constant use. Five or so rows of those comfy woven-cane chairs stand before it while the smaller console of the organ nestles behind them, ready to play for any service taking place at this altar. One cannot help but imagine what a wedding conducted before this altar would be like.
Because this is the thing. Yes, visitors flock continuously before this masterpiece; but the altar was not intended for tourists. It was intended to intensify, sanctify, and elevate each service celebrated in the space.
I’ve wanted to write about the experience of regularly being in church with an altarpiece right before my eyes. That would have been a theoretical topic for me until, after the Covid shutdown, our church reopened to reveal a long-planned renovation that included a newly commissioned tripartite altarpiece in Renaissance style. It was inspired by The Crucifixion Triptych painted by the 15th-century Dutch painter Rogier van der Weyden. Having this vividly colored altar as an intrinsic part of life has changed how I see all altarpieces, whether in historical churches or in museum galleries. It has helped me perceive them beyond their gilded splendor and reimagine them as living participants in parish life.
Similarly, whoever sat in St. James Church during Riemenschneider’s time, absorbed this impossibly beautiful scriptural narration service after service, as its wood-filigree spire danced to the heavens. No one will ever be able to number the faces of those who sang and prayed in front of Riemenschneider’s masterwork or, for that matter, any altarpiece. But a shadow of their voices still echoes inside of St. James Church. For this astonishing creation in wood goes far beyond a valuable piece of art that ranks high on lists of European masterworks. It was, and remains a spiritual friend that supports the lives of those people who sit, stand, and kneel before it.
