Renaissance miracles

For over 300 years, Italian painters produced the finest altarpieces in the world, says David Ekserdjian

- David Ekserdjian

Most art forms – like Miss Jean Brodie (and the rest of us) – have their primes. They may then stagger on, growing gradually more feeble, while still enjoying occasional highs that match their former glories, but their best days are behind them.

Very occasionally, as with the epic poem, their reign can last for millennia. But as a rule, managing to hang in there for two or three hundred years is pretty good going.

Take the symphony, which held sway from Haydn and Mozart in the second half of the 18th century until Sibelius and Vaughan Williams in the first half of the 20th.

The heyday of the altarpiece lasted roughly from the late-13th century until the early-17th. It was above all an Italian triumph in the field of painting.

No doubt I am a teeny bit biased, since I have a doorstop of a book coming out this month on the subject of the Italian renaissance altarpiece. But a handful of absolute masterpieces north of the Alps – the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and one or two others – cannot begin to hold their own against the sheer abundance and variety of what Italy has to offer.

That said, in the field of sculptural altarpieces – above all, in wood – northerners like Tilman Riemenschneider and Veit Stoss are streets ahead of the spaghetti-eating competition.

The altarpiece’s religious function – to sit above the altar table and form a backdrop to the daily miracle of the mass – remains basically unchanged, even after the Council of Trent (1545-63). But, excitingly, both its format and style are subject to extraordinary transformations over time.