High Altar

Around 1560-70 Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire, shocked by the continuing threats of iconoclasm and, perhaps, chastened by Protestant criticism of religious art, commissioned relatively few new, non-memorial paintings and sculptures for their churches. Most new works were intended for private devotional use. The revival of large-scale Catholic religious art occurred only rarely before the 1580s. One exception was the monumental high altar commissioned by Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria (r. 1550-79) for the Liebfrauenm�nster in Ingolstadt. Ordered in 1560 to commemorate the centennial of the University of Ingolstadt (1572), whose students worshipped in this church, it was the first true Counter-Reformation altarpiece in Germany. Hans Mielich, Albrecht’s court artist, spent about six years designing the ninety-one different paintings that he and his assistants made for the front and back of this polyptych. It displays a summa of Catholic faith with its insistent emphasis on the Virgin Mary, the church patroness, and, on the reverse, St Catherine of Alexandria, patron of students. In the central panel, the Virgin and Child with angels hover in the air just above the duke and his family. The sculpted Coronation of the Virgin by Hans W�rner (fl. 1576-81) concludes the narrative.