The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin

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The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Albrecht Durer

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Albrecht Durer Oil Painting - The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin

Keywords: Sorrows, Virgin

Work Overview: Seven Sorrows Polyptych
Artist Albrecht Dürer
Year c. 1500
Medium Oil on panel
Dimensions 189 cm × 138 cm (74 in × 54 in)
Location Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

The Seven Sorrows Polyptych is an oil on panel painting by Albrecht Dürer. The painting includes a central picture (108 x 43 cm), currently at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and seven surrounding panels (measuring some 60 x 46 cm) which are exhibited at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister of Dresden.

The work was commissioned by Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, not a long time after his meeting with Dürer at Nuremberg in April 1496. Stylistic considerations suggest that the artist started to work on the painting only from around 1500.

Modern scholars tend to attribute to Dürer only the central panel, the others having been executed by his pupils based on his drawings. The central panel, portraying the Sorrowing Mother, arrived in the Bavarian museum from the Benediktbeuren convent of Munich in the early 19th century. It was restored in the 1930s: once the overpaintings and additions were removed, the shell-shaped niche (a motif typical of Italian art), the halo and the sword (a symbol of Mary of the Seven Sorrows) on the right were rediscovered, clarifying the subject of the work.

The other panels were at Wittenberg, seat of Frederick's castle. In 1640 they were moved to the Kunstkammer of the Prince of Saxony. In the mid-20th century they were restored: their conditions improved, but the attribution was not cleared.

Dürer's earliest known altarpiece may well have been commissioned by Frederick the Wise for his palace church at Wittenberg. It was probably ordered in April 1496, when Dürer painted his portrait. A payment of 100 florins was made to the artist at the end of the year for the altarpiece.

The altarpiece was originally very large, nearly two metres high and nearly three metres wide. The right half, representing the Seven Joys of the Virgin, is now missing and only the left half of the Seven Sorrows survives. The central part of the surviving wing depicts the grieving Virgin after the Crucifixion, with a golden sword about to pierce her heart. Around the Virgin are seven smaller panels with detailed scenes from the life of Christ (anticlockwise from top left): the Circumcision, the Flight into Egypt, the 12 year-old Christ among the Doctors, the Bearing of the Cross, the Nailing to the Cross, the Crucifixion and the Lamentation.

The altarpiece was made in Dürer's newly established workshop and although it was made to his design, some of it may have been painted by assistants. Dürer's pen and ink study survives of the man drilling a hole in the Cross in the lower right panel of the Nailing to the Cross.

The whole altarpiece was acquired in the mid-sixteenth century by the artist Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515-86), whose distinguished father had served as court painter in Wittenberg. It was probably Cranach the Younger who sawed the work into separate panels. The panel of the grieving Virgin (which at some point was reduced in size by 18 centimetres at the top) is now in Munich and those of the Seven Sorrows are in Dresden. The right half of the altarpiece representing the Seven Joys is known only through copies.

This panel is a monumental picture depicting Mary as the Mother of Sorrows. It was severely damaged in an attack when acid was thrown at it in 1988, and ten years have been spent restoring it. It is the central picture of the seven scenes from the Passion which are in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. The work was presumably ordered by Elector Frederick the Wise for the Wittenberg university chapel. Mary's arms are crossed and she is looking up in suffering, while a sword that is threateningly close to her heart is approaching, a symbol of her agonizing pain caused by the sufferings of Christ, narrated on either side in the scenes from the Passion. As a sign of her virginity, Mary is wearing a white cloth and a heavy blue garment, the colour which refers to her status as the Queen of Heaven.

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Albrecht Durer

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