Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Hans von Kulmbach (Hans Süss)
German; 16th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
77%
Mary Salome and Zebedee with their Sons James the Greater and John the Evangelist. c1511. Oil on panel
It speaks to its limitations as an art that, often, we're forced to seek out the value of Northern painting in the places where it muddled or even debased its Italian models. This piece looks like Raphael's Madonna of the Meadow after it's been beaten against rocks — where, in Raphael's picture, the toddling kid on the right, straight-backed, firms up Mary's leg as it climbs to support the pyramid of her whole solid form, here the boy, breaking at the waist, pushes the central triangle apart and to the left (and the baby on her lap responds by bursting through the structure's left edge). Plus, there's the tilt to the column in the background (to which Zebedee responds by standing stock straight) and the strange way the floor, cut up by Salome's robes, falls forward towards the bottom edge of the picture. To the extent that these deficiencies are not actually deficiencies but aspects of a perverting sensibility, Kulmbach's scene is a success. (Worth noticing: the shard of green robe that pokes out from pink at lower left.) (TFS, 2025)