Intermedial Visions of Saint Gregory on Lübeck’s Corpus Christi Confraternity Altarpiece

This article uses the two overlapping images of Saint Gregory in painting and sculpture on the Corpus Christi Confraternity Altarpiece (1497) in Lübeck, Germany, to explore ritual and intermedial coordination in retable design. As the earliest known winged retable to have survived that contains two images of Saint Gregory celebrating Mass, the painted and sculpted images engage with one another to represent the corporeality of Christ across the altarpiece structure. Although conventionally called the Mass of Saint Gregory, recent scholarship has demonstrated the ways in which the Saint Gregory image tradition operates as a visionary picture. Opening the multi-media and -layered states of the Corpus Christi Confraternity Altarpiece, this article processes through the intermedial workflow that led to its making as well as the ritual setting from which it was seen. I argue that the complementary iconography and overlapping placement of the two images, in addition to the insertion of meta-retables, required the commissioned artisans to exploit the semantic potential of sacramental thresholds through preemptive viewing. The contracted executive producer, Henning van der Heide, and attributed painter, Wilm Dedeke, alongside their anonymous assistants, pictorially played with the potency of the Vision of Saint Gregory to enhance the dimensionalities and intermediality of winged retables for ritual use. Standing as the lone fifteenth century example, the Corpus Christi Confraternity Altarpiece shows the glories of the late medieval multimedia design before both the art form and its contained Visions of Saint Gregory were essentially discontinued during the Reformation

Altarpiece · Iconography · Incarnation · Painting · SAINT · Sculpture · Vision · Byzantine Studies and History · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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