Collection presentation: Bern's Lost Altar. Niklaus Manuel and the Panels of Dominican Church in Bern
The Museum of Fine Arts, Berne, and what today is called the Französische Kirche (French church) share a special bond. Not only did the church's presbytery house the first Museum of the Fine Arts Berne from 1849, before the latter institution acquired a building of its own. Also three panels of Bern’s leading artist of early modern times, Niklaus Manuel, alias Deutsch, are part of the Berne’s Museum of Fine Arts Collection. We presume that these panels, together with two further ones at the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Kunstmuseum Basel, belonged to the high altar of this former Dominican church. The circumstances that enabled the survival of a larger part of the altarpiece panels in their present state at the Museum of Fine Arts, Berne, are very closely linked to Berne’s history in early modern times and one of the most dramatic cultural upheavals to affect Europe.
Research today acknowledges that the three panels were formerly part of an altarpiece. The fact that a relationship between the panels was ever the subject of academic debate, however, is a result of the fate of this set of paintings on which the exhibition is focusing. The process of a loss of correlation between individual panels is not a matter of course and is instead tied to a fundamental reassignment of the paintings. The exhibition zeroes in on precisely this process of redefining pictures, the metamorphosis of altarpiece panels into individual works of art.
Manuel’s panels at the Museum of Fine Arts, Berne, were originally not considered individual artworks but parts of a kind of “sacred piece of furniture” that fulfilled specific functions in Christian practice and worship. If we dare to believe that a reconstruction of the high altarpiece of Berne’s former Dominican Church was possible, at the very least one of the outer panels together with the complete centerpiece of carved figures have been lost. The rest has been passed down to us in a more or less fragmentary state. The painted panels that have survived did so not as visual instruments serving Catholic religious practices but as works of art by Niklaus Manuel. This mode of interpretation secured their existence as objects of European material culture. The panels were detached from the altarpiece structure, which is now lost, and individually framed, sold, and preserved. As a leading masterpiece of Bernese art from around 1500 and by the city’s leading artist, the panels were purchased for the Museum of Fine Arts, Berne, by the Gottfried Keller Foundation and Berne’s Burgergemeinde.
