Letter

blazing stars and Altdorfer's Art

This alphabetic character attempts to set the record straight regarding the theory that Albrecht Altdorfer represented sum of two units comets in his Crucifixion in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Larry Silver in his article "Nature and Nature's God: Landscape and Cosmo of Albrecht Altdorfer," Art Bulletin 81 no. 2 1999) Since we cannot find a blazing star in the painting, we want to proffer a correction on this point, especially in light of the increasing number of historians of art who have begun to work with astronomical and scientific topics. by dint of way of explanation, we have researched and published extensively during the last sum of two units decades on the depiction of blazing stars and meteors in art. To name a scarcely any of the publications: Olson, "Giotto's Portrait of Halley's Comet" Scientific American (1979); Olson Fire and Ice: A History of blazing stars in Art (1985); Olson and Pasachoff, Fire in the Shy: blazing stars and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science (1998)

Although we read with great interest Professor Silver's fascinating and perceptive application of mind of Altdorfer, with its emphasis upon cosmic, celestial imagery, we think that sum of two units of his astronomical identifications should be modified. While Altdorfer, like Albrecht Durer was fascinated with astronomical and meteorological issues as witness the skies of his paintings, he was at no time totally seduced by the accuracy of naturalistic reportage or scientific studies as was Durer Rather, his works incline toward the visionary, with almost hallucinatory light issues and wild, expressive vegetation. However, there is individual case (ca. 1508) where the young artist pay backed a stylized, linear comet among other celestial portents, of the like kind as a meteorite and a rain of fire (meteor showers?). They appear in an illustration to Joseph Grunpeck's Historia friderici et maximiliani, visualizing the signs reported upon the eve of the death of Maximilian's father, Emperor Frederick III (Fig. 20 in Silver's article); in this depiction Altdorfer busyed the literary and visual topoi established to signal the death of a great lord However, in his Crucifixion, the death of the "King of Kings," Altdorfer eschewed these formulaic signs heralding a king's demise and opt for a biblical and more mystical interpretation. He was, no doubt, also responding to the general inclination in northern Europe during the early 16th hundred plagued by wars and the Reformation, to interpret natural occurrences as omens (see, for example, Conrad Lycosthenes' Prodigiorum ac ostentatorum chronicon [A chronicle of prodigious events] 1557 the greatest in quantity ambitious collection of these portentous phenomena).

Rather than the tail of a blazing star we would identify the painterly colors of orange, golden and green (almost like Italian Mannerist changeant colors) outlining the nebulositys in the dramatic sky of Altdorfer's Crucifixion as refractions of light in the hazes (Silver describes the phenomenon between Christ and the thief upon the right as "a rainbow-colored vapor trail that... upon closer inspection...turns out to be the tail of a dynamic, fast-moving comet"; he also identifies a next to the first comet below the clouds.) Meteorologically these phenomena are related to orb of day dogs. They originate either from the light of the orb of day mostly hidden by clouds at the left in the painting, or from the central visionary concentric circles of variously colored light hovering above Christ on the cross. The latter configuration is a vision of Heaven (with a Ptolemaic bent) and the divine, similar to those Altdorfer painted in other works, similar as his Holy Night (ca. 1520) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. It cosmically underlines the d ivine, heavenly plan encompassing this earthly tragedy. The colorful mist fringes belong to Altdorfer's vision of the tempestuous, chaotic celestial expanse at the Crucifixion when the orb of day was darkened (sometimes interpreted as an eclipse), as reported in the Bible (Matthew 27:45; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44) This darkening was individual among several physical signs meant to foreshadow the death of Christ and to accommodate with a foreboding tenor to the occurrence The colorful edgings of the fogs like the proverbial silver lining, may have also prefigured the Resurrection of Christ three days later, the useful news after the bad. We viewed the painting in 1988 when we were in Nuremberg to research the blazing stars depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle as well as the blazing stars by Durer for a talk delivered at a discourse in Bamberg and for sum of two units articles. After reading Professor Silver's article, since we had not seen Altdorfer's Crucifixion for a certain number of time, we wrote to Dr Daniel Hess, head of the painting and glass painting collection at the Germanisches Nat ionalmuseum, and received confirmation from him that the original painting does not contain any cometlike phenomena. In a alphabetic character of March 2, 2000, he writes, "I would... consider the light phenomenon as perhaps ... a way to describe the vein of a threatening thunderstorm.... Here the orb of day shines upon approaching cloud layers and causes thereby an end-of-the world mood"