82. Dirk Bouts,
Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament:
The Last Supper, 1464-c. 1467.

Oil on panel, 180 x 150 cm,

Sint-Pieterskerk, Louvain (Belgium).

 

 

The Cologne School

The beginnings of the new painting style in Cologne are closely connected to a certain Master Wilhelm (until 1378), who was in the services of Cologne’s council. He painted works of all kinds and sizes: wall paintings, images for standards and pennants, and miniatures for written books. For the times, his accomplishments must have been extraordinary, since a contemporary historian, the chronicler of the city of Limburg on Lahn, mentioned the artist and his works with an enthusiasm not typical for a chronicler.

 

“There was none like him in all of Christendom,” he said, and added, “He painted everyone, as though they were alive.” And yet imitation of reality was not the aim of and reason for the Cologne school of painting; instead, its members tried to remove nature from the harshness of reality with poetic idealism. Of Master Wilhelm’s own works only a few are preserved in the upper hall of the town hall. The heads of his Nine Worthies, which he painted as ideals worth emulating, are today housed in the museum of Cologne. However, many of the panel paintings which are preserved were created either by him or later students from the painting school that he founded. If he himself had no hand in these paintings, then his spirit certainly endures in them. With the exception of a large altarpiece from Klarakirche (St. Claire Church) in Cologne that depicts the life of Christ (now in Cologne Cathedral), they are all small devotional pictures which were painted as décor for the altars in the house chapels of Cologne patricians. Extensive carving work of architectural character would have been out of place in these tight spaces.