Two altarpiece wings with the Martyrdom of the Apostles, after 1435

About the Work

Stefan Lochner is fifteenth-century Cologne’s most important painter. These two altarpiece wings were once in the city’s Church of St Lawrence. What were originally their outer sides are now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. They probably once formed a retable with the ‘Last Judgement’ at the Cologne Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. The Frankfurt panels testify as much to Lochner’s ingenious staging as to his obsession with realistic detail. In the case of the martyrdoms, he does not shy away even from the depiction of shocking cruelty – one need only consider, for example, the flaying of Bartholomew.