Master MS

Biography

Eight panels, each about three and a half metres high together with its wing of the altarpiece, once stood on the high altar of the Church of the Virgin Mary in Selmecbánya. Today that church has been built into the fortress known as the Old Castle, and the altarpiece itself has been dismantled.

Its author has no name.

The conventional name comes from the monogram “M + S” with which he signed his works. His activity is placed between 1500 and 1510. The only work confidently linked to him is the altarpiece of 1506 for Selmecbánya, one of the richest mining towns of Upper Hungary in the early sixteenth century (now Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia). For a long time the altarpiece was thought to have stood in the Church of Saint Catherine, but newer research assigns it to the Church of the Virgin Mary.

The paintings decorated the outer sides of the wings, so that worshippers saw them when the altarpiece was closed. The upper row consisted of four “joyful” events from the life of Christ: “The Annunciation”, “The Visitation” (the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth), “The Birth of Christ” and “The Adoration of the Magi”. “The Annunciation” is lost. “The Visitation” is in Budapest, in one of the national museums: the sources name either the Museum of Fine Arts or the Hungarian National Gallery. “The Birth of Christ” is kept in the church of the village of Svätý Anton (Szentantal), near Banská Štiavnica. “The Adoration of the Magi” has belonged since the late nineteenth century to the museum in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille. The lower row is devoted to the Passion: “Christ on the Mount of Olives”, “The Carrying of the Cross”, “The Crucifixion” and “The Resurrection”. All four are in the Christian Museum in Esztergom.

Three wood-carved, painted sculptures larger than life also survive from the same altarpiece. The Madonna stands in the Church of Saint Catherine in Banská Štiavnica, and the statues of Saint Catherine and Saint Barbara are shown in the gallery of the Slovak Mining Museum in the same town. The artist probably also worked on the sculptures, but to what extent is unknown. Scholars also dispute whether these figures belong to this altarpiece or to another one, from the Church of Saint Catherine. In the Old Castle a half-size model of the altarpiece is on display, with colour copies of all the known panels and fragments of carved decoration that, by all appearances, were part of the altarpiece.

Writers usually describe the style like this: drama and decorative colour, a kinship with Albrecht Dürer, the Danube School and above all Matthias Grünewald, echoes of Netherlandish painting of the late fifteenth century. It seems to me that such a list says more about how hard it is to find a place for this painter than about the painter himself.

Several names have been proposed. German historians most often name the Augsburg painter Jörg Breu the Elder, a representative of the Danube School. Others identify the master with the engraver Master MZ, usually thought to be the Munich goldsmith Matthäus Zaisinger; 22 engravings and three drawings survive from him, and he travelled to Rome in 1500, a Holy Year. In that case the Selmecbánya altarpiece would be his late and principal work. The reasoning is that among the artists of the mining towns of Hungary there seems to have been no painter of such calibre, so the altarpiece was possibly not painted on the spot. Against this stands a town document of 1507 that mentions a painter named Sebestyén: perhaps he is MS, and then he was a local master. The art historian Miklós Mojzer compared the Passion panels with the work of the painter Marten Swarcz, a companion of the carver Veit Stoss, and suggested that it was he. There is no final answer.