The retable for the high altar of the church of St. Nicolai in Kalkar was to be the crowning achievement of Master Arnt’s œuvre. He received the com mission for the piece from the provisors of the Confraternity of Our Lady in 1488.
The preliminary plan was for an enormous relief depicting a busy Crucifixion scene. Similar to the St. George altarpiece, this scene was embedded in a landscape featuring numerous other scenes from the Passion, including Christ Praying on the Mount of Olives, the Arrest, the Bearing of the Cross, the Deposition from the Cross and the Entombment of Christ.
In addition, a framework of smallscale scenes depicted the appearances of the risen Christ. In the pedestal area, also known as the predella, three scenes illustrated the events that immediately preceded the Passion: the triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and Christ washing the disciples’ feet. The shrine itself is 4.20 metres high and 4.05 metres wide.
While the local joiners in Kalkar, the “kistemeker”, were already putting up the empty shrine casing with unpainted wing panels at Easter in 1491, Master Arnt was beginning to carve the artwork in his workshop in Zwolle. When he unexpectedly died at Christmas in 1491, he had already finished one scene for the predella, Christ washing the disciples’ feet, and had started work on other scenes for the shrine’s central composition. However, the piece was far from complete.
The news of his death meant that his patrons in Kalkar were faced with a difficult problem.
The pieces that had already been started were immediately brought to Kalkar from Master Arnt’s workshop in Zwolle. However, as one failed meeting with prospective replacements followed the next, the search for a successor dragged out over several years. In 1498, Jan van Halderen was commissioned to carve the scenes of the Entry into Jerusalem and the Last Supper for the predella.
However, the patrons were apparently not satisfied with the results. In the pieces on exhibit here, it is easy to recognise the differences in quality between the vibrant characters carved by Master Arnt for the scene of Christ washing the apostles’ feet and the more uniform figures of the other two scenes. Finally, Ludwig Jupan of Marburg, who was known as “Meister Loedewig” in Kalkar, agreed to complete the large relief depicting the Passion. The scene of the Mount of Olives at top left is attributed solely to him, but it is more difficult to separate his style from that of Master Arnt’s workshop in the other scenes.
Of the thirty panel paintings that had initially been planned for the wings of the altar in addition to the carvings for the retable, twenty were finally carried out by Jan Joest, a painter native to Wesel, in 1506/08. However, although the original plan had been to paint the sculptures on the high altar, this never came to fruition.
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