Volume 47, Number 6 · April 13, 2000
A Wistful Master
By John Updike
Tilman Riemenschneider: Master Sculptor of the Late Middle Ages October 3, 1999-January 9, 2000; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 10-May 14, 2000. Yale University Press)
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,, Catalog of the exhibition by Julien Chapuis
National Gallery of Art/Metropolitan Museum of Art, (distributed by, 352 pp., $65.00
The Metropolitan Museum's current exhibition of the sculpture of Tilman Riemenschneider and some contemporaries is, I would guess, the most exquisite package to arrive on these shores from pre-modern Northern Europe since the Vermeer show at Washington's National Gallery in 1995-1996. As with the Vermeer, there is a problem of seeing. The Vermeer paintings, though most of the twenty-three had a wall to themselves, were hard to glimpse through the scrum of art lovers in front of each; and, once a view had been obtained, it was hard to maintain it for more than a moment in the press of bodies. The Riemenschneider exhibit is besieged by no such throngs, but its elements, ingeniously mounted through seven spacious chambers, pose in acute form the perennial visual problem of sculpture: From what angle is it best, or most appropriately, viewed?
Review, 2765 words
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