The Grudziądz Polyptych
Unknown, Master of the Grudziądz Polyptych · About 1390
A folding altarpiece of painted panels opens to show scene after scene of the life of Christ and the Virgin in glowing colour against gold. On the panel shown here the angel Gabriel, with pink wings, kneels before Mary at the Annunciation, and the words of his greeting, Ave Maria, are written on a scroll between them. The figures are slender and elegant, with tiny hands and sweet, rounded faces, and the fabrics fall in soft, looping folds. This is the International Gothic style at its most refined, made in Prussia around 1390 for the chapel of the Teutonic Knights' castle at Grudziądz on the Vistula.
A polyptych has several pairs of wings that open in stages, so that the altar could show different pictures on ordinary days, on Sundays and on great feasts. Fully open, this one displays the Passion and the Coronation of the Virgin; the outer wings carry scenes of the Virgin's life. Look at the gold backgrounds, punched with patterns that catch the candlelight, and at the details of daily life, the beds, the tiled floors and the little windows, which show what a Prussian castle interior looked like in the fourteenth century. The painter is unknown and is called simply the Master of the Grudziądz Polyptych; he may have trained in Bohemia, where the court of Prague produced the finest painting in Central Europe at that time.
The altarpiece stayed in Grudziądz for centuries and came to the museum after the Second World War. It is the most important surviving painting from the state of the Teutonic Order, the same order that Matejko shows being crushed at Grunwald upstairs, and one of the best preserved Gothic altarpieces in Poland.
Did You Know? The Teutonic Knights who commissioned the altarpiece were defeated at Grunwald twenty years after it was painted; Matejko's picture of that battle hangs one floor above.
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