512

Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft

by Altdorfer, representing the "schöne Maria".1) The approach to the chapel is
protected by a tiled porch or penthouse supported by wooden posts, to which numerous
votive offerings are attached. In an open space before the chapel, Haidenreich's statue,
which does not represent the "schöne Maria" herself in the costume that she wears
in several engravings and woodcuts by Altdorfer, stands upon a column, on the shaft
of which votive candles are fastened upon spikes or nails.
Before this column, on one side only, that furthest removed from the chapel,
is erected a wrought-iron rail with a ledge of stone or wood for the use of kneeling
worshippers. Through the open door a picture of the Beautiful Virgin may be
discerned at the far end of the chapel. The actual "Schöne Maria", the statue in whose
honour the building was dedicated, is hidden in the interior. Round the chapel may
be seen in the background ruins of the recently demolished Jewish quarter.
Even more interesting, however, than the topographical features of the woodcut
is the vivacious picture that it presents of a crowd actuated by fanatical enthusiasm.
Round the statue is a group of devotees, clasping the column in their arms, raising
their hands towards it, or throwing themselves prostrate on the ground. Four men,
overcome either by illness or by a paroxysm of religious mania, lie on the ground
nearer than this group, and a woman kneels beside them, praying. On the left we
see the rear of a procession of men, armed with spears and pikes, who pass out of
sight round the outside of the chapel.
On the right the front of the procession comes into view, headed by a banner-
bearer and a youth carrying an enormous candle with the Bavarian arms on a
(printed?) sheet attached to it. Young girls follow, wearing wreaths and crowns, two
of them carrying tapers; then another banner-bearer precedes the clergy, who carry
reliquaries. Near the group of maidens two women support a girl who is, apparently,
becoming rigid in an access of frenzy. At the door of the chapel two streams of
pilgrims converge and pass into the interior. They consist chiefly of peasant women,
carrying pitchforks, rakes, pails, sickles and the like, in accordance with the text of
the 1610 edition, which describes how the country people left their work without
pausing to lay down their tools, and hastened, heedless of food or sleep, to the
shrine. On the left we see a knight in armour, and two men wearing hair shirts.
On the side wall of an out-house on the left, which has a small chimney, may be
seen, in the finest impressions, Ostendorfer's monogram in its earliest form, in which
the 0 is attached to the outside of one of the upright lines of the M.2) Dürer's
note written upon an early impression of this woodcut, now preserved at Coburg, is
too well known to need repetition. 3)
Far inferior to the large sheet as a work of art, but yet of a certain in-

9 Friedländer, p. 52.

2) Passavant, Nagler and Friedländer sag that the woodcut is unsigned; they cannot have
seen a sharp impression. In the two later impressions in the British Museum the monogram
is unrecognisable, and even in the earliest it is not distinct.

8) See G. Kinkel in Zeitschr. f. bild. Kunst, 1881, XVI. 334, Lange u. Fuhse, p. 381.