Vision and Reality

In this Gallery one can feel the enormous tension which accompanied people’s lives during the late Middle Ages, an era of change. On the one side was the daily reality that surrounded them: human environments from the town and country crept into the altarpieces in the form of backgrounds (see Gallery 7). On the other side there was the prospect of life after death. This was linked with hopes of eternal life in Paradise, but also with fears of punishment in Hell’s fires.

The painters developed specific forms and ideas to depict these opposites. One ingenious Cologne painter “portrayed” the river and land sides of his home town in the front and rear sides of a panel. But for a visionary subject, the apparition of Mary and Jesus, that same artist used a number of large, rounded forms. They are arranged rhythmically, or indeed almost musically in his composition. A comparison between this “Glorification of the Virgin” and the neighbouring paintings reveals that such large, rounded forms were in fact a highly popular means of depicting mysterious and mystical visions of the end of time.

Unlike people today, history was not regarded in the Middle Ages as flowing ever onward. The understanding of historical at that time was “teleological”, which is to say, directed towards a goal. The goal and simultaneously the end of history was the Last Judgement and the Apocalypse, the Resurrection of Humankind, and the descent of the New Jerusalem (paradise) to Earth. This serves as the common denominator of the quite diverse paintings in this gallery: the “portrait” of the City of Cologne depicts the city beneath a golden sky – as the image and anticipation of the New Jerusalem: a city as paradise…