The German Renaissance, room by room, at the Thyssen

A private collection, two generations, a taste for the German primitives

The first baron, Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1875-1947), began buying systematically in the 1920s, after settling in the Netherlands. His stated ambition was to build "a collection as broad as those of the great German museums," on the model of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. In 1930, more than 400 paintings from his collection were shown at the Neue Pinakothek under the name "Sammlung Schloss Rohoncz" — after the family castle in Hungary (now Rechnitz, in Austria), which in fact never housed the works but lent them its name in the catalogues of the day. It was in these years, 1928-1937, that most of the German primitives now on display in Madrid were acquired: dismembered altarpieces, panels scattered since the secularisation of German monasteries in the nineteenth century, bought back piece by piece from galleries in Munich, Frankfurt or Vienna.

When the first baron died in 1947, the collection was partly dispersed among his heirs. His younger son, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921-2002), spent much of the 1950s reassembling it by buying back from his own brothers and sisters, before turning his acquisitions toward modern art from 1961 onward. In the 1980s, seeking a place able to house the whole collection permanently — Switzerland having refused to fund the extension of the Villa Favorita, his residence in Lugano — he signed an agreement in 1988 with the Spanish State to deposit 775 works at the Palacio de Villahermosa in Madrid, opposite the Prado. The museum opened in October 1992, after the building was renovated by the architect Rafael Moneo. Eight months later, in June 1993, the Spanish State bought the entire collection for 350 million dollars: only at that point did the paintings brought together by the two barons become a public collection. The artists themselves therefore have no connection to the Thyssen family — the family assembled them in the twentieth century, four to five hundred years after they were painted.

1. Room 2 — the primitives of Bavaria and Westphalia

Room 2 brings together what the first baron bought first of all: panels detached from fifteenth-century German altarpieces, most of them long since dismembered before reaching the Munich art market. The small Holy Face triptych (Master of Minden, known as Master Bertram, active in Hamburg around 1390-1400) is the most striking example: its side wings were bought in 1929, shown in Munich in 1930, and the central panel only joined them in 1931 — three separate transactions to reassemble an object of private devotion barely thirty centimetres high.

Nearby, Gabriel Mälesskircher, a painter and later a Munich city councillor in the late fifteenth century, is represented by panels from the evangelists' altarpiece painted for the Benedictine abbey of Tegernsee — a monastic commission of the fifteenth century, with no connection whatsoever to the Thyssens, who bought it in 1928 from the Hackenbroch gallery in Frankfurt after it had left the monastery at the 1803 secularisation. The contrast with Johann Koerbecke, active in Münster and influenced by the Flemish masters, shows just how regional German painting still was in this period: every panel bears the stamp of its workshop and its town, with no dominant school yet able to unify the style, as Dürer's generation would do a generation later.

2. Room 6 — a Swabian altarpiece and the beginnings of court portraiture

Room 6 holds a set of panels painted around 1515 by an anonymous artist active in Swabia, from an altarpiece commissioned for the monastery of Obermarchtal by its abbot, Simon Götz (in office from 1482 to 1514): he appears kneeling beneath a figure of Saint Anne, identifiable by his coat of arms held by a putto. The ensemble was dismantled in the nineteenth century — the usual fate of this kind of German altarpiece once monastic commissions were dispersed after secularisation.

In the same room, the Portrait of Johann von Rückingen (?) by Wolfgang Beurer, dated 24 April 1487 on the lower edge of the frame, shows a genre in the process of settling into its own: the individual portrait, still rare in Germany at this date, contemporary with the early stages of a tradition that would culminate with Dürer and Cranach a generation later. A visitor coming from Room 2 can measure the shift here: the collective altarpiece gives way to the identified face — a shift that points directly toward the portraits of Room 9.

3. Room 8 — Derick Baegert and the dismembered Wesel altarpiece

In 1477, the Nikolauskirche in Wesel, on the Rhine, paid Derick Baegert 370 Rhenish florins for a Crucifixion altarpiece. Five panels from this ensemble are now in Madrid, but they did not arrive together: The Good Centurion entered the collection before 1929, Soldiers Casting Lots for Christ's Robe in 1934, Saint Veronica in 1936, The Carrying of the Cross in 1937 — the first four bought by Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza — and Mary Magdalene only in 1952, that one acquired by his son Hans Heinrich. A single altarpiece, dismembered in the nineteenth century, pieced back together over nearly a quarter century by two generations of collectors: a good illustration of the patience required to reassemble a set once it has left its place of origin.

Baegert's handling, as a painter active on the lower Rhine, still owes much to contemporary Flemish painting — angular figures, dense colours, frontal staging — at a date when Italy had not yet inflected German painting. It is a useful point of comparison before moving on, in Room 9, to a generation that absorbed the lessons of the Italian Renaissance without giving up this precision of detail.

4. Room 9 — Cranach, Baldung Grien and Holbein the Elder

Room 9 is the densest in well-known names. Lucas Cranach the Elder's Portrait of the Emperor Charles V, dated 1533, anchors it: a court painter in Wittenberg for forty-five years, in the successive service of three electors of Saxony including Frederick the Wise, Cranach was also a personal friend of Martin Luther — he was a witness at his wedding and became godfather to his daughter — and the favoured portraitist of the Reformation's leading figures from 1517 onward. This portrait of Charles V, with no idealisation whatsoever (prominent jaw, marked lower lip), applies to the opposing camp of the Reformation the same stripped-down bust format on a plain ground that Cranach had perfected for Luther and his circle. The painting comes from the Von Wallenberg collection in Silesia, before entering the Thyssen collection in 1933.

A few metres away, Hans Baldung Grien's Adam and Eve (1531) is a reminder that this painter was a pupil, then a trusted collaborator, of Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg: put in charge of the workshop when Dürer left for Italy between 1505 and 1507, he remained bound to him until his death by a friendship documented through their exchanges of prints. The painting, acquired by the Thyssens in 1929 from the Julius Böhler gallery in Munich, had only been known to specialists since 1916. Finally, the two small portraits by Hans Holbein the Elder (around 1518-1520) are worth a useful clarification: this Holbein is not the painter of Henry VIII — he is his father, head of a workshop in Augsburg, whose sons Ambrosius and Hans the Younger first worked as assistants before the latter became one of the great names of the German Renaissance. Late in his career, father and son even worked on shared commissions where it is hard to tell their hands apart — a sign that this artistic lineage is more than a biographical footnote.

How much time

The four rooms follow one another on Level 2 and are best visited in sequence: the primitives of Room 2 set the context, Rooms 6 and 8 show the transition, Room 9 concentrates the most recognisable names. Allow a little under an hour for the whole if you stop at each work mentioned here.

Room 2 (Master Bertram, Mälesskircher, Koerbecke) — 15 minutes.
Room 6 (Swabian altarpiece, Beurer) — 10 minutes.
Room 8 (Baegert) — 10 minutes.
Room 9 (Cranach, Baldung Grien, Holbein the Elder) — 20 minutes.

Sources and verification

The dates, techniques, dimensions and provenances cited below have been checked against the artwork records on the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza website (museothyssen.org) and cross-checked with the pages devoted to the history of the collection.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.