Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Master Pertoldus (possibly Berthold Schauer)
Austrian; 15th-century
New York, NY: The Met Cloisters
85%
Triptych with Scenes from the Passion of Christ. 1494. Silver, gilded silver, mother-of-pearl, bone, and cold enamel (attributed to Master Pertoldus)
The interior is mother-of-pearl on gilded silver and the exterior features scenes engraved into the same metal, plus there's the decorated stand, the medallions, and the gilt knobby crest. While there's an endearing crowding and blockishness to the depictions both carved and engraved, this piece's high aesthetic value comes not from any of its rendered portions (which are insubstantial on their own terms) but from the intricate relations between its many disparate parts. The silver Jesus figurine in the crowning segment, for instance, twists in the opposite direction of the crucified Christ just below him, formally involving these two separate sections of the object with each other; in the engravings on the piece's recto, the Last Supper scene is packed to the brim but there are all sorts of emptinesses in the peripheral tableaux (mostly in the form of unembellished silver grounds) that give some air to the image-conglomerate as a whole; features of the engravings on the object's base imitate the literal trusses and spires that make up its apex. The result is, despite the amalgam of material and formats (picture, sculpture, functional object) a remarkable unity of structure. (TFS, 2025)