Konrad Witz, the Painter Who Moved the Sea of Galilee to Lake Geneva

Konrad Witz

Photo: Konrad Witz / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1400 Rottweil
Died	1445
Occupation	Painter

In a museum in Geneva hangs a panel in which Christ stands on a shore that any local can name. The apostles haul their net across water that is plainly Lake Geneva, the hills of Cologny rise behind them, and the sharp cone of the Môle sits where painters before him had put an invented Galilee. Konrad Witz painted it, signed the frame, and all but vanished. That signature is the hinge of his story: nearly everything art history now credits to him has been reasoned outward from one inscribed strip of wood.

He was a Swabian who made his name in Basel, and the city’s timing made him. A church council had turned the Rhine town into a crossroads of cardinals and their money. His painting looked like nothing else on the Upper Rhine: stocky, heavy figures who seem carved rather than drawn, armour and goldsmith work catching a hard light, shadows falling across floors as if the room had a real window. Scholars trace much of that to Jan van Eyck and the Flemish masters, whose work he appears to have studied at first hand.

The documents are thin but exact. He was born around 1400, probably in Rottweil, the son of a painter named Hans Witz, who likely gave him his first training. A journey through the Netherlands is treated as near-certain by the Neue Deutsche Biographie; a study trip to Italy remains a hypothesis. On 21 June 1434 the Basel guild Zum Himmel, which took in the city’s painters, admitted him as Konrad von Rottweil. He became a citizen in January 1435 and in 1443 bought a house in the city. He married Ursula von Wangen, niece of the painter Niklaus Rüsch; they had five children.

His first major work, the Heilspiegel Altarpiece of about 1435, was probably made for the Augustinian church of St Leonhard in Basel. Its programme came from the Speculum humanae salvationis, a medieval devotional book pairing Old Testament episodes with the life of Christ. It was later sawn apart, and the surviving panels are divided between the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the museum in Dijon.

In 1444 Witz went to Geneva. Bishop François de Metz had ordered a new high altarpiece for the cathedral of Saint-Pierre, known today as the St. Peter Altarpiece, and Witz painted its wings: on the outside, the miraculous catch of fish and the liberation of Peter from prison; on the inside, the Adoration of the Magi and the kneeling bishop presented by Saint Peter to the Virgin. The frame of the fishing scene carries the line that would rescue him, “hoc opus pinxit magister conradus sapientis de basilea”, followed by the year in Roman numerals. Sapientis is simply his surname in Latin dress.

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes is the reason his name survives outside specialist circles. Witz moved the Gospel episode from the Sea of Galilee to the Geneva harbour, painting the hillside of Cologny, the Voirons, the Môle and the Petit-Salève, with Mont Blanc beyond; the pilings in the water belonged to a Geneva suburb, and a small troop of horsemen in the distance rides under the banner of Savoy. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes it as the first time in Western art that a religious scene was set in a precisely drawn, real landscape. The water is a study in optics: the boat and the fishermen’s clothes are mirrored on its surface, the shallows show the lake bed, and Christ alone casts no reflection.

The view was not innocent. According to the same dictionary, it nodded to Felix V, the former Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy, whom the council in Basel had elected as a rival pope. A fishermen’s miracle on Savoyard water flattered a patron’s politics. The wings outlived the iconoclasm that reached Geneva in 1535, when the altarpiece was dismantled, and they now hang in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire.

The trouble is how much of Konrad Witz is inference. Only the Geneva wings are signed. From them, scholars have assigned more than twenty paintings to his hand, and the edges of that catalogue keep moving. A lamentation over the dead Christ in the Frick Collection in New York, once given to him, is now catalogued as the work of his circle; the art historian Charles Sterling reassigned it, together with a Holy Family in Naples and a Calvary in Berlin, to Hans Witz, a painter active in Savoy whose relationship to Konrad has never been settled. Even the Basel altarpiece is an attribution built from the style of the Geneva panels, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie speaks of a productive workshop, which leaves open how many hands the Witz manner contains. Accounts of his legacy disagree too: the Swiss dictionary says he marked German and Savoyard painting for good, while other surveys describe a man with little effect on German art until his rediscovery. The pioneer of the northern landscape is, in part, a construction of modern connoisseurship.

What remains is a handful of panels with an unmistakable grip on space, among them Saint Christopher in Basel and an Annunciation in Nuremberg, where a wedge of shadow falls from the frame into the corner, a device the Neue Deutsche Biographie traces to the van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece. In Saints Catherine and Mary Magdalene, in Strasbourg, two saints sit on the floor of a church nave whose aisle runs back to an open door, and through it a street with a shop goes on with its day.

He did not live long after Geneva. His wife appears as a widow in accounts from 1445 to 1447, so he died around 1445, probably in Basel. Then he dropped out of memory for more than four centuries. The Basel historian Daniel Burckhardt linked the Geneva signature to the guild’s Konrad von Rottweil, and his monograph of 1901 put Witz back into the history of art.

In 2011 the Kunstmuseum Basel gathered the surviving work in an exhibition curated by Bodo Brinkmann, with technical study of the panels, and in 2013 Frédéric Elsig and Cäsar Menz published a volume on the conservation of the Geneva altarpiece. More recently the fishing scene left the museum altogether: a photomontage by Jean Stern reinterpreting it was mounted on the Temple de la Fusterie in Geneva during the church’s restoration.

The lake is still there. The Môle still rises exactly where Witz put it, which is more than any attribution list can promise. His argument was that a sacred story could happen in a place the viewer could walk to, and European painting has been making that argument ever since.

Tags: art, artists, painters, Konrad Witz, François de Metz, Heilspiegel Altarpiece