Catalogue Roberti Fine Art, TEFAF Maastricht 2026 (1) compressed - Flipbook - Page 23
The text of the Brandenburg Hours reinforces its confessional positioning. It contains
numerous references to indulgences authorised by popes, creating a cumulative
assertion of papal prerogative. Its iconography likewise emphasises episcopal and papal
authority. Produced in 1522–23, at the very moment Luther publicly rejected the
authority of Rome, the manuscript emerges not merely as a devotional object but as a
deliberate statement of Catholic identity.
Albrecht’s historical importance is equally bound to his extraordinary artistic patronage.
He cultivated one of the most sophisticated courts north of the Alps, commissioning
works from Lucas Cranach the Elder, who produced numerous portraits that fashioned
the cardinal’s public image with calculated humanist refinement. He also secured the
services of Albrecht Dürer, whose engraved portrait of 1523 projects both spiritual
gravity and intellectual authority. Among other major artists associated with his
patronage was Matthias Grünewald, whose monumental altarpieces for Halle
exemplified the continued vitality of late Gothic expressiveness within a princely
ecclesiastical context.
Through these commissions, together with an ambitious programme of relic collecting
and church decoration, Albrecht deployed art as a vehicle of confessional identity. His
patronage asserted the splendour, continuity, and visual authority of the Roman Church
at the very moment its doctrinal foundations were under unprecedented attack.
Albrecht’s engagement with Simon Bening was neither isolated nor incidental.
Approximately five years after the execution of the present Hours, he commissioned
from the Bruges master a Passion Prayerbook comprising forty-one miniatures (now Los
Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig IX.9), explicitly Catholic in tone. In the 1530s
he returned to Bening once more for a further Book of Hours, today in Stockholm
(Kungliga Biblioteket, cod. A.227), fragments of which survive elsewhere. These
successive commissions reveal a sustained and purposeful relationship between patron
and illuminator. The present manuscript is the earliest and most sumptuous of the
group.
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