Altarpiece from the Lutheran Church in Șmig

Around 1510 this altarpiece was carved and painted for a small Saxon village church in Șmig, in the hills of Transylvania. The village was still Catholic then, and the whole thing was built for the Mass: hinged wings that opened on feast days to reveal a carved Virgin Mary at the center, and closed again the rest of the year. Within a generation everything around it changed. Following the reformer Johannes Honterus of Brașov, the Transylvanian Saxons turned Lutheran through the middle of the 16th century. In much of Protestant Europe that shift meant whitewashed walls and broken statues. Here it did not. The Saxon parishes mostly left their medieval altars standing, which is the reason this one survived at all. It was set aside only at the end of the 19th century, when a newer altar showing Christ replaced it, and eventually lent to the museum in Bucharest in the 1950s, where its carved Virgin still stands at the center of the shrine.