Draft for the Framework of the Former High Altar Retable of St. Martin in Messkirch

In the 1530s, while reformers across southern Germany were stripping the images out of churches, Count Gottfried Werner von Zimmern was doing the opposite. He had just rebuilt the church of St. Martin in his small town of Meßkirch, and he ordered it filled with painted altars. This sheet is the working plan for the grandest of them, the high altar. It sets out the carpentry and the architecture that would frame the great panel of the Adoration of the Magi, and the design leans on the elaborate retables then being built in Augsburg. That altar was taken apart at the end of the 18th century. Its panels were sawn free and sold, and today they are scattered between Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Meßkirch itself, where the Adoration still hangs. The frame drawn here was never among the pieces that survived.