High altar of Freiburg Minster

Hans Baldung had trained in Dürer's Nuremberg workshop, and this was the job that set him up on his own. He moved to Freiburg around 1512 and spent some five years building the high altar of its great minster, a folding polyptych of 11 painted panels worked with his assistants. Opened wide, it shows the Coronation of the Virgin, Mary enthroned as Christ and God the Father raise a crown above her, with a heaven of small angels playing flutes and violins around them. The closed wings tell the Christmas story, and on the back is the Crucifixion. Baldung slipped his own face and his monogram into the work. The commission paid well and made his name, and the altar still stands where he built it.