Seven Sorrows Polyptych:Sorrowing mother

In April 1496 the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, came through Nuremberg and met a painter in his mid-twenties. The commission that followed was for his castle church at Wittenberg, and this mourning Mary stood at the middle of it. She was not a separate picture then. She occupied the centre of one panel roughly 190 centimetres high, surrounded by seven small scenes of the sorrows of her life, and that panel was sawn apart during the 16th century. The seven scenes went from Wittenberg to Dresden with the estate of Lucas Cranach the Younger and are in the gallery there. Mary went south instead, to the Benedictine abbey at Benediktbeuern, and reached Munich in 1803 and 1804 when Bavaria dissolved its monasteries. The date is not settled. The meeting points to 1496, the painting looks to some eyes like work of about 1500, and museum labels give a span rather than a year. Most scholars now keep this figure for Dürer's own hand and give the seven scenes to his workshop, painted from his drawings.