Synagogue

Witz painted this figure around 1435, while Basel was hosting one of the great church councils of the age. For years bishops and theologians from across Europe gathered in the city to argue about the authority of the Church itself. This panel belongs to that world. It is a personification of the Synagogue, standing for the Old Covenant, and in the medieval scheme she was set opposite a matching figure of Ecclesia, the Church, the two of them representing the old faith and the new. Witz gave her a monumental, sculptural body and turned her at an angle across the space, a young painter testing how to place a figure in a room. The perspective behind her is not quite correct, but the figure itself holds the space with a calm, grounded weight.