The Coronation of the Virgin Mary

This panel was probably made as an epitaph, a memorial hung in church for a Nuremberg family, and the family is still in it. Far below the heavenly scene, tiny beside the angels, the husband kneels at the left looking up, while his wife and daughter kneel at the right in the headdresses Nuremberg women wore at the time, including the tall linen veil the city called a Sturz. Above them Mary kneels on clouds as God the Father and Christ, enthroned side by side, hold a single crown over her head, with the dove of the Holy Spirit at the top. Kulmbach took the arrangement from woodcuts his teacher Dürer had published a few years earlier, a Coronation of the Virgin of 1510 and a Holy Trinity of 1511. He signed with his own HK monogram beneath Mary and dated it 1514. Another hand later added Dürer's monogram and the same date on the right.