Church of the Coronation of Mary, Stuppach

In 1532 a painting was taken from the collegiate church of Aschaffenburg and given away. The Archbishop of Mainz sent it to the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order at Mergentheim, and there it stayed for almost 300 years. The picture was Matthias Grünewald's Madonna, painted around 1514 to 1516 for a chapel of Our Lady of the Snows at the request of Heinrich Reitzmann, a canon of that church. Its frame is still in Aschaffenburg, and a wing showing the Miracle of the Snow is now in the Augustinermuseum in Freiburg.

In 1809 Napoleon dissolved the Order in the German states, and its possessions at Mergentheim were dispersed. In 1812 Balthasar Blumhofer, the parish priest of the nearby village of Stuppach, bought the panel for his church, believing it to be a Rubens. Only later was it recognised as Grünewald's, and it is now counted with the Isenheim Altarpiece among his main works.

Today the painting has a room of its own, a chapel added to the parish church of the Coronation of Mary in 1930 and 1931. It is shown behind glass and is rarely lent. Mary holds the Child outdoors, a rainbow above her and a fig tree heavy with fruit nearby, and behind her rises a Gothic church whose architecture scholars have linked to Strasbourg Cathedral.