The story
The Marienkirche is first of all a working Lutheran church, the oldest in the centre of Dortmund, begun in Romanesque style in the late 12th century and given a Gothic choir around 1350. Art lovers come for what stands at its high altar, the Marienaltar painted around 1420 by Conrad von Soest, the foremost painter in Westphalia at the time.
Its three panels show the Nativity, the Death of the Virgin and the Adoration of the Magi, in gold, deep blue and red, with kings in ermine-lined robes and brocade patterned with unicorns. They are incomplete. In 1720 the altar was taken apart and the panels were cut down to fit a new Baroque altar some 16 metres high, and the central Death of the Virgin lost more than half its surface. A tiny signature survived there all the same, a few letters of the painter's name hidden behind the clasps of a book, identified in 1950.
During the Second World War the panels were moved out of the city for safekeeping. Bombs almost destroyed the church and the Baroque altar with it, and the paintings came back in 1957, two years before the rebuilding was finished. Nearby stands a second medieval altarpiece, the Berswordt Altar, named after the family that paid for it in the 1380s.
