Pala Heller

What hangs in Frankfurt is a ghost of the real thing. Dürer painted the original central panel, an Assumption of the Virgin, around 1509 for the merchant Jakob Heller, and he took unusual pains over it, telling Heller in surviving letters that no one would paint such a picture for the price again. In 1615 the Duke of Bavaria bought the panel away to Munich, and a copyist named Jobst Harrich was set to paint a replacement for the altar in Frankfurt. That copy is what survives. The original burned in a Munich palace fire in 1729. So the figures rising toward heaven here are Harrich's careful record of a lost Dürer, our best evidence of a masterpiece almost no living person ever saw. Dürer's own signed cartellino, the little painted note, is preserved in the copy too.