Category: Lübeck

This font came from St Aegidien in Lübeck, or St Giles’s Church in its English form, and it dates from the early thirteenth century. It was made in Gotland, so very much part of the whole Baltic trade route arrangement. It’s solid, chunky and another marvellous survival over the centuries. It’s been given central billing in one of the museum rooms to add to the whole impact.

I do like the heritage of these things, which is why a lump of carved rock gets a blog post to itself and there’s another font with a similar history in a neighbouring room. It’s a link to the medieval past of Lübeck and it has outlasted all of the infants who were baptised in it. The church itself is still standing, a little dented from the 1806 Battle of Lübeck and the Second World War, but still there.

I’ve never really, until now, pondered when fonts became something of a thing in church, so now seemed to be a good time to find out as if I haven’t got anything better to do…. Anyway, baptisms initially took place in rivers or in other bits of water that the church found, but then there started to be a plan to construct pools within churches. This proved to be a bit of a hassle, as every church was starting to need its own swimming pool (although perhaps this might have ensured more people went along if they had continued that tradition) and so they changed the rules from immersion to just having water poured over the head. By the twelfth century, there had been a shift to fonts such as the one in the museum, although there was a new challenge as the churches frequently had to put font covers on as people kept stealing the holy consecrated water to protect themselves from witchcraft or similar such side projects.

This is a stuffed raccoon, but I was more interested in discovering that the Germans call it a Waschbär, which translates directly as ‘wash-bear‘ which I find is really rather lovely.

A raccoon is a raccoon because English borrowed the word from the Powhatan people of Virginia, who called the animal ‘aroucoun’ or something similar. By the time anyone thought to ask what the word actually meant or whether it was entirely optimal, the Powhatan language was largely gone, and ‘raccoon’ just meant the mask faced thing that raided rubbish bins.

The Germans, by contrast, encountered the animal later and through a different route, mostly through trade goods, specimens, and the general European obsession with cataloguing the natural world. When they needed a word, they didn’t borrow from anyone. They looked at what the animal actually does. Raccoons are notorious for their habit of wetting their food before eating it, dunking things in water and washing their little paws compulsively. So someone decided that was definitely a wash-bear or ‘Waschbär’. Problem solved.

Although the initial theory falls apart here, as it has since been discovered that raccoons aren’t washing their food, they’re making it wet as that enhances their sense of touch. Anyway, I think it’s the right name for the wrong reason, but there’s something honest about that. And, once again, I think I need to get out more rather than thinking about why the Germans and English have different words for an animal.

St. Catherine’s Church in Lübeck is no longer a church, which has provided a different dynamic in terms of the visitors, they are there now to see a museum. These wall paintings were made in the fifteenth century for a very specific kind of looking, the distracted, devotional gaze of people kneeling in prayer, or walking through during services, or simply existing in a space that was meant to remind them of their faith. St. Jacob the Elder was painted at monumental scale, surrounded by scenes from his life, the Virgin Mary and Child positioned where they would draw the eye during worship. The paintings were functional and told a religious message.

Now they hang, mostly fragmentary, revealed during restoration but still incomplete. Instead of being part of the furniture of devotion, they’ve become art objects and things that I can take photos of without worrying about interrupting anyone’s private prayer. Maybe there’s something a little sub-optimal about the arrangement now as the paintings were made to be part of a living, functioning space. They were meant to compete for attention with real people and with a real purpose.

In my attempt to find meaning in everything, including things where there likely isn’t much meaning to be had, this evolution of important messaging to a rather pretty piece of history is rather appealing to me even if I can’t really work out much of the faded image.

There’s something rather appealing to me, in that way that I should really get out more, about a painting of a place that doesn’t exist. Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) painted “Stadt in Abenddämmerung”, of City in Twilight, in around 1845, and the curious thing is that he didn’t bother painting an actual city at all. This is an invention, a vision of a medieval town silhouetted against a dusky sky, with the slight twist that this painting has now ended up in Lübeck, which has a cathedral and a church with twin towers.

Carus had studied Gothic architecture in England in 1844, and what he created here was an imaginary artwork, a greatest hits of medieval German architecture assembled from memory and imagination rather than from life. It’s all a bit sub-optimal that it’s not real and I think that I’d be annoyed to have a painting of something that didn’t exist. Carus was an interesting character though, he painted Romantic scenes and he ran a maternity hospital, which feels like a rather ambitious use of his lifetime. He’s become quite controversial due to some of his writings about race, which I accept is something rather more important than drawing a fake church…..

In the prosperous merchant towns of northern Germany, status was displayed not through grand façades, although those came later, but through elaborate architectural fittings attached to residential buildings. The stoop, or Beischlagwange, was one such statement of intent, and I find the whole arrangement rather intriguing although I must admit that I thought it was a manhole cover at first such is my architectural prowess.

A stoop consisted of two benches positioned at a right angle to the building’s wall, creating a small gathering space where the street met your home. The benches were typically enclosed by a stone slab on one side, often richly decorated with heraldic coats of arms or the symbols of a building’s owner. To sit on someone’s stoop was to acknowledge their status in the town and to commission an ornate one was to announce it loudly. So my friend Richard would have a very big porch, whereas I wouldn’t want visitors and I wouldn’t.

The stoop in the photo above dates from the fifteenth century and comes from a merchant’s house in Lübeck, originally belonging to the family of Bishop Nikolaus Sachow. It’s modest enough now, removed from its original context and mounted on a museum wall, but I find myself rather drawn to what it once represented.

The example above is how this whole arrangement might have worked, a little bit of decadence….

In a world far too full of frivolity, noise and people making unnecessary gestures, Barend Graat (1628–1709) offers this little arrangement. It’s a man in black, seated with all the visible delight of someone preparing to audit a village. There is no dramatic flourish, no satin explosion, no imported parrot or mythological excuse for expensive legs. Just black clothing, a sober hat, a white collar and a face which suggests that merriment has been considered and found wanting. This is just as I would want it to be.

The sitter, who is unknown, may be dressed against frivolity, but the portrait itself is full of social performance. He is not simply wearing black, he is wearing seriousness. In an age when everyone else might be tempted towards velvet, feathers and decorative nonsense, here is a man who has chosen dignity, shadow and the mild suspicion that someone nearby is enjoying themselves too much. I like it and I would put this sort of thing on my wall. Well, I wouldn’t, my friend Liam would as otherwise it’d fall off if I did it.

This old mural is now at the bottom of a staircase, but it was originally at the end of a small chapel. I’m struggling to make this out, but the museum notes that it shows St. Anne, the patron saint of the convent, with her daughter Mary and her grandson Jesus. There seems to be some religious debate about whether Anne actually existed, but it feels inappropriate to think about that in this former convent that was named after her. There are apparently two standing figures at the side, but no-one is sure who they are and I’m not sure that I can even see them.

I asked AI what it could see without mentioning what was in the image, this is what ChatGPT decided it could see.

This is Gemini’s best guess. I’m not sure how close either of these are, but I like their creativity and am reassured that it wasn’t something obvious that I could have seen in the original photo.

This is a muskrat, but this was one moment in life where I was less excited about seeing a stuffed rodent and more intrigued about the word origin. I’m frequently taken by some flight of fancy, or a linguistic holiday in this case, but in German this is a ‘bisamratte’ which also means muskrat. As an aside, I wouldn’t say that I think this is revolutionary knowledge but I didn’t know that muskrats could stay underwater for twenty minutes before coming to this museum.

It is a semi-aquatic rodent, originally from North America, and belongs closer to the voles than to the proper rats. But humans being human saw it being damp and furry and called it a rat. That all aligns with both the German and English definitions of the word. Anyway, this is where my little flight of fancy begins, because Bisam also means musk. The German word has a long journey behind it, travelling indirectly through older German forms and Latin to the word ‘balsamum’ meaning fragrant and that has Greek origins as well. I was distracted with that word also being where balsamic vinegar got its name, it was just a fragrant liquid.

Anyway, I should probably get out more…

I’m not sure that I’ve seen an image like this before, but it’s a snapshot of how much stonework has been replaced at Lübeck Cathedral over the years. I’ve written about the four construction and engineering problems of the cathedral which has caused this situation, but there has been plenty of stone replacement over the centuries.

In the above image, the various colours show how old the stonework is. There’s not a huge amount of the original late twelfth century stone and what survives is mostly in the middle. I’ve often wondered just how old some buildings actually are because of all the restorations that take place and this gives about a precise answer to that as possible.