Annunciation

Museum Tucherschloss und Hirsvogelsaal, HI MM 001
Tracery window with Annunciation to Mary, formerly in the house chapel of Dr. Sixtus Tucher, Nuremberg

Bright yellow dominates the colour palette of this stained glass painting of the annunciation to Mary, from whose sleeping chamber the view opens onto a landscape by the water. The seemingly coyly, rotated pose of Mary in the brocade cloak and the floating figure of Gabriel correspond to a late Gothic mode of representation, while the spatial perspective and 3D effect of the figures correspond to the innovations of Renaissance painting. The scene is crowned by a tracery arch with blessing God the Father as well as floral motifs and birds in the head panels (painting lost on the left).

For stylistic reasons, the design can be attributed to the group of collaborators around Albrecht Dürer. It was made by Veit Hirsvogel the Elder’s glass painting workshop, which was the most important in Nuremberg at the time.

Originally, the annunciation formed the central choir window of the chapel in Sixtus Tucher’s summer house in Nuremberg’s Grasersgasse. When the cleric and humanist gave up his position as provost of St. Lorenz in 1504, he retired there. A watercolour from the 18th century in the "Monumenta" bears witness to the splendour of the coloured windows in the house chapel.

The castle remained in the possession of the elder line of the Tuchers until 1833, when all the stained glass and other art treasures were auctioned off and dispersed (some of them preserved). The royal Bavarian councillor Christoph von Tucher (1841-1922) succeeded, among other things, in buying back the annunciation window for the family.

Claudia Däubler-Hauschke