Hamburger Kunsthalle

This guide to the winged altarpiece at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg starts in thirteen eighty-three at Saint Petri church, where the piece was built to open and close with the calendar, painted saints on ordinary days and a burst of gilded carving on feast days. It follows the Reformation's stripping of its silver apostles, and an eighteenth-century transfer to a small Mecklenburg town that turned out to be the luckiest accident in its history when Saint Petri itself burned down decades later. For a long stretch afterward, nobody in Hamburg even remembered the altarpiece was theirs.