Witz, Konrad

(c. 1410-c. 1446)

   German painter from Rottweil in Württemberg who entered the Painter's Guild in Basel in 1434 and became a citizen of the region in the following year. The fact that he purchased a house there in 1443 suggests that he had a busy workshop. Nothing is known of his training. His earliest known work is the Heilspiegel Altarpiece (c. 1435), its panels now dispersed in various museums and its main scene missing. Of these, Esther and Ahasuerus, in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, demonstrates Witz's use of deep contrasts of color and angular draperies typical of the Early Netherlandish style. His Sts. Catherine and Mary Magdalen (c. 1440-1443; Strasbourg, Musée de l'Oeuvre Notre-Dame) shows a major departure from the earlier, more naïve portrayal. Here the sense of depth is successfully rendered through a repetition of four-partite vaults that diminish in size as they move into the distance. The same feature is seen in his Madonna and Child with Saints in a Church Interior (c. 1443) in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Witz's best known work is the Miraculous Draft of Fishes (1444; Geneva, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire), part of the St. Peter Altarpiece commissioned by Bishop François de Mies for the chapel of Notre-Dame des Maccabées in the Cathedral of St.-Pierre in Geneva that belonged to his uncle, Cardinal de Brogny. The scene shows Witz's close study of reflections on the water and distortions of figures and objects seen beneath its surface. The date of the artist's death is unknown. In 1466, his wife is referred to in a document as a widow.