The Resurrection

Christ rises from the tomb gripping the banner of victory, his body haloed in light, as an unearthly dawn detonates behind him - bands of orange, scarlet, and gold flaring over black crags while the guards sprawl asleep below. Altdorfer, the leading painter of the Danube School, cared above all for landscape and for light, and here he turns the Resurrection into a cosmic sunrise, nature itself ablaze with the miracle. The panel is inscribed 1518 at the top. Beside Piero della Francesca's frontal, daylit Resurrection elsewhere in this collection, it shows how differently North and South imagined the same dawn.