TREASURES OF MUNICH

WHILE Titian was preparing a career that spanned the high Renaissance in Italy, a severe German artist named Albrecht Duerer turned up in Venice. Duerer's self-appointed mission: to soak up the best efforts of the Italian Renaissance and teach its lessons north of the Alps. Returning to Nurenberg, Duerer brought about a flowering of German and Flemish art in the early 16th century that ranks with the great moments of art history. The northern Renaissance was cooler, more metaphysical and clear-lined than its sensuous, rainbow-hued Italian source. If the Italians were sometimes overdramatic, the northerners were sometimes overintellectual, like Duerer himself. Although equally flawed, the masters of the two schools were also equal in greatness.

Out of the Mine. Few Americans realize the full splendor of Northern Renaissance because German and Flemish art has been far less widely dispersed than the Italian. Its major museum collections lie off the standard London-Paris-Rome tourist track. One of the best is at Munich, built up over centuries by the dukes and princes of Bavaria and now sheltered in the austerely classical Alte Pinakothek. The museum itself was completed by King Ludwig I in 1836. Allied bombs destroyed it in 1944, but the collection had been safely stored away in scattered castles and an Austrian salt mine. Rebuilt almost exactly as before, the museum now has 650 pictures of major importance on permanent view.

In point of numbers, Rubens dominates the Pinakothek, with no less than 74 examples. Van Dyck comes next with 26, and Rembrandt has ten. Such Italians as Titian, Tintoretto and Raphael are splendidly if sparsely represented. But the real heart of the museum is Duerer and the northerners he influenced.

Lucas van Leyden was one who sat at Duerer's feet, but as his Mary with Child shows, he worked in a still more tenderly mysterious vein than that of his master. At the Virgin's left sits a powerful and pensive Mary Magdalene, holding a jar of ointment and looking like a second, less spiritual mother to the child, a sort of earth mother. At her feet kneels the picture's donor, who wanted himself painted as a pilgrim.

Against the Moon, Another great disciple of Duerer was the little-known Albrecht Altdorfer, who worked chiefly as an architect and lives through no more than two dozen surviving pictures. As a painter, he ranks close to Durer himself. The Pinakothek has six Altdorfers, including the fabulous picture of the battle of Alexander and Darius at Gaugamela. Napoleon once confiscated the painting, and reportedly hung it in his bathroom at Saint Cloud. Five feet high and painted in the meticulous lapidary manner of a miniature throughout, the picture so absorbed Altdorfer that in order to be free to finish it, he refused appointment to an important political post in the free city of Regensburg, his native town. Altdorfer put a cityscape very like that of Regensburg in the background of the battle, and treated the whole classical event as if it had happened in his own time and place. A waning moon rides dimly over the doomed forces of Darius at the left of the picture, while young Alexander comes on with the sunrise at his shoulder. He can be discerned in mid-center, pursuing Darius' chariot with leveled lance.

As an architect, Altdorfer built Regensburg's wine stalls, meat market, fortifications and slaughterhouse. In painting The Birth of Mary he exercised his architectural imagination by transferring the drama to the ambulatory of a cathedral. The soaring, wheeling and descending composition brings Bach's music irresistibly to mind.

In fact, such painters as Altdorfer and Duerer stand with Bach in music and Goethe in literature as German immortals. And Munich deserves a place on any art-loving tourist's map.

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