Pochissimo è noto della vita di questo pittore: si suppone possa essere nato a Rottweil, soltanto perché di questa città era il padre Hans, pittore anch'egli, il quale forse si trasferì intorno al 1431 a Costanza, ove era si stava tenendo il noto, importante Concilio, e di qui, successivamente, nella ricca Basilea.
È certo che in questa città Konrad risiedeva nel 1434, quando aveva ottenuto l'iscrizione alla Corporazione dei pittori - la Himmelzunft - divenendone cittadino nel 1435 con un atto in cui è nominato «Konrad Witz di Rotwilr, pittore». Quello è anche l'anno in cui sposa Ursula Treyger, nipote di un pittore di Tubinga, Niklaus Rusch, detto «mastro Lawelin», collaborando con lui ad affrescare - ma l'opera è stata distrutta - una sala dell'Arsenale cittadino.
Il successo dovette presto arridergli, se Konrad poté acquistare casa nella Freienstraße, nel pieno centro della città. Seguì a Ginevra il cardinale François de Mies, per il quale concluse nel 1444 il grande altare della chiesa di San Pietro. Da quell'anno non si hanno di lui più notizie: nel 1446 la moglie risulta già vedova, con cinque figli a carico, dei quali, nel 1447, il padre del pittore assume la tutela.
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ARTICOLO del GUARDIAN di Jonathan Jones
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited - 17 April 2009
Konrad Witz is a giant of medieval painting just waiting to be discovered 20 years before Leonardo da Vinci was born Konrad Witz was pioneering a poetic realism in his visionary paintings
The water is miraculously reflective and translucent, as if a pane of glass had somehow been inserted into the picture, but no, because it is molten, mobile, rippling. Rocks like giant's fingers stutter up out of this green mirror, receding to blue phantoms in the distance. It is one of the eeriest and most beautiful landscapes in the entire history of art. With its fantastic mountains, its superb reflections and observations of wave motion in water, it is powerfully reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci. But Konrad Witz painted his sublime work Saint Christopher, with its hunched red-robed saint carrying the infant Christ over a river of dreams, in about 1435, almost 20 years before Leonardo was born. Witz is one of the great discoveries awaiting anyone who steps away from the high road of western art history, from the famous names of the Italian Renaissance and Flemish tradition, to discover what painters in central Europe were up to at the end of the middle ages.
Witz lived in Basel, and today his Saint Christopher hangs in that city's Kunstmuseum. He was a contemporary of Jan van Eyck, who pioneered the subtleties of oil painting, and Uccello, who delighted in the mathematics of perspective. While Van Eyck was portraying himself caught in a convex mirror in a room in Bruges, and Uccello was astounding Florence with his gaudy Battle of San Romano, this German artist was making the visionary spookily immediate beside the Rhine. What makes his art so distinctive and fascinating is that he does it within a remote medieval view of the world. The landscape of Saint Christopher is in no sense realistic; it is a place of fable and myth. The apocryphal story of Saint Christopher is a typical medieval fable, the artist's portrayal of the story poignantly sincere.
The painting is so strange not just because of its glassy green water and surreal vista of rocks but its intense depiction of a man and his burden. Christopher, big and powerful, stands in water with Christ balanced on his back; bent under the weight of Christ, he is undergoing a spiritual ordeal in physical form. They are isolated in their journey. The landscape is awfully lonely. Surely Saint Christopher is the soul struggling with truth, alone with God - bearing the weight, in a wasteland of water and mountains.
Witz must surely be responding imaginatively to the inward-looking religious movements of the later middle ages, finding a visual equivalent for new mysticisms that stressed the soul's quest for God. The poetic solitude of this painting is as startling as the precocity of its style. This readiness to translate the visual world into disturbing images of isolation, death, and spiritual destiny is something we see again and again in German art, from Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece to Caspar David Friedrich and beyond. It is very different, already in this medieval masterpiece, from the socially teeming art of the Netherlands or Italy. There was always an innerness to German art that has made it one of the most fascinating visual art traditions in Europe. Witz is one of its giants.
Da notare , di seguito, il particolare del Bambino che si guarda riflesso nella bacinella ,
la Madre riflette sul libro e il Figlio riflette sula sua immagine,
Madre e Figlio separati e riuniti nella riflessione.
