"The Hand of the Master"

In Berlin's East zone one day last week, a squad of Communist police sped to the Maerkisches Museum and shouldered their way inside. A few minutes later they came out bearing two leather-bound volumes darkened with age. The books thus placed under "state protection" were the rare (but not invaluable) 1541 edition of the Martin Luther Bible. What made this particular Bible worth state protection to culture-conscious East zone Reds were the three drawings inside: freshly discovered work of the early 16th century German master, Mathias Griinewald.

Mystic of Mainz. The world knows little about Mathias Griinewald, less, perhaps, than it does about any other first-rank master. Only a handful of paintings and a bare 33 drawings have come to light in four centuries, but these are enough to make his fame. His greatest work, a tremendous altarpiece of nine paintings which now stands in the museum at Colmar, Alsace, contains a magnificent painting of the Crucifixion. A mystic with a realist's sense of physical suffering, Griinewald made the Crucifixion an epic of wounds and pain seldom, if ever, matched on canvas.

Scholars know little more about Griinewald. They believe he was a lonely, moody man consumed by the religious revolts of the times, that he was court painter to the archbishops of Mainz and Halle for 17 years, that he married but had no children, that he may have visited Italy in 1509 to see the work of Leonardo da Vinci and other Italian masters, and that he died during the 1528 plague in the town of Halle, in disgrace, possibly because of his Lutheran sympathies.

The three small (12 in. high) drawings which Berlin's East zone police hauled away last week make a total of 36 known Griinewald sketches, and they show his unmistakable touch. While they are untitled, all three seem to be animated drawings of Biblical figures, swiftly brushed out in watercolor and filled in with shades of grey and white chalk. Says Berlin's Professor Will Grohmann, a top German art expert: "A sensational find."

A Last Browse. Credit for the discovery goes to Dr. Walter Stengel, 70, the director of East Berlin's Markisches Museum for the past 25 years. He had seen the 1541 Luther Bible in his museum many times, but never looked into it until last November. Then, planning to retire and flee the East zone to live in West Berlin with his son, he had been browsing through the treasures of a professional lifetime.

"I turned the front cover of the Bible," says Dr. Stengel, "and there, on the inside, was a drawing with a foreshortened face. It struck a familiar note. I leafed on and found two others. The inner tension was there, the vitality, the technique." Working slowly through the book, he found another clue: an ex libris showing that the Bible had once been owned by one Hans Plock, master of embroidery at the court of the Archbishop of Halle. "With that," he says, "I was in Griinewald's territory, and I recognized the hand of the master." Other German experts agreed.

Last week Dr. Stengel left his museum for good and settled down in West Berlin with photographs of his discoveries. When and where the original drawings would be exhibited, the East zone police were not saying.

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