What place does the Simuna Church retable occupy in studying Christian Ackermann’s oeuvre?

The Simuna Church retable was completed in 1684. It is one of the earliest and richest in detail of Ackermann’s surviving works. The dial of the Church of the Holy Spirit clock in Tallinn dates from the same year and has been attributed to Ackermann. The indoor portal of the house at 18 Raekoja plats in Tallinn dates from three years earlier, and the corpus of the pulpit of Tallinn’s Cathedral dates from two years after the Simuna retable. Along with other early works, the study of the Simuna retable helps to ascertain the beginning of Ackermann’s sculpting career and the gradual modification of his style. All the more so, the comparison of figures provides the best results in analysing carving style, and the Simuna retable has numerous figures to facilitate such comparisons.

What did the stylistic analysis of the figures of the Simuna Church retable show?

The Simuna retable has eight figures – St. Peter the Apostle and St. Paul the Apostle on the main level, the theological virtues, in other words Faith, Hope and Love, on the additional level, and Christ the Invincible and two angels on the cornice. It turned out from a close examination of the sculptures that the retable’s cornice figures – the angels and Christ the Invincible – do not necessarily originate from Ackermann’s workshop.

Who carved these statues?

Did Ackermann hire an assistant and entrust him with fashioning them? Or have the original statues been lost and replaced by statues carved in the first half of the 18th century? These are questions that have emerged from the comprehensive study of Ackermann’s oeuvre, yet which do not have unambiguous answers.

What happened to the retable completed in Ackermann’s workshop after the master’s death?

The Simuna Church tower caught fire from a lightning strike in 1831. In an effort to save whatever was possible, all church possessions that could be gotten hold of were carried out of the building. The statues of St. Peter and St. Paul carved by Ackermann were slightly damaged when they were yanked off the retable (unnecessarily as it later turned out).

The composition of the retable completed in Ackermann’s workshop was altered at least twice in the 19th century: in the spring of 1836, the painting The Last Supper, which originally adorned the retable’s socle, and the painting The Crucifixion, which had adorned the central panel of the main level, were replaced with a painting by the Baltic German artist Carl Siegmund Walther depicting the presentation of baby Jesus in the temple. In 1877, Walther’s painting was in turn replaced with a copy of the altar painting Christ on the Cross by the Russian artist Yakov Hapalov, the original of which was at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in St. Petersburg.

In the first half of the 1880s, when the Simuna congregation set about expanding its church by way of its eastern end, the retable was removed from the altar because of the construction work. After the church addition had been completed, the retable was placed in its current location and was most likely repainted.

The retable was given its current, quite professionally executed colouring in 1939.

Colours of the retable

Studies confirm that at least three monochromatic coats of paint cover the retable’s original polychromy.

The retable’s polychromy from Ackermann’s time survives only as incredibly tiny, isolated fragments – the damaged, peeling paint was evidently removed for the most part before repainting it for the first time so that the new coat of paint would adhere to the wood.

The retable’s coating remained monochrome at the start of the 1940s when Sten Karling, the grand old man of Estonian woodcarving art, introduced Ackermann’s oeuvre in his monograph (Holzschnitzerei und Tischlerkunst …, 1943). Examinations ascertained that the sculptures and ornamentation were coated with bronze paint at that time, while the retable’s architectonics were evidently coated with bluish-grey paint.

The retable was last repainted, quite professionally, in 1939. An artist named Buchholz did the job according to Sten Karling’s instructions, who had gone to study the altar and identified its original colours. The retable’s current coat of paint, which can be seen in the photograph from 1940, evidently originates from precisely that time.