Christoph Fugger was a member of a great banking family from Augsburg, Germany. When he died unmarried in 1579, a large sum of money was set aside from his estate for an appropriately lavish memorial. A site was chosen in the Dominican church of St Magdalena in Augsburg, and the work was entrusted to Hubert Gerhard. The altar memorial consisted of a stone framework of red and white marble, on to which were set gilt-bronze sculptures: a large relief of the Resurrection, a smaller relief of the Ascension (missing since the 18th century), two standing and two seated figures of prophets, two small angels holding the Instruments of the Passion and two large kneeling angels who supported the framework above. In addition to Gerhard, Paulus Mair was employed to cut the marble, Carlo Pallago (a Florentine stucco sculptor) assisted with the casting, the Reisinger brothers of Augsburg supervised the technical side of the work, and the goldsmith Johann Müller was responsible for the finishing, chasing and gilding.
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The progress of the commission is fortunately extremely well documented in an account book held in the Fugger archives at Dillingen. Fascinating details emerge from the accounts, such as the fact that the casts of the two reliefs and one of the large angels failed at the first attempt, and it is interesting to see how many people were involved in such a collaborative exercise. In connection with the final polishing, for instance, two women were employed for a number of weeks to rub at the bronzes with wire brushes and tartar and to wash them down with beer and water; and to counteract the effects of mercury poisoning the men working on the gilding were given small amounts of butter. This is unlikely to have been particularly helpful.
The marble framework of the altar was renewed in 1727, when the church was remodelled in the Baroque taste, but the bronzes - with the apparent exception of the Ascension relief - remained in place until 1807, when the church was secularised and the contents sold. The history of the sculptures between the early 19th century and 1964, when they were bequeathed to the Museum, is not known.
Hubert Gerhard was one of a number of Northern sculptors trained in Italy in the second half of the 16th century, all of whom came under the considerable influence of Giambologna and carried the latest artistic developments back to Germany and the Netherlands. The Fugger altar was one of the first manifestations of this mixture of Italianate and Northern styles in South Germany, and Gerhard - together with Johann Gregor van der Schardt and Adriaen de Vries - became one of its leading exponents.
