The Queen of Sheba before Solomon

The painting is executed in oil on oak panel, a medium that allowed Witz the precision and saturated color for which he became known. The surface is smooth with fine detail in fabrics and faces, shadows modeling the drapery folds. The palette is dominated by gold, green, blue, and red, with the seated Solomon wearing a voluminous green robe with darker green decorative motifs and a red hat adorned with jewels and a gold band, while the queen wears a white headdress and blue cloak over a red garment. The gold ground is not flat but patterned with tooled floral and geometric designs, creating a shallow, frontal, and symmetrical composition without landscape or architectural setting. Witz's brushwork is precise and controlled, particularly in rendering textiles and jewelry. The figures possess a remarkable solidity, almost as if carved rather than painted, with stocky proportions, large heads and hands, and garments falling in sharp, splintering, angular folds whose ridges catch the light against deep shadow. This accentuated modeling creates a corporeal, three-dimensional effect that signals Witz's ambition to move beyond Gothic flatness toward spatial and material realism.

The painting was created around 1435, probably during the two years following Witz's entry into the Basel painters' guild in 1434 and his acquisition of Basel citizenship in 1435. It formed part of the Heilsspiegelaltar, whose themes derived from the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. The altarpiece was likely commissioned for Saint Leonhard in Basel, though some scholarship suggests a possible connection to Geneva or Savoy. The central section of the altarpiece has been lost, and its original motifs remain unknown. After the altarpiece was dismantled, this panel entered a different life as an independent work. The painting is now in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, German painting of the 13th-16th century, Hall I, within the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Its precise accession history and exhibition record are not detailed in the available sources.

Konrad Witz, born around 1400 in Rottweil am Neckar in the Black Forest, represents one of the great innovators of the Upper Rhine region. Working in Basel, a city animated by the Church Council that convened in 1431 and by humanist learning, Witz absorbed the new Realist style emerging in Netherlandish painting, as seen in the works of van Eyck and the Master of Flémalle. He superseded the courtly, transcendentally determined International Gothic with a more grounded, physically present approach to figure and space. The Queen of Sheba before Solomon exemplifies this transitional moment: it retains the gold ground and devotional function of late medieval art while demonstrating the new interest in bodily presence, material texture, and spatial coherence that would define northern Renaissance painting. Witz's career was brief, approximately twelve years, and fate has been unkind to his major enterprises; none of his three principal altarpieces survives intact. Wall paintings have vanished, and iconoclasm in the Upper Rhine region claimed many other works. The panels of his 1444 Altarpiece of St. Peter in Geneva and dispersed panels from a likely Virgin altarpiece originally in the Dominican nunnery in Basel constitute his other surviving major works.