Craftsmen in Demand Across Europe
This maturity showed itself first in art. We may find it hard to believe, but it is an established fact that at the very height of the Italian Renaissance, from the birth of Leonardo da Vinci (1452) to the death of Raphael (1520), German artists were in demand throughout Europe for their mastery and craftsmanship in wood, iron, copper, bronze, silver, gold, engraving, painting, sculpture and architecture. Felix Fabri of Ulm, perhaps from patriotism rather than impartiality, wrote in 1484 that when anyone wants a work of art in bronze, stone or wood he hires German craftsmen and artists; he himself had seen German jewelers, goldsmiths, stonecutters and wagon-makers produce wonderful works among the Arabs, surpassing even the Greeks and Italians of the past. About fifty years later Paolo Giovio, an Italian, found this to be true and wrote that in the world of art the Germans take whatever existed before them and carry it forward, and we idle Italians will have to send to Germany for good craftsmen. German architects worked in Florence, Assisi, Orvieto, Siena, Barcelona and Burgos, and were asked to help finish the cathedral of Milan. Veit Stoss had conquered Cracow, Dürer was surrounded with honor in Venice, and the younger Holbein made a stir in England.
Late Gothic Building
The height and grandeur of church architecture had of course declined with the passing of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Even so, one generation of Munich citizens built the Church of Our Lady (1468–88) and the "Old Town Hall" (1470–88) in the late Gothic style. In the first two decades of the sixteenth century Freiberg in Saxony completed the choir of its church, the Fugger chapel was founded in Augsburg, the cathedral of Strasbourg finished its Laurentius chapel, and a handsome oriel window was added to the rectory of St. Sebald's in Nuremberg. In rural and urban building of this age charming cottages were raised, with red tile roofs, wooden upper stories, flowered railings and wide eaves to protect the windows from sun and snow. Thus in the harsh climate of Mittenwald the hardy Germans, with the simple, warm beauty of their houses, stood up against the grandeur of the Alps in Bavaria.
Sculpture: Stoss, Vischer and Kraft
Sculpture was the splendid crown of honor shining on the brow of the age. Lesser sculptors were many, and some of them, such as Nikolaus Gerhaert, Simon Leinberger, Tilman Riemenschneider and Hans Backoffen, would each have counted as a star of the first magnitude in a smaller galaxy of art. In a single generation Nuremberg raised three artists without equal in any Italian city of the time.
The story of the life and work of Veit Stoss is a tale of two cities. He grew up in Nuremberg and became known as engineer, bridge-builder, architect, engraver, sculptor and painter. Then at thirty he went to Cracow and produced his best work there, in the late flamboyant Gothic style, which shows at once the piety and the sensitivity of the Poles. In 1496 he returned to Nuremberg with ample money, bought a new house, and took a new wife, who added five children to his eight earlier ones. At the height of his success he was arrested for what was perhaps an unwitting share in a fraud. His cheeks were branded and he was forbidden to leave Nuremberg. The emperor Maximilian pardoned him and restored his civil rights (1506), but Stoss remained an outcast to the end of his long and painful life.
In 1517 he carved the great work showing the Annunciation, or "Angelic Salutation." He enclosed two of the figures, which come nearest to perfection among wooden sculptures, in a ring of roses, and carved around the whole a garland from which hung seven medallions showing the joys of the Virgin; above the entire work, all of it in lime wood, he set a rather uninviting figure of God the Father. This fragile composition hung from the vault of the choir of St. Lorenz and still hangs there as a treasure, a memorial of the quiet, splendid days of the city. For St. Sebald's he carved in wood a Crucifixion (1520), which has never found its equal of its kind. The same year his son Andreas, prior of the Carmelite house in Nuremberg, obtained for him a commission to design and build an altarpiece for the church at Bamberg. While Stoss was at work, the Reformation swept Nuremberg. Andreas, who remained Catholic, was removed from his priorship; Veit himself stayed loyal to the splendid faith that had inspired his art. Payment for the altarpiece stopped and the work was left unfinished. Stoss spent the last ten years of his life blind, lonely and forsaken; his wives had died before him, his children had left him, and the age was too deep in theology to notice that it was losing the greatest wood carver in history at ninety-three (1533).
In the same city and at the same time lived a bronze-worker as unmatched in his field as Stoss, though his life was quieter and happier. Peter Vischer the Elder portrayed himself in a corner of his most famous work as a plain, earnest, short, broad-shouldered workman with a thick beard and a leather apron, hammer and chisel in hand. He and his five sons spent eleven years (1508–19) creating his masterpiece, the tomb of St. Sebald, patron saint of Nuremberg. The work was costly; halfway through, the money ran out and it stood unfinished until Anton Tucher got the townspeople to pay the 800 gulden ($20,000 by the book's conversion) needed to complete it.
This great work is not striking at first sight; it does not seem comparable to the Orcagna tabernacle (1348) in Florence, and the snails and fishes on whose backs the tomb rests seem unsuited to carrying so heavy a load. But closer examination shows the astonishing completeness of its parts. The engraved silver coffin in the middle is adorned on its four sides with reliefs showing the miracles of St. Sebald. Around it rise the bronze columns of a Gothic canopy, carved with great delicacy and Renaissance detail and joined at the top by beautiful openwork. On the columns, around the bases, in corners and on the capitals, the artists placed truly countless figures of Christian, Hebrew and common creatures and heroes: tritons, centaurs, nereids, sirens, muses, fauns, Hercules, Theseus, Samson, prophets, Jesus, apostles and angels playing music or at play with lions and dogs. Some of these figures are still unpolished and rough; many others are finished and have a precision and clarity like the works of Donatello or Ghiberti; and all together plainly help to show life in its variety. The figures of Peter, Paul, Matthew and John equal Dürer's picture of the Four Apostles, painted some seven years later in the same Nuremberg.
It is said that in the first decades of the sixteenth century no prince or lord came to Nuremberg without visiting Peter Vischer's workshop, and many sought and bought his art. His works, from the great brass chandelier of St. Lorenz to the tomb of Maximilian I at Innsbruck, were on view in many churches. His five sons took up his work in sculpture, but two of them died before him. Hermann Vischer the Younger, who died at thirty-one (1517), cast a beautiful bronze relief for the tomb of Cardinal Casimir in the cathedral of Cracow.
As the Vischers excelled in bronze and Veit Stoss in wood, Adam Kraft surpassed all his contemporaries in stone. The German chroniclers portray him, Peter Vischer the Elder and Sebastian Lindenast, who designed the flattering electors on the clock of the Church of Our Lady, as three artists and devoted friends. "They were like brothers. Every Friday, even in old age, they hurried to visit one another, and as the sketches they made at these meetings show, they studied like three students. Then, having utterly forgotten hunger and thirst, they parted." Adam, who is thought to have been born in the same year as Vischer (1460), resembled him in simplicity, honesty, piety and devotion to his art. In 1492 he carved the tomb of Sebald Schreyer for St. Sebald's, with reliefs of the Passion and Resurrection. Hans Imhoff, a merchant prince, impressed by their beauty, commissioned Kraft to build a place for the consecrated bread and wine in St. Lorenz.
Adam made this sacrament house as a tall, slender vessel in late Gothic style, a miracle of stone carving, rising step by step to a height of 19.5 meters and growing narrower as it goes up until it ends in the pleasing curve of a bishop's crook. Its columns seem alive with many figures of saints, its doors are guarded by angels, and its square panels carry reliefs of the life of Christ. This whole vast structure rests, in an extraordinary way, on the bent figures of three kneeling men, who are Adam Kraft and two of his assistants. In these personal figures there is no flattery: the clothes are worn and torn with toil, the hands rough and the beards unkempt, and the broad upturned faces are absorbed in the work. When this astonishing masterpiece was done, Kraft turned again to a favorite subject and carved on seven pillars of stone scenes from the story of the Passion. Six of these pillars are now in the German National Museum. One of them, the Entombment, is a perfect example of Teutonic art, whose bold realism needs no imaginary ornament to express true faith and devotion.
Stained Glass and the Minor Arts
Medieval themes and moods continued in the lesser arts. Miniaturists were still in such demand that they formed a prosperous guild. Great artists such as Dürer and Holbein made designs for stained glass. This art, which was declining in France and England, reached its height in Germany in this age; St. Lorenz and the cathedrals of Ulm and Cologne gained colored windows famous throughout the world. Not only churches but guild halls, palaces and even private houses had stained-glass windows. Cities such as Nuremberg, Augsburg, Regensburg, Cologne and Mainz were proud of their craftsmen: of metalworkers who made torches, lamps, basins, jugs, locks and splendid trays; of goldsmiths whose handiwork, from spoons to communion tables, enriched all Europe; of weavers who made beautiful carpets and tapestries, church vestments and the showy dress of the aristocracy; and of pious women who wore out their fingers and eyes embroidering silk and brocade to clothe priests and altars. Wood-carvers had never shown more skill. Michael Wolgemut, besides painting two great windows for St. Lorenz, carved several altar masterpieces in wood and then taught Dürer, who surpassed him.
Woodcut, Engraving and Etching
Engraving, the cutting of designs in wood or copper, made great advances in the fifteenth century and became a complete art, standing side by side with painting. The greatest painters nurtured it, and Martin Schongauer perfected it. Some of his engravings, such as the Flagellation, the Bearing of the Cross, St. John on Patmos and the Temptation of St. Anthony, rank in all ages among the greatest works. Illustrating books with woodcut blocks became common and quickly replaced illumination and painting. The most famous paintings of the time were copied as prints, which sold easily in bookshops, markets and fairs.
Lucas van Leyden was one of the precocious geniuses of the field: at fourteen he engraved a portrait of Muhammad, at sixteen the Ecce Homo (1510), and in engraving the portrait of Maximilian on copper he came near perfection. (The book dates the Muhammad print to his fourteenth year; later scholarship dates it differently, and it is given here as the book states it.) Around 1480 the drypoint came into use through an unknown artist called the "Master of the Housebook," in which, with a sharp tool, lines were cut into the metal along the design, raising a burr at the edge. Etching, in which the metal surface is covered with wax, the design scratched through the wax and the lines then bitten out with acid, developed from the decoration of armor to engraving on metal plates from which prints could be taken; it is thought that Daniel Hopfer, an armorer, made the first etching in 1504. Burgkmair and Dürer used this new technique only partially; Lucas van Leyden most likely learned it from Dürer but soon went beyond the master and brought it to perfection.
Painting
In painting, this century was the greatest period of German art. German painters, influenced by the Dutch and Italian schools and by Memling, left behind in the second half of the fifteenth century the intensity and harshness of the Gothic style and turned to a delicacy of line and form that moved gently through landscapes and reflected the domestic life of the triumphant middle class.
The subjects remained chiefly religious, but secular ones grew more numerous. Single pictures took the place of altar panels, and wealthy donors were no longer satisfied to kneel in a corner of a picture beside a crowd of the faithful, but wanted paintings devoted entirely to depicting themselves. The painters themselves also emerged from medieval anonymity, became individuals, signed their names at the foot of their works and so made them immortal. The master of the picture of the "Life of the Virgin," who worked at Cologne around 1470, is still anonymous. His "Madonna and St. Bernard" survives; his Virgin is a pure German girl who offers her breast, in the book's words, for the child before a devout monk. (The detail is mentioned only in passing.) Michael Pacher is one of the first painters whose name and work have both come down to us. The church of St. Wolfgang at Salzkammergut still shows the great altarpiece he carved and painted (1479–81); it is eleven meters long.
The study of the rules of perspective in these pictures contributed to the growth of German art. Martin Schongauer joined to his paintings the care and subtlety of a skilled engraver and the delicacy of feeling of Rogier van der Weyden. Schongauer was born at Augsburg (about 1445), settled at Colmar, and founded there a school of painting and engraving that played a great part in bringing these arts to the perfection we see in Dürer and Holbein.
The prosperous cities of the south gradually took the lead in German art from Cologne and the northern towns. At Augsburg, the center of trade with Italy, Hans Burgkmair brought the decorative refinements of Italian painting into his pictures, and Hans Holbein the Elder blended the ornament of Italian art with the dignity and weight of the Gothic style. Hans passed on his art to his sons Ambrosius and Hans, whom he painted with great affection in his pictures. Nothing of Ambrosius has survived in history, but Hans the Younger became one of the glories of Germany, Switzerland and England.
Grünewald and the Isenheim Altarpiece
The greatest artist before Dürer was Matthias Gothart Neithart, who by a scholar's error became known to posterity as Matthias Grünewald. In the long social heritage of art, he learned the magic of painting from Schongauer at Colmar, added to it his own insatiable thirst for fame and perfection, practiced patiently at Dragan, Speyer and Frankfurt, and made Strasbourg his home (1479). It was probably there that he produced his first masterpiece, two portraits of Philip II, lord of Hanau-Lichtenberg, and his wife. Even Dürer could not have created better in depth of effect and delicacy of drawing. When Grünewald took to wandering again, he worked for a time with Dürer at Basel, where he painted a portrait of a man now in a museum in New York, and again at Nuremberg, where he worked with Dürer on woodcuts. In 1503 he settled at Seligenstadt and there at last developed his distinctive, mature manner, the pictorial display of scenes from the Bible with passionate feeling and tragic power. Albrecht, archbishop of Mainz, made him court painter (1509), but when Grünewald insisted on praising and supporting Luther, he dismissed him from that post (1526). He made an unhappy marriage and sank into a melancholy isolation whose darkness may have left black marks in the chiaroscuro of his art.
His masterpiece, probably the greatest painting in Germany, is the multi-paneled altarpiece he painted in 1513 for a monastery at Isenheim. The central wooden frame shows the Virgin with her child in brilliant gold, in the manner of Turner, against a distant seascape. But the most striking picture of the set is the terrible Crucifixion, which shows Christ in the agony of death; his body is covered with wounds and with sweat mixed with blood, his limbs are twisted and bent by the strain of pain, the Virgin has fainted in the arms of John the apostle, and Mary Magdalene trembles with unbelievable anger and grief. The other panels of this "album" are also each a great painting in itself: the Concert of Angels, set in a Gothic building and painted in glowing red and brown; the frightening Temptation of St. Anthony; the panel that shows him as a hermit in an unnatural forest of rotted trees; and a monster in the manner of Bosch, apparently embodying St. Anthony's fearful dreams. In its mastery of color, light and feeling over line, form and bodily structure, this work, an exaggerated outburst of the power of figure painting, marks the peak of German Gothic painting on the threshold of the victory of line and logic in Dürer, Dürer whose hidden roots drew water from the mystery of the German Middle Ages, but whose hand reached out in longing toward humanism and the Italian art of the Renaissance.