German Renaissance Prints, 1490-1550

The Renaissance in Germany was one of the most important periods in the history of European printmaking. Largely through the singular efforts of Albrecht Durer, the woodcut was transformed from cheap book decoration into a medium of artistic merit in its own right. From the last quarter of the fifteenth century painters began to take up the technique of engraving and introduced many innovations. The first etchings ever to be produced, which also include the earliest pure landscapes in European art, date from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. The collection held by the British Museum ranks with the greatest in the world and this catalogue includes some of its finest examples. Prints were used to propagate the ideas of the Reformation and the humanists, and were also favoured by the impecunious Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I as a cheap means of glorifying his status, Giulia Bartrum emphasises the stylistic diversity of German Renaissance prints and places them in their historical context. There is a representative selection of the works of Albrecht Durer, who combined unsurpassed technical excellence with artistic genius, and his most idiosyncratic of pupils. Hans Baldung Grien, is also discussed. Artists from Augsburg include Hans Burgkmair, Hans Schaufelein and Jorg Breu. Also represented are Lucas Cranach, close friend of Martin Luther and specialist in elegant portraits and courtly subjects for the dukes of Saxony, and Hans Holbein the Younger, who designed book illustrations in Basel and became court painter to Henry VIII of England.