BURGKMAIR, Hans

Hans Schellenberger was an Augsburg patrician, who married Barbara Ehem in 1506. He is holding an eyebright flower in his hand, signifying cheerfulness; she has a lily of the valley, a symbol of future happiness. The inscriptions, the portrait type, their being pendants, the symbols and the age of the subjects identify these as betrothal and marriage portraits. These paintings, formerly in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, are the only surviving pair of portraits by Burgkmair.

The painting is the central panel of the Calvary Triptych, the side wings representing St Sigismund and St George, respectively.

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Hans Burgkmair was a major designer of woodcuts for Augsburg book publishers. His designs for woodcuts found a ready patron when Emperor Maximilian sought to have his likeness and politics circulated in visual form throughout the Holy Roman Empire. To commemorate Maximilian’s official coronation, Burgkmair designed a pendant pair of equestrian woodcuts, one of the emperor’s knightly role model, St George Slaying the Dragon, the other of Emperor Maximilian on Horseback. This latter print was the first major experiment in coloured printmaking.

The chiaroscuro woodcut was first developed in Germany between 1507 and 1510 with the experiments of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Burgkmair in Augsburg. Although initially inspired by coloured drawings executed on paper first prepared with a coloured wash, the technique quickly proved popular. It offered a mechanical alternative to hand colouring or stencilling. The line block is printed first, normally using black ink, on either white or coloured paper. Each impression is printed again with one or more coloured blocks. The registration of the paper and the blocks has to be precise to avoid the colours being misapplied.

The portrait of Jacob Fugger is elegantly simple yet highly imaginative. Rather than employing the line block just for contours and the tone block just for shading, the Augsburg master mixed their applications. He composed from light to dark. The whiteness of the paper stands for the brightest passages, the fleshy brown colour of the tone block for the middle range, and the black of the line block for the shaded areas. Fugger’s profile is outlined by the tone block. Yet at the bridge and base of the nose, at the mouth and at the lower curve of the chin, deft touches of black imply deepening shadows. Bold black contour and shading lines dominate the back of the figure. The same tonal gradation is evident in the hat.

Augsburg-born Hans Burgkmair not only played a leading role in disseminating modern Italian Renaissance ornamentation in southern Germany, but also developed the technique of the chiaroscuro woodcut, in which several plates are used, each one printing a different tone of the same colour. In the case of the Paumgartner portrait, the desired painterly effect is achieved by using three tones of violet; black is not used at all. The architectural motif of the arch is used to better effect in the young Hans Holbein’s double portraits of burgomaster Jacob Meyer and his wife (�ffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel). In these portraits husband and wife are shown against one continuous architectural background which is sumptuous in its elaborate detail and contrasts of red and gold.

And the same time with his printmaking activities, Burgkmair continued to paint traditional religious works, particularly altarpieces, with his own distinctive large-scale and fully modeled figures. A good example is the St John Altarpiece, which features the Evangelist on the island of Patmos in the centre, and the bishop saints Erasmus and Martin in an extended landscape on the wings.

The painting, which is the central panel of the St John Triptych, depicts a subject popular in Northern culture: St John the Evangelist’s vision of the Apocalypse on the isle of Patmos. The side wings represent the bishop saints Erasmus and Martin in an extended landscape.

Late in his career Burgkmair collaborated with artists from Augsburg in the painted ensemble for Wlihelm IV, the Wittelsbach Duke of Bavaria, in his palace in Munich. Burgkmair contributed to a series dedicated to virtuous women by the painting The Story of Esther, in which he featured the heroic intervention by a Jewish woman, installed as queen, on behalf of her people against the genocidal plans as the king’s minister, Haman.