ROTTENHAMMER, Hans I

This dated painting was executed in 1608. By that year the artist had settled in Augsburg, after a lengthy stay in Venice. Following his return to his homeland, Rottenhammer’s figural style remained strongly rooted in Venice, and recalls Venetian prototypes in both pose and expression. In the present picture the debt to Veronese reveals itself most strongly.

This composition repeats, with minor alterations to the angels and the immediate foreground, Rottenhammer’s large-scale Adoration of the Shepherds of 1608 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Copper was a popular painting support in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and it was used for this Allegory. Pictura is inspired by her beautiful model (Venus), as Architecture devises a centrally planned château-fort; Poetry writes and Music strums the lute. Faintly in the manner of Veronese, this cheerily erotic tableau is typical of international Mannerism.

Hans Rottenhammer was a German artist who traveled to Italy around the turn of the seventeenth century. Although trained in Munich under the court painter Hans Donauer, his most formative training arose from studying the grand works of Tintoretto, Veronese and Palma Giovane in Venice, where he spent a lengthy and successful sojourn from 1591-1606, broken only by a brief Roman excursion from 1594-1595. Rottenhammer would later settle back in his native Bavaria, but his style, though German at its core, would remain strongly rooted in Italy, particularly in Venice, until the end of his career.

Rottenhammer’s reputation for working in this small format was widespread during his lifetime, but his undeniable talent also found its way, albeit very rarely, onto the large scale format of the present canvas. While Rottenhammer returned to the theme of the Feast of the Gods on a number of occasions, he most often approached it in a much smaller format. The present composition, in fact, can be closely compared to Rottenhammer’s celebrated copper of the same subject dated 1600 and now in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

The Judgement of Paris was a theme frequently dealt with by Rottenhammer during his Venetian period of 1591 to 1604, with the artist varying the composition in terms of both the format and the arrangement of figures.