Along with Nuremberg, Augsburg was a leading center of art production in the early sixteenth century in Upper Germany, one that until recently in the scholarship has tended to play second fiddle to Nuremberg and its own star: Albrecht Dürer.[1] The exhibition Holbein. Burgkmair. Dürer. Renaissance in the North, with its accompanying catalogue Renaissance in the North: Holbein, Burgkmair and the Age of the Fuggers,[2] foregrounds a vision of this “other German Renaissance,” offered by Augsburg from around 1480 to 1540, led by its two most important master painters, Hans Holbein the Elder (c. 1464 – 1524) and Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1473 – 1531). Their more localized but durable Northern Renaissance was brewed from Augsburg’s incomparable cultural and economic prosperity, plus its own sense of an ancient Roman past. Unlike Nuremberg, Augsburg distributed political power across its artisanal class. Its Small and Large Council included not only the well-established patrician and merchant classes, whose families, such as the Fuggers, Welsers, and Höchstetters, provided the demand for the city’s commissions in fine and decorative arts, but also the guilds – led by nearly two hundred artisan families, including the formidable weavers’ guild, whose specialty was Fustian cloth.
Curators Jochen Sander at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and Guido Messling at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna deserve much praise both for this major exhibition in two venues as well as for the accompanying catalogue. Ten well-chosen experts in the field contributed specialized essays, followed by an extensive catalogue of over 187 works, organized into five sections.
As the first two essays by Wolfgang Augustyn (18-25) and Andreas Tacke (26-33) establish, Augsburg was shaped by a humanistic culture, linked closely to its own ancient past as the Roman outpost Augusta Vindelicorum and to its convenient location on trade routes with Northern Italy. Its antiquarian impulses prompted early archaeological efforts about the city’s ancient past[3] and fed the collections of city secretary Konrad Peutinger. Augsburg’s favorable position with respect to Italy drew Italian works of art into local collection: for example, the Fuggers commissioned works from Giovanni Bellini, and later Titian made two monthslong stays in the city (1548, 1550-51).
Augsburg artists also traveled southward, perhaps inspired by Dürer’s stop in the city in 1507 on his return from Venice. Burgkmair’s own trip to Italy,[4] engaging Italian Renaissance ornament, Venetian color, and Venetian and Lombard pictorial architecture is competently assessed by Ulrich Söding (“Burgkmair and Italy,” 57-69). Holbein the Elder’s painting, in contrast, has been considered as more committed to local Bavarian, Swabian, and early Netherlandish models of painting.[5] Guido Messling’s essay “Holbein and Burgkmair: A Tale of Two Augsburg Artists,” continues that narrative (35-47). The two painters’ commissions to paint Roman Basilica paintings for the elite Dominican convent of St. Catherine’s (c. 1499-1504) ultimately represent the dominant artistic alternatives available in Augsburg at the cusp of the sixteenth century in terms of their stylistic affinities and workshop structures (i.e., the use of apprentices vs. family enterprise; see also Bodo Brinkmann’s new discoveries in “‘Family Business,’” 78-85). The comprehensiveness of the volume, including the large catalogue section at the end, complicates that apparent dichotomy, because in addition to Burgkmair’s turn toward Italy, it also reveals his northern artistic inheritance in Martin Schongauer, Cologne and the Lower Rhine region, plus Netherlandish traditions originating in Bruges. Likewise, Holbein embraces Renaissance forms by the second decade of the 1500s. Other Augsburg artists took up variations of these artistic models to varying degrees, responding to the tastes of their wealthy, cosmopolitan clients.
The catalogue heavily focuses on the most important panel paintings by Holbein and Burgkmair, in conjunction with a selection of their drawings and prints (Burgkmair), supplemented with works by other Augsburg painters, sculptors, printmakers, and armorers. Ulrich Apt (1460-1532) and Christoph Amberger (c. 1505-1562), arguably the leading Augsburg painters who bookend Holbein and Burgkmair, are absent in the catalogue, though Jörg Breu the Elder (1475-1537) plays an important role, with Hans Holbein the Younger, whose formative years in Augsburg and early years in Basel appear in Jochen Sander’s essay (86-91), and the final catalogue section. Nuremberg’s Dürer (of course!) makes an important cameo appearance for his Fugger commissions.
Also notable are Augsburg sculptors Gregor Erhart, Hans Daucher, Sebastian Loscher, and portrait medalist Hans Schwarz. Their inclusion across media illustrates the epochal shift from the late Gothic to the Renaissance or early modern era in Augsburg art, which affected virtually all media and genres. The dynamic of this change is what Manuel Teget-Welz calls “the Daucher-Erhard-Holbein artists’ cooperative” in his essay “When Three Minds Meet” (49-55, at 53), referring to the yearslong collaborative relationship between Holbein the Elder, Michel and Gregor Erhart, as well as the younger Erhart’s pupil, Hans Daucher, who would excel in Renaissance relief forms. Extending that narrative, Hans Holbein the Younger’s early works in Basel, namely his Portrait of Jacob Meyer and the Solothurn Madonna, are presented by Sander as a synthesis of Italian Renaissance and early Netherlandish traditions, suitable for the book’s coda.
An analogous juxtaposition between the ‘deutsch’ (German) and ‘welsch’ (foreign, basically Italian) elements shows the various Augsburg artistic approaches to Italian forms, ranging from the adoption of new ornament to adaptation of motifs and styles. The modern welsch forms suggest a desire for self-representation and historical self-assurance, commissioned by members of financially-connected banking and merchant families, such as the Fuggers and Welsers. Key here is a Gesamtkunstwerk, the Fugger Chapel in the Carmelite Church of St. Anne’s, the focus of Friederike Schütt’s essay “Albrecht Dürer and Jakob Fugger” (71-77) and of a catalogue section. Designed as the Fugger family burial place, it is the earliest full expression of the welsch style across media. Stone epitaph reliefs after Dürer’s designs, plus putti and a Corpus Christi altarpiece group by Hans Daucher, add to painted organ shutters by Breu with arcaded architecture for biblical and ancient figures from the history of music.
Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) must also be mentioned in the orbit of the welsch and Renaissance style in Augsburg. Maximilian preferred to commission works from local Augsburg artists – especially for his elaborate printed Gedächtnis projects – mediated by Konrad Peutinger.[6] Armin Kunz’s excellent essay “Printmaking in Augsburg” (93-105, esp. 93-94) and a catalogue section focus on some this imperial material. Major events such as the Reichstag (Imperial Diet), which convened six times in Augsburg between 1500-1525, must also be singled out as a stimulus for cultural exchange and artistic production, bringing together eager patrons from outside the city with savvy artists, ready to meet demands for innovative works, such as portrait medals by Hans Schwarz.
Other technical innovations and new genres that arose in Augsburg during this period demonstrate the networks of Augsburg’s economic elite: chiaroscuro woodcuts; depictions of exotic peoples; and the early etching by Daniel Hopfer and Burgkmair, almost certainly in collaboration with the city’s imperial armorers, the Helmschmieds (for which see Kunz, “Printmaking in Augsburg” and the catalogue section, “Augsburg around 1500: New subjects, new techniques, new opportunities”).
The catalogue seems to be trying to address two audiences at once, both scholars and a general public. While indeed beautiful, heavily illustrated in full color and with numerous figure comparisons, it includes a full apparatus of footnotes and bibliography for scholars (though no index for more targeted use, and the font is truly minuscule). Certainly, one value of such serious undertakings is an opportunity to bring together works of art not seen together and to allow specialists to present new research. This “insiders’ view” surely holds more interest for scholars, and this catalogue rises to the occasion in many respects, in particular, some convincing new technical and archival discoveries pertaining to Holbein the Elder. Bodo Brinkmann’s essay, “‘Family Business’: Conjectures on the Holbein Family of Painters in 1512” (78-85), reveals new evidence on the workings of Holbein’s workshop and the participation of his sons, Ambrosius and Hans the Younger. In “The Traces of Hans Holbein the Elder in Augsburg” (107-117), Heidrun Lange-Krach makes major contributions in her archival dive into Holbein’s extended ancestral namesakes and their histories in Augsburg and nearby Ulm. New x-radiographs and infrared reflectograms also settle attribution questions about the stupendous double portrait of Burgkmair and his wife Anna with reflected deaths’ heads (cat. no. 2.006). The revealed underdrawing, according to Messling, indicates that one of Burgkmair’s late pupils, Lucas Furtenagel, produced the entire work and that it was not, in fact, begun by Burgkmair and then completed by Furtenagel in the workshop, as previously proposed.[7] Kunz’s overview of printmaking in Augsburg has wider appeal across both general and scholarly audiences. It echoes recent scholarship by Elizabeth Savage in acknowledging the role of print publishers (namely, Erhard Ratdolt) in development of color printing, and it gives credit to the skilled block-cutters (e.g., Jost de Negker, Cornelis Liefrinck) who came to the city; these collaborators, as much as Burgkmair, enabled innovations in printing particular to Augsburg.[8]
Other artistic quandaries remain unresolved: for example, the identity of the Petrarch Master as Hans Weiditz, and the attribution of the Marriage Portrait of Jakob Fugger and Sibylla Artzt (cat. no. 3.01) to Hans Burgkmair (not his father Thoman). In another instance, the catalogue confuses through internal contradictions, with some authors putting Holbein the Elder as a citizen in nearby Ulm in 1493, and others suggesting that the archival record refers instead to a different Hans Holbein.[9] However, such mysteries demonstrate the need for more Augsburg research at our new tipping-point of interest in the arts of this truly outstanding city.
The catalogue’s multi-media representation is most welcome, though, except for the Fugger Chapel and its decoration, it still largely focuses on two-dimensional works. This is natural for a catalogue based on the logistics of exhibition loans, which are much more conducive to panel paintings, drawings, and prints. Among the highlights are Burgkmair’s remarkable red chalk drawings (cat. nos. 1.14, 1.15), a rare medium for a northern artist at this time and yet another link between the artist and Italy, where the medium is associated with the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The book’s uneven treatment of some other media for which Augsburg was known – silverpoint portrait drawings (Holbein’s specialty), stained glass windows, metalwork (Jörg Muskat’s bronze busts and the exquisite reliquaries by Jörg Seld, for example), and armor – point to possible directions for future publications on Augsburg. Such new research can build on this exhibition, as well as on its related symposium on Augsburg’s African and Indian ‘ethnographies,’[10] to provide a more fully integrated, multi-media view of the city’s artistic production and visual and material culture. That might entail an examination across the city’s most localized important spaces and its regional- and global-facing presence across the entire sixteenth century.
Ashley D. West T
emple University–The Tyler School of Art & Architecture
[1] For which, see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), which argues for Dürer’s own self-presentation and positioning within the longer history of art as precisely such a figure, as both exceptional and normative in defining this period of art production.
[2] Holbein. Burgkmair. Dürer. Renaissance in the North was the name of the exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (March 19 – June 30, 2024). The exhibition title at the Städel venue in Frankfurt (Nov. 2, 2023 – Feb. 18, 2024) was, rather, Holbein and the Renaissance in the North – in that case, dropping the name of Burgkmair from the banner and playing up the titular Holbein name, with its double signification for both Hans the Elder and the better-known (and publicly popular) Hans the Younger. Regarding the exhibition titles, one might well imagine the conversations held between the curators and museum development and public programming departments to balance audience draw with scholarly content.
[3] Christopher S. Wood, “Notation of Visual Information in the Earliest Archeological Scholarship,” Word & Image 17.1-2 (Jan.-June 2001): 94-118; and Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008), 90, 128-35.
[4] First posited by Tilman Falk, Hans Burgkmair. Studien zu Leben und Werk des Augsburger Malers (Munich: Bruckmann, 1968).
[5] Katharina Krause, Hans Holbein der Ältere (Munich/Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002).
[6] Further to Peutinger as patron and supervisor of antiquarian-driven projects: Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Ashley D. West, “Hans Burgkmair and Conrad Peutinger: Reevaluating the Artist-Humanist Relationship,” in Hans Burgkmair—Neue Forschungen, eds. Wolfgang Augustyn and Manuel Teget-Welz (Passau: Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 2018), 45-67; West, “Conrad Peutinger and Visual Images: Collaborating with Hans Burgkmair” and “Die Illustrationen für das Kaiserbuch: Die Caesarenköpfe Hans Burgkmairs d. A.,” in Gesammeltes Gedächtnis—Konrad Peutinger und die kulturelle Überlieferung im 16. Jahrhundert, eds. Reinhard Laube and Helmut Zäh (Lucerne: Quaternio Verlag, 2016), 62-73, 118-24; and Rachel M. Carlisle, Picturing German Antiquity in the Age of Print (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025).
[7] However, Messling points to the likelihood that Furtenagel’s double portrait was a copy after Burgkmair depicting himself with his wife, perhaps set against an elaborate monumental Renaissance architectural setting, as reproduced in an engraving by Georg Christoph Kilian in 1766. Messing neglected to provide an image of the crucial underdrawing.
[8] Elizabeth Savage, “Hans Burgkmair’s Colour Woodcuts: An Overview,” in Augustyn and Teget-Welz, 333-66; and Savage, Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts in the British Museum (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021), 45-83.
[9] See Teget-Welz, “When Three Minds Meet,” 49 and n.2, vs. Lange-Krach, “The Traces of Hans Holbein the Elder in Augsburg,” 108 and n.40.
[10] The symposium, “Hans Burgkmair d. Ä. & die europäische Vorstellung von Afrika und Indien: Baltasar Sprengers ‘Merfart’ (1508) im Kontext,” took place in Frankfurt from Jan. 18-19, 2024, jointly sponsored by the Städel Museum and Kunstgeschichtleiches Institut, Goethe-Universität.