Hans Wechtlin
Johann, Johannes or Hans Wechtlin was a German Renaissance artist, active between at least 1502 and 1526, whose
Life
He was born in about 1480-85, presumably in
Single woodcuts
He left nineteen single-leaf wood-cuts (i.e. prints rather than book illustrations), apparently made in the period 1505-15, and is mainly remembered for his twelve chiaroscuro woodcuts, which are all extremely rare. The dating of these has been much discussed by art-historians, as part of the very tangled issue of the development of the German chiaroscuro woodcut. Bartrum assigns them "towards the end" of the 16th century.[3] No surviving paintings are attributed to him, although a few drawings have been, tentatively. As with most artists in woodcut, art historians now consider that Wechtlin probably just designed the woodcuts, leaving the block-cutting to a specialist "formschneider" who pasted the design to the wood and chiselled the white areas away. The quality of the final woodcuts, which varies considerably, depended on the skill of the cutter as well as the artist.
His best known print is the chiaroscuro Skull Within an Ornamental Frame, "by far his most impressive" and "one of the most powerful [images] of the German Renaissance", which is the only one for which there is evidence of dating, as it is copied in a book of 1512.
His Knight and Halberdier (illustrated above) is in the chivalrous spirit influenced by Emperor Maximilian and his calls for a crusade; indeed the style of armour the knight wears is often called "Maximilian armour".[7] Other early chiaroscuro woodcuts were equestrian portraits of similar knightly figures, a portrait of Maximilian by Hans Burgkmair, and versions of Saint George and the Dragon looking very similar to the Emperor, by both Cranach and Burgkmair.[8] Wechtlin's twelve prints were the largest individual contribution to the corpus of about sixty German chiaroscuro woodcuts from the early 16th century - the technique was probably invented by Burgkmair in 1508.[9] Unlike Burgkmair's often frankly garish colours, Wechtlin's colour woodcuts use only two blocks and muted colours. In both the Cleveland and Cincinnati impressions of the Knight and Halberdier there are black line blocks and a "greyish-blue" tone block;[10] other tone blocks are described as "blue-grey" (Orpheus and the Skull) and "grey-green" (Pyramus and Thisbe).[6]
His monogram, used only on eleven of his chiaroscuro prints, consists in its fullest form of his initials "Io V" between two diagonally crossed pilgrim's staves, with a flower in the centre, on a cartellino or plaque, a style copied from Albrecht Dürer.[7] His prints, recognised as a group,[11] remained unattributed to any documented artist until 1851, when his name on the title page of a book he illustrated was connected with the monogram and the few documentary records.[12] A similar monogram was used by the glass-painter Jacob Wechtlin, perhaps a brother.[13]
Book illustrations
His best known book illustrations in his own time were 135 woodcuts from
Better-known today are the often rather gruesome woodcuts for Hans von Gersdorff's (1455–1529) Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (literally "Field-book of the Wound-doctor", 1517, 1st edn.), a manual for the military surgeon (see Commons). These have sometimes been coloured by hand, but are printed in black and white.[17] His frontispiece for the 1526 edition, produced when he was probably in his forties, is the last known trace of him. He is not to be confused with Hans Weiditz, another Strasbourg woodcut artist of the period.
Notes
- ^ "Coloured version from Cleveland Museum of Art". Archived from the original on 2004-10-30. Retrieved 2008-10-08.
- ^ Variant contemporary spellings are Veuchtelin, Wächtlin, or Wechtle
- ^ Bartrum, 67
- ^ Bartrum, 67. Skull Within an Ornamental Frame British Museum, with image.
- ^ Cleveland impression[permanent dead link]
- ^ a b Bartrum, 66-67
- ^ a b c Peters, 69
- ^ Peters, 69. Illustrated in Landau & Parshall, 186-189, also Bartrum & Peters.
- ISBN 0-300-06883-2, for a full discussion of the origin of the technique.
- ^ Peters, 69, and see link at illustration note for a colour image of Cleveland
- ^ One, St John on the Island of Patmos (see External links), was added by Campbell Dodgson in 1903 JSTOR, Burlington Magazine
- ^ Bartrum, 65. He was known by the invented name "Johann Ulrich Pilgrim" until this point.
- ^ Bartrum, 65
- ISBN 0-300-10131-7, including one page illustrated. Another woodcut of "Fame" is shown here Archived 2011-07-06 at the Wayback Machine, and further pages here, here and here
- ^ See section 16 with example
- ^ Examples, with commentary, from the Fitzwilliam Museum Archived 2011-06-12 at the Wayback Machine and the Metropolitan Museum
- ^ copy at Columbia University Library
References
- ISBN 0-7141-2604-7
- Jane S Peters in KL Spangeberg (ed), Six Centuries of Master Prints, Cincinnati Art Museum, 1993, no. 38, ISBN 0-931537-15-0
External links
- Cleveland[permanent dead link] Saint John on the island of Patmos.