Augsburg Takes Center Stage

For early sixteenth-century German art, Albrecht Dürer and Nuremberg command the spotlight of both public and scholarly attention. Yet, as this rich new exhibition demonstrates, rival Augsburg was far more than a “second city.” It, too, had a thriving economy under patrician rule, led by the proud merchant banking family, the Fuggers, but also by international networks of other families, including the Welsers (who also engaged in early explorations and slave trading), Höchstetters, and others. Fustian cloth provided a major local industry. Like Nuremberg, Augsburg, too, was an independent, imperial city. At last, with this huge exhibition, Augsburg art during its early sixteenth-century apogee now gets its due.

Together, the great German art collections at Frankfurt and Vienna provide a nucleus to display Augsburg’s artistic counterpoint. This roster of 187 objects covers a local “Renaissance in the North” across the period of roughly 1480 to 1530. Augsburg visual culture was led by painters: Hans Holbein the Elder (with an exhibition coda pointing to his namesake son, Holbein the Younger), Hans Burgkmair, the exhibition’s namesakes, but also Jörg Breu and others. Local sculptors also shone, such as Gregor Erhart, Hans Daucher, Loy Hering, and Sebastian Loscher, plus portrait medalist Hans Schwarz. Innovative printmaking chiefly featured woodcuts—including innovative color woodcuts—by Burgkmair and his successor Hans Weiditz, but also etchings, the technical invention of Daniel Hopfer. (Prints are covered in a magisterial overview essay by Armin Kunz, 92–105.) While these individuals are today not as well known as Dürer and his circle—or the Nuremberg sculptors Veit Stoss, Adam Kraft, and Peter Vischer— this enlightening exhibition makes a powerful reminder, or riposte, about the impressive accomplishments of their Augsburg artistic contemporaries.

Because installations will differ in their organization between Frankfurt and Vienna and because the influence of this revisionist view of Augsburg’s own Renaissance will largely result from its catalogue, this review will focus on that book. First of all, it is beautifully illustrated by Hirmer, with almost all images in color and a series of essays by noted experts. Compliments, first of all, for both the catalogue itself and for the original conception of this important exhibition, should go to its distinguished curators: Jochen Sander at the Städel and Guido Messling at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Wolfgang Augustyn begins the essay section with a learned overview (18–25) of Augsburg’s political organization and economic prosperity, albeit unequally distributed between the super-rich and the poor.^[1] He notes the city’s importance for Emperor Maximilian I, who not only held multiple Diets there but also was considered “the Mayor of Augsburg.” The emperor primarily commissioned Augsburg artists, led by Burgkmair and Leonhard Beck, for the massive woodcut projects used to illustrate his genealogy, family saints, the book of his character and deeds (Weisskunig) and his verse romance (Theuerdank; the only one of those projects published), as well as a partially completed woodcut Triumphal Procession.^[2] At the Augsburg Diet of 1518 Dürer made portraits of both Maximilian and Jakob Fugger, while Hans Schwarz initiated his series of medals of major figures of politics and culture.^[3]

Facilitating this local flowering of visual culture and acting as an agent for Maximilian’s projects in his role as imperial councilor was the learned city secretary and antiquarian Konrad Peutinger. He also worked on his own project for Maximilian, an illustrated history of Roman emperors, the Kaiserbuch. For that project (also never published), he enlisted the young Burgkmair to produce woodcut profile portraits and fostered the ongoing connections between the emperor and that artist. The exhibition downplays that interaction, but it is covered elsewhere; however, the images are confusingly divided, with most of them in the final section.

Of course, Augsburg culture is often associated with the family firm of the Fuggers, led by Jakob “the Rich,” a major merchant-banker and metal trader as well as art patron.^[4] He notably sponsored Dürer-designed marble reliefs in round porphyry arches for the family funerary chapel, the Fuggerkapelle, at St. Anna’s.^[5] The architecture of that chapel (as well as the remodeled Fugger household on the Weinmarkt; now lost) has also been dubbed as the “first Renaissance building in Germany.”^[6] More specific attention to that foundational project appears in a later essay, “Albrecht Dürer and Jakob Fugger,” by Friederike Schütt (70–77), and the more general effect of Fugger taste for the local adoption of Italianate forms is outlined by Andreas Tacke’s essay on Augsburg as a cultural center (27–33).

A wave of church building in Augsburg, including the massive nave of the abbey of SS. Ulrich and Afra, included Dominican churches for both friars and nuns as well as Augustinian canons. To ornament those spaces with paintings, Hans Holbein the Elder painted the high altarpiece of Augsburg’s existing cathedral (cat. no. 2.068), and he shared production of a series of paintings (1499–1508) for the Dominican nuns at St. Catherine’s with Hans Burgkmair. Holbein also actively produced altarpieces for the region. He collaborated at Weingarten with Ulm sculptor Michel Erhart on the wings for a Mary Altarpiece (1493; now in Augsburg Cathedral) and at Kaisheim, both with Erhart’s son Gregor, who resettled with him in Augsburg in 1494, and with Adolf Daucher, father of relief carver Hans Daucher. Gregor Erhart and Holbein the Elder enjoyed several fruitful collaborations and mutual influences with the Erharts, as Manuel Teget-Welz spells out in both his essay and his recent monograph on Gregor Erhart (48–55).^[7]

Later paintings in the Fugger Chapel for organ wings and a family epitaph were made by yet another local artist, Jörg Breu, whose personal chronicle shows intense, if private, sympathy for the Reformation.^[8] That religious movement, which included the formulation of an Augsburg Confession by Lutherans in 1530, split the city for several centuries. Its advent, including a wave of iconoclasm in 1537, plus the deaths of most of the city’s principal artists seen in the exhibition, marks the basic endpoint of this halcyon moment.

In his essay, Guido Messling introduces the principal artists named in the exhibition title: Holbein and Burgkmair (34–47), as he draws significant comparisons between them.^[9] In addition to his Augsburg regional activity, Holbein also produced a massive altarpiece for the Frankfurt Dominicans (1501; housed today in the Stádel), and he made designs for a silver Kaisheim reliquary by Gregor Erhart, for stained glass windows, and for engravings produced by printmaker Israhel van Meckenem. As noted, Hans Holbein the Elder was the dominant Augsburg painter at the turn of the sixteenth century, shortly after his journeyman’s visit to the Netherlands around 1490.

Holbein’s sudden emerging rival in Augsburg, the younger artist Hans Burgkmair, already becomes prominent in their respective, ongoing contributions to the St. Catherine’s series on Roman basilicas. There, Burgkmair’s turn toward Italian spatial and figural depictions clearly emerges sooner. His importation of Renaissance forms is even more evident in his subsequent Madonna and Child paintings and prints, such as his large 1509 Nuremberg panel (64). Holbein would later make a similar, emphatic turn in the second decade of the century, in such pictures as the spectacular Fountain of Life (1519, Lisbon; cat. no. 2.073), with its prominent triumphal arch, made for the Augsburg Church of Mary Magdalene (with an Erhart figure of the saint; Paris, Louvre); it is one of the most notable loans for this exhibition. Of course, this move toward the Renaissance would climax in the Basel works of Holbein the Younger, whose Meyer Madonna (ca. 1526–1528; cat. no. 5.11), returned on loan to Frankfurt from the Würth Collection, along with his Solothurn Madonna (1522; cat. no. 5.08), form a spectacular coda to the exhibition’s focus on his father, Holbein the Elder.^[10]

Messling also contrasts the large Holbein workshop, which not only engaged his artist sons but also included other established Augsburg painters, such as Leonard Beck, against Burgkmair’s use of recorded apprentices (including his own son, Hans the Younger). However, Burgkmair’s family associated closely with local armorers of the Helmschmied family (cat nos. 1.41, 4.23), and he also collaborated with sculptor Sebastian Loscher.^[11] Holbein’s close association with the Erhard sculpture dynasty is well covered in Manuel Teget-Welz’s essay, “When Three Minds Meet” (48–55). Messling finally notes perceptively that Burgkmair’s Renaissance forms, especially through his prints, carried wider influence, including both the Holbein and his sons later as well as to Augsburg sculptors, especially relief sculptors.

Of all Augsburg topics, a serious catalogue of Burgkmair paintings remains the major lacuna.^[12] Messling endorses one theory of Burgkmair’s origins: an apprenticeship with Martin Schongauer, based in part on the identification of the Colmar artist in a posthumous portrait (ca. 1510–1511, Munich; sometimes attributed to Hans’s father, Thoman Burgkmair), also related to a black chalk Burgkmair drawing in the exhibition (Oxford; cat. no. 2.111).^[13] Of course, with a painter father, no outside apprenticeship would have been necessary for Hans, whose father might also have been the one who learned from Schongauer.

Significantly, one of Burgkmair’s earliest portraits, the wedding double image of Jakob Fugger and Sibylla Artzt (1498; cat. no. 3.01), marks a major social connection. Added to his early work for Peutinger, it helps explain his early turn to Italian forms.^[14] Another thoughtful essay by Ulrich Söding, “Burgkmair and Italy” (56–69), takes up that important topic. Soding adopts the consensus and provides firm evidence that Burgkmair made an undocumented trip to Italy in 1507, chiefly to the Veneto and Lombardy. Those experiences quickly reshaped his Madonna images, their Venetian coloring, and their architectural settings (cat. nos. 2.083–2.090). Lingering Italian forms dominate the atmosphere of his later St. John Altarpiece (1518) and the exterior shutter figures under domed space on his Crucifixion Altarpiece, made for the Peutinger family (1519, both works now in Munich). Dürer’s own stay in Italy ended in 1507, after he painted his Feast of the Rose Garlands for the important German trading company at Venice’s Fondaco dei Tedeschi (1506, Vienna copy; cat. no. 1.03). But as the study by Friederike Schütt (70–77) reminds us, Dürer also had contact afterward with Augsburg for the Fugger Chapel design (cat. nos. 3.08–3.13); during the 1518 Diet of Augsburg, he returned to the city and made a drawing for portraits of Jakob Fugger (Berlin; cat. no. 3.06) and Emperor Maximilian (Vienna), plus a drawing of Burgkmair himself (Oxford). Söding notes how both Burgkmair and Dürer became “Italian-speaking” and shared several humanist contacts, such as imperial poet-laureate Conrad Celtis, for whom Burgkmair created an early, fully classicizing printed memorial (1507; cat. no. 1.08).^[15] Burgkmair, however, never attained Dürer’s international renown, nor did he have the same drive to master art theory and record it for posterity.

Remaining essays focus more exclusively on the Holbein family and its pictorial projects. A remarkable archival detective story by Heidrun Lange-Krach uncovers “The Traces of Hans Holbein the Elder in Augsburg” (107–117). In the process, besides family ancestry she reveals the financial status of the family as well as their workshop organization. Complementing those findings, Bodo Brinkmann investigates the new-found 1512 Marx (?) Fischer male portrait (private collection; cat. no. 5.01), based on a drawing by Holbein the Elder (cat. no. 5.03) but now given convincingly to the emerging Holbein the Younger, then only fifteen years old, based on its different concept and handling. It appears alongside its pendant of his wife (Basel; cat. no. 5.02 and her drawing study, cat. no. 5.04), attributed to Ambrosius Holbein. His essay, “Family Business” (78–85), considers what these portraits suggest about the emerging multi-generational Holbein workshop at its formative moment, the same time when Holbein the Elder made a memorable silverpoint double portrait of his two artist sons, Ambrosius and Hans the Younger (1511, Berlin).^[16] Finally, Jochen Sander briefly traces for Holbein the Younger his “Formative Experiences as an Artist in Augsburg and his First Decade in Basel” (86–91). While he made the move from Augsburg in 1515, this exhibition reveals Holbein the Younger’s activity in the family workshop before then. Hans the Younger began immediately to gain prominence in Basel, incorporating Burgkmair’s use of Italianate architecture along with his father’s related work of the same moment, which resulted in works such as the 1516 pendant portraits under arches of Jacob Meyer zum Hasen and his wife Dorothea Kannengiesser (Basel; cat. no. 5.07). Sander wants to assert dual influences on Holbein the Younger of both Jan van Eyck and Leonardo da Vinci, the latter obtained during Holbein’s unsuccessful trip to France around 1524 in quest of a royal court appointment.

An extensive catalogue section of works on view effectively brings in comparative images not in the exhibition, usually in color, except for graphics. Those works complement the loans by showing related subjects or final versions drawn from the same design. But the catalogue is divided into quite uneven sections, which undermine clarity, especially about the two main artists, Holbein the Elder and Burgkmair, whose works are scattered throughout.

The first segment of the exhibition organization is the most diverse and unfocused, “Augsburg around 1500: New Subjects, New Techniques, New Opportunities” (121–159). Along with imagery from abroad, including Burgkmair’s images of African and Asian peoples as well as his version of a rhinoceros, various other themes appear. For example, paintings of the Temperaments by Hans Schäufelein mix with the bronze Neptune fountain by a good but unknown sculptor, a Jörg Breu design for a Fourteen Helpers shrine, and a Hopfer etching of the new church of St. Catherine’s with a parable included. Portrait medals of both Fugger and Peutinger by Schwarz expand the range of media and complement Burgkmair’s portrait prints— the first to appear in Germany—and other drawn or painted portraits.^[17] Two subjects that are less visible in the essays make brief cameo appearances here before turning up elsewhere in the catalogue: projects, including armor, for Emperor Maximilian by Augsburg artists, led by Hans Burgkmair (but also see cat. nos. 4.23–4.36); plus later, small-scale limestone reliefs by Hans Daucher and Gregor Erhart. In short, Part One is a mishmash.

Part Two, “Holbein and Burgkmair” (161–267), is by far the largest section, though of course works by both artists populate much of the rest of the catalogue. Religious works are featured here, through panels, drawings, and Meckenem prints, and through Burgkmair colored breviary woodcuts. Additionally, one Holbein design for stained glass is included (cat. no. 2.042), and his design (cat. no. 2.044) for a silver reliquary of St. Sebastian is notably paired with Gregor Erhart’s final work. Frequent Madonna icons by Holbein appear, which pose unasked questions about their role and sources, especially in Byzantine models, soon to be transformed by Burgkmair’s Italianate innovations. Also noteworthy is Burgkmair’s seldom seen, multi-sheet, late religious woodcut imagery, here an Agony in the Garden (1524, eight blocks; cat. no. 2.098). Burgkmair paintings are well represented (raising again the need for a full catalogue of those works), while other Augsburg artists are sampled: Ulrich Apt (cat. nos. 2.102–2.103), Leonhard Beck (cat. no. 2.104), and Jörg Breu (cat. nos. 2.105–106).

Remaining sections of the exhibition largely feature portraits. Part Three, “The Fuggers, the Fugger Chapel, and Dürer” (269–289), mixes Fugger family portraits with elements drawn from the family chapel, including Breu’s organ wings. Part Four, another mishmash, displays “All Kinds of Change: Patrons in Augsburg” (291–325). At long last, it includes more Maximilian projects in various media, but separated from previous examples, mostly as tokens of patronage along with local citizen portraits. Finally, the brief parting gesture to Holbein the Younger arrives in Part Five, “From Augsburg to Basel: Holbein’s Sons” (327–341).

Sifting and sorting all these threads to make a coherence pattern surely was difficult, since the exhibition has an embarrassment of riches, with remarkable loans of highest quality, framed by its authoritative essays. This sheer volume of Holbein and Burgkmair works in all media deserves highest praise, even if some of their artistic accomplishments are scattered enough to defy coherence. Altogether, Augsburg has been well served, though (as is usually the case with modern exhibitions), neither venue could show all the works in the catalogue.

On the walls, these outstanding loans and impressive artistic accomplishments shone brightly, and the organizers are to be congratulated and thanked for their labors. For the general public, however, without the informative catalogue or other assistance, such as Acoustiguides, understanding the phenomenon of the Augsburg Renaissance solely from the works on display alone might be difficult. Graphic images of Jakob Fugger, for example, by both Burgkmair and Holbein were displayed together but were located deep into the installation. In addition, for marketing purposes, in Vienna the exhibition posters heralded “Holbein, Burgkmair, Dürer” as the artistic stars of the exhibition. Granted, in Vienna several portraits by Holbein the Younger graced the exhibition exit, and several Dürer images also appeared: designs for the Fugger Chapel as well as his Rhinoceros and drawings of Jakob and Raymond Fugger, all displayed later. But, of course, the Augsburg painter was Holbein the Elder, celebrated here rather than his son, and Dürer was not from Augsburg, so he should not be trumpeted as a drawing-card. For readers of this scholarly journal, the confusion caused by that list of artists might be merely amusing; however, some visitors might well have been disappointed or even frustrated by tactics that vendors call “bait and switch.”

In 1521, a bird’s-eye view of Augsburg (96–97), based on measurements taken by goldsmith Jörg Seld and cut on eight woodblocks by Hans Weiditz, was printed with the city coat of arms and inscriptions. As the first systematic city layout in German art, it sparked numerous imitations and variations.^[18] It is one among other graphic innovations in the city, notably the color woodcuts or etchings so well presented by Armin Kunz (92–105). That Augsburg city portrait grew out of local pride and prosperity, projected through prints across the entire Germanspeaking empire. Like Seld’s map, this splendid exhibition and its catalogue provide a fresh overview of Augsburg visual culture and patronage, effectively putting that prosperous imperial city squarely back on the map.