Burgkmair’s Hand

At last, scholars have a complete catalogue of drawings by the German Renaissance artist Hans Burgkmair the Elder (1473–1531), until recently one of the more understudied of the leading early sixteenth-century artists that included Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger. The book will be the prevailing reference on the artist’s drawings for years to come, undoubtedly the basis for future research. There is no one more qualified and suitable to the task than the late Tilman Falk (1936–2020), who from his dissertation on Burgkmair (1964) through his tenure as Director of the Graphische Sammlung in Munich (1989–2000) and until the final weeks of his life spent his professional career and retirement years researching Burgkmair, the most prolific artist of the Renaissance in Augsburg. Falk’s seminal book Hans Burgkmair: Studien zu Leben und Werk des Augsburger Malers (1968) and contribution to the main publication on Burkgmair’s printed work (1973) did much to reintroduce Burgkmair in the post-war era, presenting him as a successful painter and printmaker, and an artist who benefited from a trip to Italy, as well as from a network of patrons among Augsburg’s leading ecclesiasts, patricians, humanists, and of course, Emperor Maximilian I.^[1] Falk’s book on Burgkmair’s drawings serves as a significant marker both of Burgkmair’s legacy and, poignantly, of that of the author, who unfortunately passed away before its publication.

Thankfully, Wolfgang Augustyn, former Deputy Director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, ably edited the manuscript and saw it through publication. He left Falk’s text essentially untouched, with the exception of minimal editorial polishing and bibliographic updates of the literature since Falk’s submission of his manuscript in 2020. The publisher has produced a beautiful volume, large in size and fully illustrated. Each drawing and related entry are given their own page, or even a full folio spread, and there is an appendix with thirty-eight color reproductions for those images where color, tonal variation, or texture is particularly noteworthy.

While the catalogue lacks any extended critical essays to help reframe or interpret Burgkmair’s drawings, its service as a vital reference more than fulfills the necessary task of updating and refining the past efforts of scholars to create a compendium of the artist’s drawings – a challenge that no one other than Falk dared tackle since Hans Rupe, Karl Theodor Parker, and Peter Halm.^[2] Falk’s decades-long development of avisual storehouse of images in his mind, based on his direct study of thousands of works of art by Augsburg artists and Burgkmair’s work, in particular – drawings, prints, paintings – have honed his visual acuity over many decades of experience and have made him uniquely qualified to this task as his culminating contribution to the field. Falk tracked down and examined in person virtually all of the surviving drawings that appear in the catalogue, in major and minor collections, public and private, across Germany, Austria, England, and cities including New York, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, one of the largest single repositories of Burgkmair drawings, whose collection of works on paper had been for six years sequestered due to renovations.

Following a short essay on Burgkmair as a draughtsman, Falk divides his catalogue into four sections, each roughly chronological as he sees it. The first (Z 1–86) consists of eighty-six entries on drawings that Falk accepts as authentically by Burgkmair (including seven pen and ink color drawings, within a single entry, for the margins of Emperor Maximilian’s Prayerbook). The second (ZA 1–9) includes nine sheets that Falk was not able to attribute securely to Burgkmair, either because they are lost or with authorship still uncertain. Section three (ZB 1–33) features thirty-three workshop copy drawings after known or lost works by Burgkmair. In the final section (ZC 1–47) are forty-seven works formerly attributed to Burgkmair in the scholarship but rejected by Falk. Each entry contains information about the image’s medium, size, current location and literature, and, where applicable, the presence of watermarks and inscriptions, with excursus on the image’s subject or likely context and function, and its status in previous scholarship.

According to Falk, Burgkmair’s complete drawing oeuvre is about ones-tenth of that ascribed to Albrecht Dürer, his exact contemporary. However, that number is deceptive, given the nearly 800 woodcuts Burgkmair designed, for which there undoubtedly would have been drawings. Such an absence in the drawing record suggests a high loss rate, with many drawings likely destroyed in the image transfer to the woodblocks, or otherwise discarded. Case in point is Burgkmair’s work for Maximilian’s Triumphal Procession, for which the artist designed 67 of the 139 blocks but for which only two autograph sketches remain (Z 53, 54). Another small portion of Burgkmair’s extant drawings had been claimed by eager Dürer collectors who had falsely added the AD monogram to some, including the astounding self-portrait dated 1517 (Z 58), now in Hamburg and previously owned by the painter and art theorist, Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688).

Although Falk lays out the drawing attributions according to approximate chronology, it is difficult to ascertain a sense of linear artistic development for such a prolific and variable artist as Burgkmair. Falk deliberately refrains from larger art historical interpretations of the drawings, but with such a compendium readers have the opportunity to see for themselves Burgkmair’s fundamental artistic skills, as the practice of drawing undergirded every aspect of a master painter’s range of artistic output. We can make connections among smaller groups of drawings separated by time but linked by subject, style, composition, function, and exploration of certain artistic problems and materials.

Burgkmair has become best known for developing and transmitting a Renaissance style north of the Alps. But evident also in his oeuvre – with traces visible in his drawings – are interests in other stylistic modes and subject matter. Early in the chronology, Burgkmair’s drawings give testimony to his travels ca. 1503 not to Italy but rather to the North, namely to Cologne and perhaps also to Bruges. Drawings in fine lines, some with color notations, show Burgkmair’s interest in Stephan Lochner’s Last Judgment in Cologne (Z 19; described as a visual commentary of Lochner’s work rather than as a kind of medieval workshop practice copy) and in Rogier van der Weyden’s most elegant wing panel from the Columba Altarpiece (Z 20; described as a “drawing after a drawing,” made after an initial sketch Burgkmair must have first made before the original work). There is a pair of loose sketchbook pages showing Wise and Foolish Virgins before the Gates of Heaven (Z 22, 23) possibly after a lost panel or wall painting by Robert Campin. Burgkmair had his sights also on the work of fellow Augsburg artist Hans Holbein the Elder, Burgkmair’s main rival who shared with him a commission from the Dominican nuns at the St. Catherine’s cloister to represent Rome’s seven pilgrimage basilicas. Burgkmair made three sketches after Holbein’s Basilica of St. Paul (Z 26–28), possibly catching a glimpse of the work in progress (one drawing of the full composition bears color notations) or otherwise demonstrating close contact between the artists as they were simultaneously working on this large commission in the first years of the 1500s.

There are several drawings that correspond directly to finished painted works by Burgkmair, either as study drawings or presentation drawings. Study drawings include Burgkmair’s sketch of Mary and the Seven Helper-Saints (Z 15) for the lower left panel of his St. Peter’s Basilica painting for the same convent cycle; a charcoal drawing of the Holy Family (Z 46) that pertains closely to a Virgin and Child painting in Nuremberg (having ditched Joseph); and a loose sketch in ink of St. John on Patmos (Z 61) that may be indication of the artist’s inchoate ideas for his grand triptych of St. John on Patmos from 1518, in Munich. Also included in this group are drawings of St. Lazarus and St. Martha (Z 62, 63), which would appear as witnesses in the inner wings of Burgkmair’s Crucifixion Altarpiece of 1519, also in Munich.

Burgkmair’s interest in Italian Renaissance style, on the other hand, does not seem to be showcased in his drawings, at least not to the degree manifested in his prints and paintings. Anexception is a study drawing of the left portion of Burgkmair’s Esther before Ahasuerus (Z 84; last documented in an unknown private collection in the U.S.) and a workshop copy presumably after a study drawing of the full composition (ZB 33), one of his two history paintings made late in his career (1528–1529) for the Wittelsbach court in Munich. The painting, with Renaissance loggia and capitals, and showing Alessandro Leopardi’s flagpole on Piazza San Marco, has been cited frequently as evidence of Burgkmair’s travels to northern Italy, namely Venice, though such travel would have taken place much earlier in his career, ca. 1507, when his prints and paintings show an initial shift toward Italian Renaissance style.^[3]

An orientation to Italy can be also medium-based, as seen in the artist’s unusual three red chalk drawings, two of them “rediscovered” by Falk in the Waldburg-Wolfegg Collection (Z 51, 56). A medium rare among this generation of German artists, red chalk is rather associated with Italian Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael. Burgkmair’s innovative use of red chalk is therefore deserving of further study. His Herm of Priapus (Z 51), whose laureled and bearded head bears resemblance to Kunz van der Rosen, Maximilian’s court jester, shows the appeal of antiquities and erotic motifs in humanist culture of the time. The Dragon Rider with Trumpet (Z 56), bearing Burgkmair’s monogram as also the Herm of Priapus, features a nude male figure wearing an expressive hat and blasting a bugle. Set in a watery environment, the man rides a fantastical creature, part dragon, serpent and fish, a chain passing through its nostrils. The drawing may be a playful demonstration of Burgkmair’s imaginative powers, or perhaps an initial study for some kind of fountain design which he was known to have made.^[4] In both instances, Falk points to Burgkmair’s likely use of prints as visual inspiration, with the dragon-serpent creature reminiscent of Andrea Mantegna’s Battle of Sea Gods, which had been copied in etching by Augsburg artist Daniel Hopfer; and the Priapus statue inspired maybe by Jacopo de’ Barbari’s two engravings of the same subject from ca. 1501.

A more clear use of prints for Burgkmair’s visual sources is in his third red chalk drawing (Z 48), which adapts the head of Christ from Dürer’s Ecce Homo from the Large Passion woodcut series. It is one of the few drawings that shows direct influence of Dürer on Burgkmair, a dearth that is one of the surprising finds in Falk’s catalogue, with Burgkmair’s early training under Martin Schongauer having had more of an impact on his drawing manner. In this drawing, Burgkmair isolates the Christ head from the narrative and thereby transforms it into a form of Andachtsbild, focusing the viewer’s attention to the calligraphic curls of Christ’s head, clotted with blood beneath the barbed crown of thorns, his head downcast and eyes nearly closed.

Among the most remarkable of Burgkmair’s drawings are those not derived from printed sources or other standard workshop models, but rather those that display naturalism and are drawn from life, or at least presented as if drawn from life. Burgkmair’s study of a Standing Bear (Z 7) and Fortune-telling “Gypsy” and Market Woman (Z 14) are early drawings made from observation that show his fascination for new subjects, while his charcoal study of a Decapitated Head, inscribed with his monogram and the year 1522 (Z 79), seems in its striking realism much more than simply a study for St. John the Baptist’s head. His two watercolors of “Exotic Warriors” bearing club and turquoise shield, and lance (Z 77, 78) are convincing in their naturalism, but a reminder that such stylistic claims to accuracy or truth can be deceptive: though observed likely from life – the turquoise shield has been identified as one of the objects brought back from Hernán Cortés in 1519/20, now in Vienna – Burgkmair has mixed the component parts of different cultures: African men bearing Aztec weapons and Tupinamba featherwork, worn improperly around the waist as skirts.^[5]

A good portion of Burgkmair’s surviving drawings are portraits. In his round-formatted profile drawings of Pope Julius II (Z 47) and Raymund Fugger (Z 81), we see the intermedial play of Burgkmair’s work as he utilizes toned paper and grisaille or color inks illusionistically to render surface and relief familiar to him from the circulation of Renaissance portrait medals, including those by Augsburg’s Hans Schwarz. These are ideas Burgkmair explores further in his pioneering portrait multiples in woodcut (such as his woodcut designs for the Kaiserbuch ca. 1505 and a two-block woodcut of Pope Julius II of 1511).^[6]Not all portrait subjects have been identified (Z 3, 57, 59, 68–70). There is an early ink drawing of a young woman whose relationship to Burgkmair is unclear, inscribed Urschelin burckmayrlin (Z 5) that in its fine outline exhibits his training with Schongauer, and a light crayon drawing of an infant on the verso of another sheet that shows with an economy of line the unfocused stare of a baby. Falk also proposes the artist’s wife Anna Allerlay as the model for a charcoal drawing in near profile for Z 71. The charcoal portrait of his father and erstwhile teacher Thoman Burgkmair (Z 72), destroyed in the Second World War in Dresden, stands out as a double loss. Inscribed with the specific date of execution – 22 November 1520 – and a notation that he was ill, the artist’s repeated touch of curved strokes rendering his father’s hair, the fur trim of his cloak, and his heavy facial wrinkles makes this a particularly affecting encounter.

While portraiture may have been a staple of art production, Burgkmair was quite a pioneer in German printed portraits before Dürer; and his impulse to study himself and create his own persona through self-portraiture rivals that of Dürer. Falk’s first catalogue entry features an inscribed self-portrait of the artist at twelve (Z 1), the boy-artist donning a floppy hat and with heavy-lidded visage recognizable even at this youthful age. The precocious image, painted in oil or tempera on paper, is another one lost in World War II and is known to Falk only through a fortuitous photograph. Its self-assertion recalls Dürers distinguished self-portrait in silverpoint when he was thirteen (Albertina, Vienna). Also notable are Burgkmair’s two watercolor self-portraits as a groom from 1497–1498 (Z 8, 9), which document his fashionable attire and the life events on which he is about to embark. The inscriptions in Burgkmair’s hand boast of his appearance and engagement, and include the first mention in the historical record of his contact with Conrad Peutinger, the city secretary and future steadfast patron of Burgkmair in much of his work for Maximilian I. (With regard to other scholarly sightings of self-portraits, Falk rejects the proposition that the figure of St. Vitus in the study of Mary and the Seven Helper-Saints [Z 15] for his St. Peter’s Basilica is a self-portrait of the young artist.) One of Burgkmair’s most remarkable drawings is his self-portrait in black chalk from 1517 (Z 58) – the one with the AD monogram that had been owned by Sandrart. Here Burgkmair depicts himself in profile, head tilted downward as if in self-reflection, though perhaps the pose rather captures himself pedantically in the process of sketching this very image. It would have required the use of two mirrors – new devices likely imported from Venice – cleverly placed, for him to have apprehended that pose.

It is little surprise that this publication on Burgkmair’s drawings not only builds on Falk’s own previous scholarship from 1968 and 1973, but also comes at a moment of new interest in Augsburg Renaissance artists that itself stands on Falk’s shoulders, and that his enduring presence and enthusiasm helped to cultivate. Important volumes from 2018 and 2023 with new research on Burgkmair brought together over a dozen scholars and address more deeply many of the same questions initially posed by Falk in his book from 1968.^[7] Most recently, curators Guido Messling and Jochen Sander took a broader view of Augsburg ca. 1480–1530, focusing however on the Renaissance aspects of the city’s art production and centering around Burgkmair, as well as on Holbein the Elder and Younger, Jörg Breu, and sculptors including Gregor Erhart and Hans Daucher, among others.^[8] Falk’s contribution on Burgkmair’s drawings stands on its own, but also becomes instantaneously part of these most current conversations about Burgkmair and Augsburg, offering other scholars additional material to consider about artistic tradition and innovation, workshop practices, art as a form of knowledge, local and expanding global networks, and the mobility of Renaissance styles in and out of Augsburg.