Hello and welcome to the Painting Podcast, Art History from a painters perspective. In this Episode we’re going to be diving into the work of Albrecht Altdorfer, a giant of the German Rennaissance. Every week on the podcast we take a look at the life and work of one artist.
Currently I’ve been looking at a lot of the Danube School of Painting, which consists of a group of German painters working primarily in the 16th century. You can a bunch of the images I’ve gathered together from these painters on our instagram which is paintingcourse.
So, before we get into it, I just wanted to set the scene a bit, and talk about the other Albrecht in the room so to speak. And that’s Albrecht Durer who of course would be the most well known artist to come out of the German Renaissance. Now, when we think of “The Renaissance” generally people associate it with Italy, and that’s understandable because that’s where it started, and where a lot of the Germans were pulling from. Durer himself was in correspondence with Da Vinci, and Raphael and many of the greats of the Italian Renaissance. Their ideas blend together in a number of ways.
It’s important to remember that during this time these artists were almost exclusively also running workshops, and printmaking was a burgeoning field. So, what is a “workshop”? Basically a workshop was a place that made stuff. There were cabinet making workshops, and hat makers, and painters, and goldsmiths as well. It’s only within the last couple hundred years that we began associating art with a solitary pursuit where the artist is working alone in a room, trying to exorcize his demons. Albrecht Durer’s dad was a goldsmith, a trade which required a lot of precision, Albrecht Altdorfer’s dad was a muralist, and made miniature paintings as well.
So, before we go any further, lets get our timeline straight. Albrecht Durer was a bit older than Albrecht Altdorfer. Durer was born in 1471 and Altdorfer in 1480. For contrast, Da Vinci was born in 1452 , and the renaissance was in full swing by the time he was born. Mantegna was already 20 by then. So in general, it’s safe to assume that the “renaissance” in Germany simply started later. The ideas were largely the same, paintings were revolutionized by the use of light to model forms, perspective, and the landscape became central to the painting itself. We got a little bit into the landscape in the Caspar David Friedrich podcast previously, and spoke about how the landscape was brought into the church, and seen as a devotional element, with a lot of German Renaissance art, we see biblical scenes taking place in a natural environment which overwhelms it’s subject matter. This concept of the power of nature is nothing new to German thought, as early as 1000 BC Hildegard de Bingen, a Christian nun and mystic, was writing extensively about the idea of Veriditas, which is the power of plants to put forth leaves and fruit, as well as in the sense of an analogous intrinsic power of human beings to grow and to heal. To me, painters of the German renaissance like Altdorfer, and Durer have more of a grimeyness about them. There’s something more guttural and primal, whereas the scenes depicted by the great Italian painters are more reminiscent of fantastical imagery. The Sistine Chapel would be a perfect example of this. That’s more like Disney, whereas Altdorfer is more David Lynch.