Albrecht Altdorfer

Albrecht Altdorfer did something in the early 1500s that almost no European artist had tried since antiquity. He painted landscapes with no people in them at all, small views of forests and castles along the Danube where the trees and the light are the whole subject. That instinct for wild scenery gives its name to the Danube School, the loose group of German and Austrian artists he led around Regensburg, the Bavarian city where he lived and served as a town councillor.

Even his crowded pictures are really about landscape. His masterpiece, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, painted in 1529, shows Alexander the Great's ancient victory over the Persians, but the tiny armies are swallowed by a vast panorama of mountains, sea, and a blazing sky that seems to curve over the whole known world.

Altdorfer was prosperous and civic-minded, and in 1528 he was offered the post of mayor of Regensburg, which he turned down so he could finish the Alexander painting. He was also caught up in the religious upheaval of his day. He voted in the council to expel the city's Jewish community in 1519, and etched the medieval synagogue just before it was pulled down, two of the earliest etchings of a real building that we have.