Barthel Beham

In January 1525 the city council of Nuremberg put three young artists on trial. Under questioning they had said that they did not believe in baptism, in the church's sacraments, or in its authority, and in a city that had just turned firmly Protestant that was enough to have them banished. The court records call them the godless painters. One of the three was Barthel Beham, then about 22.

Beham belonged to the last generation to grow up in the shadow of Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg's towering printmaker, and he learned to cut copper with astonishing fineness. He is counted among the Little Masters, a group named for the tiny scale of their engravings, sheets you could hide in a palm, crowded with classical nudes, saints and portraits worked in lines almost too fine to follow.

The banishment did not finish him. He was back within the year, then left for good around 1527 to serve Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in Munich as a court portraitist. He was travelling in the duke's service in Italy when he died in 1540, still short of 40.