Georg Lemberger

Georg Lemberger learned to paint landscape the way the Danube region taught it: forests dense enough to swallow a figure, skies worked up with feeling, every branch and root given its own life. Born around 1490 near Landshut in Bavaria, he trained with the court painter Hans Wertinger and spent time in Regensburg alongside Albrecht Altdorfer, the leading name of that wild, wooded style.

Then he carried it north. By 1522 Lemberger was in Leipzig, in the middle of Germany, bringing the Danube manner to a region that had not seen it and making an epitaph panel for a local official. His real trade, though, was the woodblock. He designed and cut woodcuts in the years when Luther's Reformation was turning the printed image into everyday matter, illustrating Bibles and broadsheets for a reading public that had suddenly grown enormous.

His Protestant leanings eventually made his position untenable in staunchly Catholic Leipzig, and he was driven out. The record of his last years grows thin, ending around 1540.