Hans Leu the Younger

Around 1510 a young painter from Zurich turned up in Nuremberg and spent time in the workshop of Albrecht Dürer, the towering German master of the age. Hans Leu came home a few years later the finest painter in his city. He took on altarpieces and religious panels and painted wild, mountainous landscapes in watercolour that owe something to the Danube School, the German artists then discovering nature as a subject in its own right.

Then his world changed under him. Zurich became the base of Huldrych Zwingli, the reformer whose stripped-down Protestantism had no use for painted saints. Commissions for churches dried up, and in 1523 Zwingli's followers destroyed religious images across the city, much of Leu's own work among them. A painter of sacred pictures suddenly had almost no one to paint for.

To make a living he hired himself out as a soldier. On 24 October 1531 he was killed fighting near the hill of Gubel in the second war of Kappel, the armed clash between Zurich's Protestants and the Catholic cantons. He was about 41. Among the little that survives is his 'Orpheus among the Animals' of 1519, a dark, teeming forest scene that shows how strange and inventive a landscape painter he had become.