Hans Maler zu Schwaz
Holy Roman Empire · Northern Renaissance, German Renaissance, School of Ulm
The story
Early in the 16th century the little Tyrolean town of Schwaz, near Innsbruck, sat on the richest silver mines in Europe. Money poured in, and the men who ran the mines wanted their faces recorded. The painter who recorded them was Hans Maler, trained in Ulm and settled in Schwaz, whose very surname in German means simply 'the painter'.
He became the portraitist of that boom. He painted the mining magnates and, above all, the Fuggers of Augsburg, the banking family whose loans propped up emperors, as well as the young Habsburg prince Ferdinand, later emperor, and Ferdinand's wife Anna. His formula rarely changed: a plain bust against a coloured ground, the hands hidden, the sitter looking slightly past you, costume and jewels rendered with cool precision.
That sameness is itself a record. Set his portraits side by side and you meet the ruling and moneyed class of the Alps at the moment silver made the region briefly one of the wealthiest in Europe. Several of those faces now hang far from Schwaz, among them portraits in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid.
