Hans Rottenhammer

Hans Rottenhammer built a career on smallness. Born in Munich in 1564, he went south to Rome and then to Venice, and there he became the first German painter to specialize in cabinet pictures, little mythological and religious scenes painted on sheets of copper, so smooth and jewel-like that collectors prized them for their glow. Copper was becoming cheap enough to paint on, and it gave his colours a lit-from-within brightness.

His most curious work was done by post. Rottenhammer struck up a partnership with the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder that outlasted their living in the same city. Brueghel would paint a delicate landscape on a copper plate in Antwerp, ship it across the Alps to Venice, and Rottenhammer would fill in the figures before sending it back, two hands on one small picture a thousand miles apart.

Fame did not keep him. He returned to Germany and settled in Augsburg, and the sources agree that he ended his days there in poverty, some blaming drink, a specialist in luminous little things who could not hold on to his money.