Hans Sebald Beham

In 1525, as the Reformation split Germany apart, the city council of Nuremberg put three young artists on trial and expelled them for heresy. They had pushed further than the new Lutheran order allowed, doubting the church, the sacraments and civic authority, and the records call them the godless painters. One of the three was Sebald Beham, then about 25.

He came back, and he made his living from tiny engravings, many no bigger than a postage stamp, packed with soldiers, peasants dancing at a feast, gods and biblical scenes. Working these small plates put him among the Little Masters, the German printmakers of the generation after Albrecht Dürer, who was still alive and working in the same city while Beham was starting out. Dürer's shadow lay so heavily over him that one of Beham's early woodcuts, a head of Christ, was for centuries filed under Dürer's famous monogram.

He was astonishingly productive, leaving something like 250 engravings and well over a thousand woodcuts, including illustrations for printed books, a trade then booming in Germany. He was caught up in another scandal over a suppressed treatise on human proportion, partly lifted from Dürer's own studies. Beham left Nuremberg for good and settled in Frankfurt, where he died in 1550.