Lukas Furtenagel

On 18 February 1546 Martin Luther died in Eisleben, the small town where he had been born. A painter came over from nearby Halle to record the reformer's face, and by the time he arrived Luther was already lying in his coffin. The painter was Lukas Furtenagel, an Augsburg man who had been working in Halle for several years. His drawing of the dead Luther is now in Berlin, and some later painted images of Luther on his deathbed drew on it.

Furtenagel was born in Augsburg in 1505 and was apprenticed there at the age of ten. His best-known painting, from 1529, shows the Augsburg master Hans Burgkmair and his wife Anna holding a convex mirror in which their faces appear as skulls. It hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In June 1546, a few months after Eisleben, the city of Augsburg granted him the right to work there as a master painter, and the year of his death is not recorded.