Martin Schongauer
1440–1491 · Holy Roman Empire · Northern Renaissance, Gothic
The story
In 1492 the young Albrecht Durer travelled to Colmar in Alsace hoping to study with Martin Schongauer, the most admired engraver in Europe. He arrived to find that Schongauer had died the year before, and had to make do with the older man's brothers and his prints.
Schongauer was the artist who lifted engraving from a craft into a fine art in the generation before Durer perfected it. His prints, signed with his monogram, were collected and copied across the continent, spreading a refined German style far beyond his home. His Temptation of Saint Anthony, a saint swarmed by grotesque demons, was so admired that a teenage Michelangelo made a painted copy of it in Florence.
He also painted, and his Madonna of the Rose Bower of 1473, still in a church in Colmar, is a jewel of tender detail, its roses and songbirds worked with the fine precision he had learned from his goldsmith father.
