Master of Messkirch

We know this painter only by the town whose church he filled. Between about 1536 and 1540 he produced a whole cycle of altarpieces, one great high altar and roughly ten smaller ones, for St. Martin's church in Meßkirch, a small town in the Swabian uplands of southwest Germany. The commission came from the Counts of Zimmern, the local lords, and it is from that ensemble that scholars gave him his working name.

His real name has never been settled. He seems to have trained near the circle of Albrecht Dürer, perhaps with Hans von Kulmbach or Hans Leonhard Schäufelein, painters who carried Dürer's manner through southern Germany, and by the 1530s his work shows he had also seen northern Italian painting. What stands out is his colour, bright and saturated almost to the point of enamel, set against carefully watched river valleys and mountains.

The Meßkirch altars were later taken apart, and their panels are now scattered through collections in Germany and Switzerland, one of them here in Basel.