Master of the Drapery Studies

In Strasbourg around 1480, one busy workshop turned out altarpieces, designs for stained glass and a remarkable quantity of drawings. Its head is known only by a nickname, the Master of the Drapery Studies, after a group of sheets on which he worked out how cloth falls in folds over a standing or kneeling figure. He has a second nickname as well, the Master of the Coburg Roundels, from his designs for small round panes of painted glass.

More than 150 of his drawings survive, and the Getty Museum puts the figure as high as 180, one of the largest bodies of drawings by any Northern European artist before Albrecht Dürer. About a third of them are kept in the Veste Coburg, a hilltop fortress in Franconia. Some 30 paintings are attributed to him too. He also recorded designs by Peter Hemmel, the leading Strasbourg glass painter of the day, which is one of the clues tying him to that city.

Who he was remains uncertain. A painter named Heinrich Lützelmann has been proposed, and some scholars think the drawings come from a whole circle of artists working in one shared manner.