Danube Landscape with Wörth Castle

Sometime around 1520 to 1525, Albrecht Altdorfer, a painter who sat on the city council of Regensburg, painted a view with no saint and no story in it, a stretch of the Danube some 25 kilometres downriver from his town. The museum calls the result the earliest landscape painting in German art that stands on its own and records a real place exactly. The place can still be found. Altdorfer stood on raised ground above the Wellerbach, at the point where this small stream leaves the hills and runs out onto the plain. In the middle distance stands Wörth Castle, a stronghold of the prince-bishops of Regensburg, with the Scheuchenberg hill and the river beyond. The picture is tiny, about 30 centimetres high, painted on parchment that was later fixed to a beech panel. It came to Munich in 1828 from the collection of the princes of Oettingen-Wallerstein.