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(di Giacomo di Pace)

(b Cortine in Valdibiana Montaperti, 1484; d Siena, between Jan and May 1551).

Italian painter, sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker and illuminator. He was one of the protagonists, perhaps even the most precocious, of Tuscan Mannerism, which he practised with a strong sense of his Sienese artistic background but at the same time with an awareness of contemporary developments in Florence and Rome. He responded to the new demand for feeling and fantasy while retaining the formal language of the early 16th century. None of Beccafumi’s works is signed or dated, but his highly personal maniera has facilitated almost unanimous agreement regarding the definition of his corpus and the principal areas of influence on it. However, some questions concerning the circumstances of his early career and the choices available to him remain unanswered. The more extreme forms of Beccafumi’s reckless experimentation underwent a critical reappraisal only in the later 20th century.

The primary sources of information concerning Beccafumi are Vasari’s biography (1568) and archival findings, mostly 19th century, relating to the artist. Vasari, although a direct acquaintance of Beccafumi in his last years and in a position to gather information from mutual friends, was, predictably, unreliable in regard to his early career. According to Vasari, Mecherino, the son of a poor farmer named Giacomo di Pace, became the protégé of ...

[Giampietrino]

(fl c. 1471/4–1513).

Italian illuminator and engraver. In 1894 he was tentatively associated with his principal work, the Hours of Bona Sforza (London, BL, Add. MSS 34294, 45722 and 62997), and became known as the Master of the Sforza Book of Hours or the Pseudo-Antonio da Monza; in 1956 he was conclusively identified by his signature psbr io petr biragvs ft on the frontispiece of a copy (Warsaw, N. Lib., Inc. F. 1347) of Giovanni Simonetta’s life of Francesco Sforza, the Sforziada, published first in Latin and then in Italian translation at Milan in 1490.

Three choir-books from Brescia Cathedral dated c. 1471–4 (Brescia, Pin. Civ. Tosio-Martinengo, nos 22, 23 and 25) are the earliest known works signed by Birago. It has been suggested that he was active in Venice during the 1480s. Miniatures attributed to him appear in a Breviary of the Venetian Barozzo family, printed on parchment by Nicolas Jenson at Venice in ...

(b Carpi, fl c. 1502–32).

Italian woodcutter. He trained as a type-founder and painter and c. 1509 moved to Venice, where he was employed for five or more years making woodcut book illustrations. Despite the menial nature of his work, which involved copying 15th-century designs, he broke with custom by signing his blocks. By 1515 he had secured an important commission from the Venetian publisher Bernardino Benalius to cut blocks for the Sacrifice of Abraham, (Passavant, VI, 223) a large black-and-white print on four joined sheets (Berlin, Altes Mus., 15.15). The composition is a pastiche of elements taken from Dürer and Titian and was designed perhaps by Ugo himself. Benalius sought a copyright for the print, and, probably under this influence, the following year Ugo sought the protection of the Venetian Senate for a colour-printing process he was now using, the chiaroscuro woodcut (see Woodcut, chiaroscuro, §1). He claimed to have invented the technique, although it was not this that was patented, as is often thought; rather he copyrighted all his chiaroscuro designs, past and future, doubtless due to the plagiarism of earlier works such as the ...

[Liberale di Jacopo dalla Biava]

(b Verona, c. 1445; d Verona, 1527–9).

Italian illuminator, painter and woodcut designer. His father, the baker Jacopo, came from Monza; his mother, Jacoba, was the daughter of the Veronese painter Zeno Solimani (fl c. 1438) and sister of the painter Nicolò Solimani (fl c. 1462–1493). The latter, according to Vasari, was Liberale’s teacher (but mistakenly called Vincenzo di Stefano in the Vite). Liberale is documented in Verona in 1455 and 1465, but works from this period are not known. His career thereafter may be divided into two periods: as a young artist he was based in Siena, where his work on a group of choir-books for the cathedral demonstrates his originality as an illuminator; in or soon after 1476 he returned to Verona, where he established himself as one of the city’s major painters. During both periods he travelled and worked in other centres.

Called to Siena before 1467 by the Olivetans, Liberale illuminated four choir-books (Chiusi, Mus. Cattedrale, Cods A, Q, R and Y) for the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore. The miniatures show a mixture of styles: Sienese influences, especially the Late Gothic ornament of Sano di Pietro, are combined with such stylistic components from the Veneto and Emilia as sculpturally modelled, animated draperies, expressive physiognomies and tense, nervous gestures. Liberale worked as an illuminator for Siena Cathedral from ...

(b Warburg, 1553–4; d Warburg, 1603).

German goldsmith, engraver and draughtsman. Probably from a long-established Warburg family of freemen, he is first fully named in 1578, in an engraving that shows his connections with scholars as an illustrator of academic works. One of these was Michele Mercati, for whom Eisenhoit worked during a stay in Rome c. 1580 on the Metallotheca Vaticana, a work cataloguing the Vatican’s scientific collections. His style draws principally on the Roman Late Renaissance. Back in Germany by c. 1582–5, Eisenhoit began to work primarily for patrons residing near Warburg, where he had settled by 1587 at the latest. Commissions of these years show work for the Hessian courts in Kassel and Marburg and the beginning of his cooperation with Jost Bürgi, instrument-maker and mathematician to the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. Between c. 1582 and 1594 Eisenhoit decorated Bürgi’s mechanical celestial globes with engravings and illustrated with etchings a treatise on engineering.

Eisenhoit’s first works in gold (...

(b c. 1510; d ?Bologna, c. 1565).

French sculptor, illustrator and architect. He was one of the great masters of relief sculpture. Through his collaboration with the architect Pierre Lescot he was involved in many major building projects, and in his refined relief sculptures, such as the carved panels for the Fountain of the Innocents, Paris, he achieved a highly personal synthesis between the mannered style of the Fontainebleau school and a classicism derived from his study of antique sculpture. He illustrated with skilful and lively wood-engravings Jean Baptiste Martin I’s first complete French translation (Paris, 1547) of Vitruvius, De architectura: Architecture ou art de bien bastir, an edition that was to have considerable influence on the revival of the classical style in France.

Goujon was possibly of Norman origin, and the knowledge of the sculpture and architecture of anti-quity and the Italian Renaissance displayed in his works suggests that he spent time in Italy. He is first recorded at Rouen in ...

(b Forlì; fl c. Venice, 1480–1528).

Italian publisher, printer and woodcutter. He went to Venice c. 1480, where, with his brother Giovanni de’ Gregoriis, he set up a press that produced many of the most admired illustrated books of the time (e.g. Boccaccio’s Decameron, 1492; for illustration see Boccaccio, Giovanni). From 1505 to 1528 he ran the press on his own. In 1517 he published a five-block edition of Titian’s Triumph of Christ (e.g. Bassano del Grappa, Mus. Civ.; and see 1976–7 exh. cat., no. 2) and two other woodcuts designed by Titian: the Virgin and Child with SS John the Baptist and Gregory the Great (see 1976–7 exh. cat., no. 13), which also bears the monogram of Lucantonio degli Uberti, and a Martyrdom of St Cecilia, which is signed and dated.

(b Kotagiri, Madras, India, March 13, 1836; d London, Nov 25, 1875).

English painter and illustrator. He played a leading role in the renaissance of wood-engraved illustration during the so-called golden decade of English book illustration (c. 1860–75), when a new school of artists overcame the limitations of the medium. Deeply influenced by the idealism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he imbued both his paintings and drawings with a haunting blend of poetic realism. He was the fourth son of Captain John Michael Houghton (1797–1874), who served in the East India Company’s Marine as a draughtsman.

Houghton was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1854 but did not pass further than the Life School. He received additional training at J. M. Leigh’s academy and its convivial corollary, the Langham Artists’ Society, which was then a forcing-house for young impoverished painters who wished to have a foot in both publishing and the fine arts. There, with older artists such as Charles Keene and John Tenniel, he learnt to run the race against time with a set weekly subject. Keene, already a well-known contributor to ...

(b Antwerp, c. 1545; d Antwerp, 1592).

Flemish woodcutter and engraver. He entered the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp as a pupil of Bernard van de Putte (1528–80) in 1558–9 and is known primarily for the book illustrations that he executed while working for Christoph Plantin. Van Leest depicted a wide range of subjects in his woodcuts, including biblical themes in several editions of the New Testament (Flem. edns, 1571 and 1578; Fr. edn, 1573) and allegorical images such as those in J. B. Houwaert’s Declaratie van die triumphante incompst van den … prince van Oraignien binnen die princelijke stadt van Brussele, 1578 (‘Declaration of the triumphal entry of the … Prince of Orange into the princely city of Brussels, 1578; Antwerp, 1579), which contains images alluding to contemporary politics. There are images of figures in exotic costume in Sluperius’s Omne fere gentium (Antwerp, 1572) and in Nicolas de Nicolay’s Les Navigations pérégrinations et voyages faicts à la Turquie...

[Kristoffel; Stoffel]

(b Zurich, Feb 1558; d Winterthur, March 27, 1614).

Swiss glass painter, woodcut designer, etcher, book illustrator and writer. He was the son and pupil of the glass painter and councillor Jos Murer (1530–80), founder of a family of artists who lived in Zurich in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1577 he collaborated with his father on a cycle of 13 pairs of panes representing Thirteen Historic Scenes of the Swiss Confederation for the Zisterzienkloster of Wettingen, Aargau. Christoph’s monograms (sm, stm) are on three panes. He probably followed this work with study travels. In 1579 he designed a cycle of panes in Basle for the well-known citizen Leonhard Thurneysser (1531–96), celebrating the adventurous life of this much-travelled goldsmith, alchemist, astrologer and personal physician to the Elector of Brandenburg. Of the original cycle, two paintings, including the Birth of Leonhard Thurneysser of Basle in 1531 (1579; Basle, Öff. Kstsamml.), and two design sketches (?...

(b c. 1532; d c. 1592–3).

German draughtsman, publisher, wood-engraver and painter. In 1548 he published a textbook of writing instruction and in 1551 one on arithmetic. In 1560–63 he made a model of Augsburg (Augsburg, Maximilianmus.) and in 1563 a map of the city, which was used in simplified form in the monumental Civitates orbis terrarum (1572–1618) by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg (fl c. 1560–c. 1590/94). His Augsburger Meilenscheibe (c. 1565, frequently reissued), a disc with a plan of Augsburg at the centre, with lists of towns and distances radiating from it, was a practical instrument for travellers from and to the most important trade and cultural centre of 16th-century central Europe and is to be seen in close conjunction with the Reissbüchlein (Augsburg, 1563) by Jörg Gail.

Rogel reproduced the works of several artists in woodcuts, for example the Geometria et perspectiva (Augsburg, 1567...

(b ?Nuremberg, c. 1495; d after 1522).

German painter, draughtsman, woodcut designer and possibly manuscript illuminator. He was probably born in Nuremberg and is reputed to have lived in Dürer’s house, where he was a pupil (Neudörfer). He was commissioned in 1520 to contribute to the decoration of the Emperor Charles V’s private chambers in the Burg, on the occasion of the Emperor’s visit to Nuremberg. He dated woodcuts between 1513 and 1522, signing many of them with the ligated letters hsk (the s reversed). A Hans Springinklee married Barbara Wagnerin on 7 December 1533 in St Sebald.

Springinklee’s oeuvre can be established on the basis of his woodcuts and book illustrations. Between 1512 and 1515 he collaborated with Dürer, Wolf Traut and Albrecht Altdorfer on the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I, designing at least 7 of 24 historical scenes from Emperor Maximilian I’s life as well as much of his family tree. He is also credited with contributing, along with Dürer and others, to the ...

[Niklas]

(fl c. 1520; d Nuremberg, 1562–3).

German woodcut designer and illustrator. He is thought to have trained with Hans Springinklee. In 1537 he was paid the second highest amount among five artists for their work on the decorations of the Haller Album (Nuremberg, Staatsarchv), an illustrated book of portraits and family heraldry. However, his authorship of woodcuts, which constitute the principal body of work attributed to him, is based on only two initialled prints, the two-part Cavalry Battle and the Mounted Captain and Two Landsknechts (Geisberg, nos 1392 and 1372). These signatures are not identical: in the first the initials appear side by side, in the second they are overlapped as a monogram.

On the basis of these two works, c. 124 woodcuts have been attributed to Stör that were previously assigned to Erhard Schön, with whom Stör had presumably worked in close association. The 46 small illustrations for a Bible (Nuremberg, 1530) published by ...

French, 16th century, male.

Born 1485, in Bourges; died 1533, in Paris.

Miniaturist, copyist, engraver, illustrator, printer (?), potter.

Tory was one of the eminent Renaissance artists in France. Like many of the notable figures of his day, he was learned and skilled in several areas. After education in Rome and Bologna (1503), he returned to Paris, where he was nominated professor at the Collège du Plessis; he also taught at the Collège de Coquerel and the Collège de Bourgogne. Initially in collaboration with Henri Estienne and then in collaboration with Gilles de Gourmont, he published several scholarly works, among them the ...

(b Florence; fl Venice, 1503 fl Florence, 1557).

Italian printmaker. In Venice between 1503 and 1526 he engraved numerous woodcut book illustrations: his monogram, known in 17 variations, appears in c. 60 different volumes, printed in Venice. Among his most famous works is the edition (c. 1517) in nine blocks of Titian’s woodcut Triumph of Christ. Uberti’s return to Florence c. 1550 is suggested by the presence of wood-engravings in the Venetian fashion in certain Florentine texts, such as the Historia di S Antonio di Padova (1557). Apart from his woodcuts, seven engravings (and a dubious eighth) are attributed to him (e.g. b. 1, 2 [390] and Patellani, pp. 48–55), which, in a graphic language that is still late 15th century, are inspired by works by Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci, Marcantonio Raimondi and Dürer.

(b Lyon, 1498; d ?France, c. 1552).

French printmaker. He was the son of a Lyonnais printer and an important illustrator and designer of engraved decoration. He was active throughout Spain from 1534, when his signature i. d. v. began to appear on woodcuts the style of which was still imbued with the Gothic tradition of Provence. In 1547 in Saragossa he signed a contract with the calligrapher and writer Juan de Iciar, for whom he illustrated the frontispieces of several works including Recopilación intitulada, orthographia practica (Saragossa, 1548), which contains a fine portrait of the author. They also collaborated on Arte subtilisima por la qual se enseña a escrivir perfectamente (Saragossa, 1550). From 1552 he was active in Pau in the south of France. His engravings for the borders of books, frontispieces and coats of arms were very popular and his work was widely disseminated and used in the mid–16th century. His style was Italianate rather than Germanic, but he made use of models by Holbein in his designs for initial letters....