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Article

Rosemarie Bergmann

(b Paderborn, 1502; d Soest, Westphalia, 1555–61).

German engraver, painter and designer. He was the most important graphic artist in Westphalia in the 16th century. His reputation rests largely on his ornamental designs, which make up about one third of his c. 300 engravings. They were principally intended as models for metalworkers but were also adapted by other craftsmen for such decorative arts as enamel, intarsia and book illustration. Aldegrever followed Dürer and the Nuremberg Little Masters, deriving models for his paintings and subject prints as well as a full repertory of Renaissance ornamental motifs: fig and Acanthus foliage, vases and cornucopia, combined with putti and satyrs, tritons, mermaids and dolphins, sphinxes, masks and medallions. From the beginning of his career Aldegrever was aware of the artistic trends of the time: the Dürer influence was strongest at its outset yielding somewhat in work of the 1530s to Mannerist tendencies under Netherlandish influence, though never waning entirely.

Aldegrever was the son of Hermann Trippenmeker (...

Article

Alessandra Frabetti

[l’Argenta]

(b Argenta, nr Ferrara, 1546; d Ferrara, Dec 9, 1636).

Italian architect, engineer and designer. He was the son of Vincenzo Aleotti (not Francesco Aleotti, as is sometimes erroneously stated), from whom Giovanni Battista claimed he ‘learnt the art … as much as from all the other teachers I had’ (letter, 1583; see Coffin, p. 121). In 1575 he succeeded Galasso Alghisi as architect to Alfonso II d’Este (ii), Duke of Ferrara and Modena, who nicknamed him l’Argenta after the town of his birth. When, on the death of the Duke, the Este duchy devolved to the Papal States (1598), Aleotti was confirmed as official architect, with a stipend of 20 scudi per month. His activity extended to various parts of the Po plain, embracing different architectural genres and including some important urban projects.

Among Aleotti’s religious buildings were several churches in Ferrara, including S Barbara (1586–8), S Maria della Rotonda at Castel Tedaldo (1597...

Article

Wendy M. Watson

(b Rovigo, 1486–7; d 1542).

Italian maiolica painter . More is known about Avelli than any other maiolica painter because of his many signed works and the autobiographical details included in his sonnets in honour of Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Avelli considered himself to be not only an artist but also a poet and courtier. His intellectual abilities set him apart from his colleagues, even if as a painter he was not the most talented. He seems never to have directed his own workshop, but he is known to have worked in Urbino from 1530, the year of his first unequivocally signed and dated plate; some pieces from the 1520s signed f.r. and f.l.r. may also be ascribed to him. His familiarity with Classical and contemporary literature is evident in his choice of secular and religious subjects, taken from such authors as Virgil and Ovid, Ariosto and Petrarch (e.g. plate, 1531; London, BM). He also depicted contemporary events, sometimes in allegorical form, for example the Sack of Rome (...

Article

Feliciano Benvenuti

Italian family of typographers, engravers, publishers and print dealers. Members of the family were active in Venice and Padua in the 16th century and the early 17th. Most notable among them were Luca Bertelli (fl Venice, c. 1560; fl Padua, 1594), Orazio Bertelli (fl Venice, 1562–88), who was possibly Luca’s brother, and Ferdinando (Ferrando, Ferrante) Bertelli (fl Venice, 1561–72). It is difficult to determine the extent of Luca Bertelli’s participation in the execution of the prints he published; they were mainly historical, religious and mythological. Orazio Bertelli probably encouraged Agostino Carracci’s visit to Venice in 1582. Orazio’s engravings included the works of Federico Barocci, Domenico Tibaldi and Paolo Veronese, notably a Pietà (De Grazia, p. 125, no. 102). Ferdinando Bertelli was best known for his publication of a vast number of maps, by both Italian and foreign cartographers.

DBI; Thieme–Becker D. De Grazia: Le stampe dei Carracci...

Article

Christian Dittrich

(b Sangerhausen, July 30, 1641; d Dresden, May 29, 1706).

German painter, draughtsman, graphic artist and writer on art. He was a son and pupil of Andreas Bottschild II (c. 1590–1657), a painter and engraver, who decorated churches in Sangerhausen. Samuel had further training with his brother Johann Andreas Bottschild (b 1630; d after 1670), with whom he went to Saxony. In 1658–61 they worked jointly on gallery paintings of 19 scenes from the Passion (heavily restored 1852) in the Dorfkirche at Hohnstädt, near Leipzig. The decorations for the banqueting hall of Schloss Rötha, near Leipzig (c. 1668–70; destr.), were Bottschild’s first complete programme of mythological themes. At Rötha he also completed two group portraits of the female and male lines of the Friesen family (Dresden, Inst. Dkmlpf.)

In 1673 Bottschild painted a Presentation in the Temple for Freiberg Cathedral. It was probably after this that he left for Italy with his cousin and pupil ...

Article

(b Amsterdam, 1522; d Gouda, Oct 29, 1590).

Dutch printmaker, poet, writer, theologian and philosopher. His work as a printmaker began in Haarlem in 1547, when he made a woodcut for a lottery poster after a design of Maarten van Heemskerck. From then until 1559 Coornhert worked as Heemskerck’s principal engraver. Initially he etched his plates, but during the 1550s he turned to engraving. He was possibly also responsible for the woodcuts after Heemskerck and the publication of Heemskerck’s early prints. In addition, he engraved designs by Willem Thibaut (1524–97) in 1556–7, Lambert Lombard in 1556 and Frans Floris in 1554–7. During this period Philip Galle was his pupil. In 1560 Coornhert temporarily stopped his engraving activities, set up a print publishing house, became a clerk and devoted himself to his literary work. In 1567 he was arrested for political reasons but managed to escape to Cologne in 1568. During his exile, which lasted until 1576...

Article

Klaus Lankheit

(Johann)

(b ?April 9, 1691; d Mannheim, Jan 11, 1752).

German sculptor, stuccoist, draughtsman and illustrator. He was the most important sculptor active in Franconia and the Palatinate in the first half of the 18th century; nevertheless, although his very individual late Baroque sculpture, mostly carved in wood, was highly regarded by his contemporaries, he was quickly forgotten after his death. His rich oeuvre was severely depleted, particularly as a result of World War II. It was only after that date that his importance was reassessed. Egell probably served an apprenticeship with the Würzburg sculptor Balthasar Esterbauer (1672–1722) and collaborated on the interior decoration of the Banz monastery. His first documented work is an expressive Crucifix made in 1716 for St Michael’s Monastery in Bamberg (now in St Otto, Bamberg). His stylistic development was affected by his work between 1716–17 and 1719 as one of the team directed by Balthasar Permoser, which made all the sculptural decorations at the Zwinger in Dresden for ...

Article

(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 (...

Article

Kurt Löcher

(b c. 1495–1500; d after 1541).

German painter. On 12 January 1521 he received citizenship of Nuremberg, where he is thought to have studied under Wolf Traut. Like Traut, he used an austere graphic line and dry, bright colours. While in Nuremberg he painted a Portrait of a Man (1523; Heidelberg, Kurpfälz. Mus.; stolen 1974) and a portrait of Hans Geyer (1524; Raleigh, NC Mus. A.). By 1527 he was working for Kasimir, Markgraf zu Brandenburg-Kulmbach, Burgrave of Nuremberg (1481–1527); he later painted a memorial picture of the Margrave with his wife Susanna (untraced; copy, Heilbronn, Protestant Pfarrkirche). When Susanna then married Otto Henry, the future Elector Palatine, in 1529, Gertner went with her to the court of Neuburg an der Donau. A portrait of her (c. 1530; Berchtesgaden, Schlossmus.) was followed by portraits of Otto Henry and other members of the house of Wittelsbach (1531–9; mostly in Munich, Bayer. Nmus.) which took ‘maister Peter, Hofmaller’ to various German courts. That of ...

Article

Jacques Thirion

(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 ...

Article

Luís de Albuquerque

(b ?Lisbon, c. 1520; d ?Lisbon, after 1576).

Portuguese cartographer, son of Lopo Homem. He worked with his father in his Lisbon workshop; of his work 12 atlases and 12 maps are known. Some of these are undated, some are unsigned; several atlases have folios containing nautical or cosmographical information.

Some time earlier than 1547 Diogo Homem was involved in the death of a certain António Fernandes, for which he was imprisoned and subsequently sentenced to a year’s exile. On his release he fled to England, where his presence was recorded in 1547 and from where he sent a petition asking for a pardon from John III of Portugal. In the same year he brought an action against the Admiralty to obtain payment for a map he had drawn for a Venetian, one ‘Aloisius Blancus’, which was valued at between 80 and 100 ducats.

There are five known works by Diogo Homem:

part of an atlas of charts of the Atlantic (...

Article

Luís de Albuquerque

(b ?Lisbon, 1500; d ?Lisbon, after 1565).

Portuguese cartographer. The earliest known document to name Lopo Homem, dated 16 February 1517, indicates that he was already a master craftsman in the production of nautical charts, he was still working in 1565, when a document refers to him as a cartographer. Other documents show that he was attached to the court of ...

Article

Christiaan Schuckman

(b Wakken, nr Ghent, Oct 14, 1563; d Amsterdam, bur ?16 Feb, 20 Feb 1612).

Dutch engraver, draughtsman, printer, publisher, bookseller, type-cutter, cartographer and instrument-maker. He was the son of Olivier de Hondt (d 1568), sheriff and registrar of Wakken, and Petronella d’Havertuyn. His family moved to Ghent when Jodocus was still very young; by the age of eight he had taken up drawing and engraving. In 1584, because of the war with Spain, Jodocus was staying in London as a refugee with his sister Jacomina, who was shortly thereafter married to the Flemish émigré Pieter van de Berghe (1560–1625), also from Ghent. Jodocus I married Coletta van den Keere in London on 11 April 1587, and his earliest graphic works appeared shortly thereafter. These include engravings for the English edition of Lucas Waghenaer’s Spieghel der zeevaart (published as The Mariner’s Mirrour, London, 1588), for Talbot’s Rose (1589) and for two books by Hugh Broughton (1588 and ...

Article

Paul Hogarth

(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 ...

Article

(b Dieppe, c. 1533; d London, before June 1, 1588).

French painter, illustrator and explorer, also active in Florida and England. In April 1564 he sailed with René de Laudonnière as artist of the Huguenot expedition to Florida. In September 1565 the Spaniards overran the colony, but he escaped and returned to France. By c. 1580 he had settled in Blackfriars, London, ‘for religion’ and received letters of denization on 12 May 1581. He later came into contact with Sir Walter Ralegh and his colonizing circle and with John White, the artist of the first English colony of Virginia, with whom he exchanged ideas and perhaps collaborated. Ralegh commissioned him to illustrate the Florida enterprise, and Le Moyne produced an account Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida … acciderunt … auctore Iacobo le Moyne with 42 illustrations and a map that Theodor de Bry published in Frankfurt am Main in 1591 as the second part of his Collectiones perigrinationum in Indiam orientalem et occidentalem...

Article

[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 (?...

Article

Elizabeth McGrath

(b Perugia, c. 1555; d probably Rome, 1622).

Italian writer and theorist. His fame and most of the scant biographical information that exists derives from his one very successful work: the Iconologia. First published in Rome in 1593, it went through many editions and translations, the text being expanded and ‘improved’ first by Ripa himself, then still more by friends and publishers. Like Vincenzo Cartari’s handbook of mythology, Le imagini de i dei (Venice, 1556), the book was not originally illustrated. Its real impact came when it appeared with a selection of woodcuts in 1603. Proceeding systematically through more than 1000 images and nearly 700 concepts, from Abundance (a garlanded woman clad in gold with a bunch of mustard and poppies and a cornucopia) to Zeal (a man dressed as an ancient priest holding a scourge and a lamp), it describes and prescribes ways to represent allegorical figures. Thus, whatever associations this title may evoke today, the book is the most straightforward of iconographic manuals....

Article

Christian Klemm

(b Frankfurt am Main, May 12, 1606; d Nuremberg, Oct 14, 1688).

German painter and writer. A leading figure in 17th-century German painting, he is chiefly famed for his biographical writings in the Teutsche Academie. His great-nephew, an engraver who died young in London, also bore the name Joachim von Sandrart (1668–91).

Sandrart came from a family of Calvinist refugees from Wallonia. After initial lessons in drawing with Georg Keller and Sebastian Stoskopff (1597–1657), he began an apprenticeship in engraving in 1620 with Peter Isselburg in Nuremberg. In 1622 he went to Prague for more advanced tuition with Aegidius Sadeler II, who advised him to turn to painting. He accordingly apprenticed himself to Gerrit van Honthorst in Utrecht. Here, in 1627, he met Peter Paul Rubens, whom he accompanied on a journey through Holland. In 1628 he went with Honthorst to the English court. In 1629 Sandrart travelled via Venice and Florence to Rome. Here he initially became friendly with Domenichino; his acquaintance included both northerners—Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, François Du Quesnoy, Pieter van Laer—and Italians—Pietro da Cortona, Andrea Sacchi and Pietro Testa. From ...

Article

Feliciano Benvenuti

(b Vicenza, fl late 16th century–early 17th).

Italian painter and printmaker. There is little biographical information about him. His birthplace has been inferred from the signature giosepe. scolari. vecentino. f. on the print of the Man of Sorrows. He was a member of the Arte dei Depentori in Venice between 1592 and 1607. He has been generally considered as a pupil of the painter Giambattista Maganza (c. 1509–86) of Vicenza, although according to others he was a disciple of the Mannerist Giovanni Demio or of Paolo Veronese. Famous in Vicenza for his grisaille frescoes, he also created pictorial works recorded in Venice, as well as at Padua and Verona. Among the Venetian works were four paintings originally in the presbytery of the church of S Luca: a Chastisement of the Serpents, which was executed ‘for nothing, in his youth, in order to make himself known’ (Della pittura veneziana, i (Venice, 1797), p. 295), in S Giovanni Elemosinario; a ...

Article

Jane S. Peters

[Hans]

(fl Nuremberg, 1590; d Nuremberg, March 23, 1611).

German painter, etcher and graphic artist. He became a master sometime before 1597, but his activity as a painter was probably confined to painting coats of arms, not panels. In 1601, in a petition to Emperor Rudolf II, he identified himself as an etcher and citizen of Nuremberg. He must have conducted an active print workshop, because he produced over 7000 etchings. The earliest dated, monogrammed print is 1590. The subjects of his prints range from portraits, genealogical trees, warfare scenes, city views and maps to series of hunts, the months, coats of arms and ornaments. Among them are designs borrowed from such artists as Jost Amman, Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau and Enea Vico. His penchant for ornament is reflected in his two most enduring graphic projects, needlework patterns and heraldry. His two needlework books (1597, 1604) replaced their cumbersome woodcut predecessors with delicate tonal etchings and are considered among the best of their genre. His ...