page_title: Martin Schongauer
section_title: Engravings
hierarchical_section_title: Martin Schongauer / Engravings
caption_attribution_description: Print; Prints
context_page_description: Martin Schongauer, also known as Martin Schön or Hübsch Martin by his contemporaries, was an Alsatian engraver and painter. He was the most important printmaker north of the Alps before Albrecht Dürer, a younger artist who collected his work. Schongauer is the first German painter to be a significant engraver, although he seems to have had the family background and training in goldsmithing which was usual for early engravers.
  The bulk of Schongauer's surviving production is 116 engravings, all with his monogram but none dated, which were well known not only in Germany, but also in Italy and even made their way to England and Spain. Vasari says that Michelangelo copied one of his engravings, in the Trial of Saint Anthony. His style shows no trace of Italian influence, but a very clear and organised Gothic, which draws from both German and Early Netherlandish painting.
  Recent scholarship, building on the work of Max Lehrs, attributes 116 engravings to him, with many also being copied by other artists, as was common in the period.
context_section_description: One hundred and sixteen engravings are generally recognised as by his hand. Many of his pupils' plates as well as his own are signed, M†S, as are many copies probably by artists with no connection to him.  He is thought to have begun signing engravings in the early 1470s.  The rarest survives in three impressions, and unlike most other printmakers of the century, examples have probably survived of all the engravings he made.
  The great majority of his subjects are religious, but there are a handful of comic scenes of ordinary life such as the early Peasant Family Going to Market or the Two Apprentices Fighting, which may reflect his background in a goldsmith's house.  A print of an elephant is a unique venture into the popular "prodigy" genre; it turns out that an elephant was indeed being toured around Germany in 1483, before drowning in a canal near Muiden.  
  He also produced nine of the first ornament prints, initially intended to be used by craftsmen in various media, including woodcarvers and goldsmiths, as patterns for the elaborate and sophisticated designs.  There are also two prints of metalwork objects, a censer and crosier.
  From his family background and time at university he was no doubt familiar with the emerging bourgeoisie of trade and the professions who provided the core market for high quality engravings, but the subjects from classical mythology so popular in German prints of the next century, and already present in Italian ones, do not appear at all in his work.
  The generally agreed sequence of his engravings shows an increasing sophistication of technique, but the most crowded and detailed, but highly organized, compositions are placed rather early, with "late-Gothic complexity" giving way to simpler compositions with more empty space and "an almost classical orderliness and decorum".  But some of the busy early prints were his most popular and influential, as shown by the number of copies of them.  These include The Temptation of St Anthony, the [Rest on] the Flight into Egypt, Death of the Virgin and Christ Carrying the Cross.
  There are a number of series of engravings which show this development, from the twelve "crowded and turbulent" scenes in the Passion series, perhaps of about 1480, through the Twelve Apostles, and the circular coats of arms with wild men, to the late circular Evangelist's symbols and the Wise and Foolish Virgins, perhaps of around 1490.  By the time of his pair showing the Annuciation with each figure occupying its own sheet, often thought to be his last prints, the background is only represented by a simple groundline.
  He went beyond Master E. S. in the system of depicting volume by means of cross-hatching (lines in two directions) which was further developed by Dürer, and was the first engraver to curve parallel lines, probably by rotating the plate against a steady burin.  He also developed a burin technique producing deeper lines on the plate, which meant that more impressions could be taken before the plate became worn.
  According to Arthur Mayger Hind, Schongauer was one of the first German engravers to "rise above the Gothic limitations both of setting and type" and that he "actualises an idea of beauty which in its nearer approach to more absolute ideals appeals to a far more universal appreciation" than earlier engravers such as Master E. S.
  With Master E.S., he was the first northern printmaker not only to have his prints very widely copied by other printmakers, but to have his designs taken by painters, sculptors and artists in all media.  The demons in his The Temptation of St Anthony established the hybrids of fish, bird and insect types followed by Hieronymus Bosch and other artists throughout the next century.
  Major print rooms possess good collections of Schongauer's prints, most of which are relatively common for fifteenth-century prints, although impressions vary in quality a good deal.  The different watermarks found suggest that impressions were printed over considerable periods, with most made when the copper plates were showing signs of wear.  The Rest on
caption: A Foolish Virgin, engraving
exif: {}