page_title: Augustin Hirschvogel
section_title: Works
hierarchical_section_title: Augustin Hirschvogel / Works
context_page_description: Augustin Hirschvogel was a German artist, mathematician, and cartographer known primarily for his etchings. His thirty-five small landscape etchings, made between 1545 and 1549, assured him a place in the Danube School, a circle of artists in sixteenth-century Bavaria and Austria.
context_section_description: Hirschvogel took up etching late in his career, and almost all of his prints date from the last decade of his life, when he resided in Vienna. His etchings, numbering about 300, "reflect his concern with Italianate problems of space, form, and ornament", and include portraiture, cartography, and book ornamentation. He was among the first etchers to use copper rather than iron plates. He contributed 23 etchings to Sigismund von Herberstein's 1549 edition of Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Notes on Muscovite Affairs), and more than 100 Old and New Testament illustrations for the verses of Hungarian reformer Péter Perényi (1502–48). A series of 53 hunting scenes for stained glass are of questionable authorship, but Peters asserts that they are by Hirschvogel. Hirschvogel is credited with the single authentic portrait of the Swiss physician Paracelsus, but this attribution is not certain.
  His pen-and-ink landscapes have been described as "strong but light, sure but delicate". The lack of shadow in his landscapes contributes to a tranquil, idyllic mood. Almost 100 drawings are attributed to him; some are likely not his own, but are similar in style to his or Wolf Huber's work. His art shows the influence of Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Sebald Beham, Hans Burgkmair, and Agostino del Musi—some of whom had provided his father's workshop with designs.
caption: Castle yard, c. 1546. Etching, 140 × 213 mm, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
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