page_title: Daniel Hopfer
section_title: Works
hierarchical_section_title: Daniel Hopfer / Works
caption_attribution_description: Hopfer, Hieronymus. (um 1500 Augsburg – 1563 Nürnberg). Drei Prunkgefäße. Freie, seitenverkehrte Kopie nach Albrecht Altdorfers 1520-25 entstandenen Kupferstich. Eisenradierung/etching. B. 67. Hollst. 72, II. Vgl. B. 96 (Altdorfer). - Mit dem Namenszug und der Funck-Nummer&#160;»68«&#160;in der Platte. 28,9 x 21,4 cm. Meist mit winzigem Rändchen. Minimal fleckig sowie mit dünnen Papierstellen in den Ecken.
context_page_description: Daniel Hopfer was a German artist who is widely believed to have been the first to use etching in printmaking, at the end of the fifteenth century. He also worked in woodcut. Although his etchings were widely ignored by art historians for years, more recent scholarship is crediting him and his work with "single-handedly establishing the salability of etchings" and introducing the print publisher business model.
context_section_description: Daniel Hopfer's early etchings were done in line-work, but he and his sons soon developed more sophisticated techniques, referred to by armour historians as the Hopfer style. Applied to prints, this produced silhouetted designs on a black ground, doubtless by multiple bitings of the plates. The technically demanding procedure seems to have been both delicate and labour-intensive, and no other artists are known to have used this exact method.  Their plates were all iron, rather than the copper that the Italians later introduced once appropriate acids had been discovered. Iron plates had to be handled carefully to be kept free of rust, which could develop quickly from even a fingerprint.
  None of the Hopfer family was a trained artist, or a natural draughtsman: their designs show a certain naïveté that never gained an artistic following. But the extraordinary diversity of the Hopfers' works have made them collectors' items. From religious prints to designs for goldsmiths, secular subjects such as peasants, military figures (especially Landsknechts), portraits of contemporary worthies, mytholological and folkloric themes, the sheer range of the Hopfers' productions are both remarkable and unique, designed to appeal to a clientele far wider than the metalsmiths who bought his patterns to create their wares. However, the Hopfer family did not hesitate to plagiarize the work of their contemporaries: of Daniel's 230 known prints, 14 are copies of other masters, mainly Mantegna, whilst only a minority of Hieronymus' 82 plates are his original work—no less than 21 are copies of Durer's works, and around 30 others are copies from Jacopo de' Barbari, Raimondi and Altdorfer among others.
  In the next century, a distant relative of the Hopfers, David Funck (1642–1705), a bookseller of Nuremberg, acquired 230 of the Hopfers' iron plates, and reprinted these under the title Operae Hopferianae, adding a somewhat crudely scratched number, known as the Funck number, to each one, thus creating a second state of the hitherto unretouched plates.
  A further print run of 92 plates was made in 1802 by the publishers C.W. Silberberg of Frankfurt under the title Opera Hopferiana. The quality of the prints is a tribute to the care with which the Hopfer family maintained these rust-prone plates, many of which are in the Berlin print cabinet today.
caption: Hieronymus Hopfer: Three ornate vessels, probably a model for goldsmiths. With the Funck number, lower right: "68".
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