Hans Wechtlin

Johann, Johannes or Hans Wechtlin was a German Renaissance artist, active between at least 1502 and 1526, whose woodcuts are his only certainly surviving work. He was the most prolific producer of German chiaroscuro woodcuts, printed in two or more colours, during their period in fashion, though most of his output was of book illustrations.

He was born in about 1480-85, presumably in Strasbourg, then in Germany and now in France, where his father, also called Hans Wechtlin, was a cloth merchant. Most of his identified works are woodcut book illustrations, the first, scenes from the Life of Christ, are from a Strasbourg book of 1502, and the last is a Strasbourg title-page of 1526. In 1505 he began a year of employment as a painter to René II, Duke of Lorraine in Nancy. After he left Nancy he was in Wittenberg in 1506-7, where he must have met the court painter, Lucas Cranach the Elder. He became a citizen of Strasbourg in 1514, and by 1519 was a master of the painter's guild there.

He left nineteen single-leaf wood-cuts (i.e. prints rather than book illustrations), apparently made in the period 1505-15, and is mainly remembered for his twelve chiaroscuro woodcuts, which are all extremely rare. The dating of these has been much discussed by art-historians, as part of the very tangled issue of the development of the German chiaroscuro woodcut. Bartrum assigns them "towards the end" of the 16th century. No surviving paintings are attributed to him, although a few drawings have been, tentatively. As with most artists in woodcut, art historians now consider that Wechtlin probably just designed the woodcuts, leaving the block-cutting to a specialist "formschneider" who pasted the design to the wood and chiselled the white areas away. The quality of the final woodcuts, which varies considerably, depended on the skill of the cutter as well as the artist.

His best known print is the chiaroscuro Skull Within an Ornamental Frame, "by far his most impressive" and "one of the most powerful [images] of the German Renaissance", which is the only one for which there is evidence of dating, as it is copied in a book of 1512. Four of his chiaroscuro prints are somewhat ostentatiously classical, two on the very obscure subjects of Alcon Slaying the Serpent and Pyrgoteles (a famous Ancient Greek gem-carver), as well the better known ones of Pyramus and Thisbe and Orpheus. They show Italianate influence, especially from the engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, from whom the figures of Pyramus and Thisbe are directly borrowed. His woodcut technique is based on that of Albrecht Dürer, though his wooded backgrounds owe more to Cranach.

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