Martin Schongauer

Martin Schongauer (c. 1445, Colmar – 2 February 1491, Breisach), also known as Martin Schön ("Martin beautiful") or Hübsch Martin ("pretty Martin") by his contemporaries, was an Alsatian engraver and painter. He was the most important printmaker north of the Alps before Albrecht Dürer.

Schongauer was born in about 1440 in Colmar, Alsace, probably the third of the four sons of Caspar Schongauer, a goldsmith from Augsburg who taught his son the art of engraving. Colmar is now in France but was then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He may well have been trained by Master E. S. The art historian A. Hyatt Mayor saw both their individual styles in different parts of a single engraving, and all the works with Schongauer's M†S monogram show a fully developed style. Schongauer established at Colmar a very important school of engraving, out of which grew the "Little Masters" of the succeeding generation, and a large group of Nuremberg artists.

As a painter, Schongauer was a follower, through the teachings of his probable master Caspar Isenmann, of the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, and his rare existing pictures closely resemble, both in splendour of color and exquisite minuteness of execution, the best works of his contemporaries in Flanders.

Only a few of his paintings survive, the most notable of them being the Madonna in the Rose Garden, painted for St Martin's Church, Colmar. The Musée d´Unterlinden in Colmar possesses eleven panels by him or his workshop, and a small panel of David with Goliath's Head in Munich is attributed to him. The miniature painting of the Death of the Virgin in the National Gallery, London is probably the work of a pupil.

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