Melchior Lorck

Melchior Lorck (or: Lorichs or: Lorich or: Lorch) (1526/27 – after 1583 in Copenhagen) was a renaissance painter, draughtsman, and printmaker of Danish-German origin. He produced the most thorough visual record of the life and customs of Turkey in the 16th century, to this day a unique source. He was also the first Danish artist of whom a substantial biography is reconstructable and a substantial body of artworks is attributable.

Melchior Lorck was born in either 1526 or 1527 as son of a city clerk, Thomas Lorck, in Flensburg in the duchy of Schleswig in present-day Germany. The first document relating to him is the receipt of a royal Danish 4 year travel stipend from the Danish king, Christian III, signed on March 22, 1549 in Flensburg. His earliest engravings stem from the years before the travel stipend, starting with rather unsecure copies after Heinrich Aldegrever, but soon developing a fine control of the burin as in the staunchly anti-papal The Pope as a Wild Man i Hell from 1545 and the Portrait of Martin Luther from 1548. With the royal travel stipend Lorck went to southern Germany, settling in Nuremberg around 1550, where he paid tribute to that city's preeminent artist of the previous generation, Albrecht Dürer in a portrait print building on Hans Schwarz' portrait medal of the artist.

After a visit in Rome in 1551 and what seems to have been a short period of employment at the residence of count palatine Otto Henry in Neuburg an der Donau he worked for the circle of the prominent Fugger family in Augsburg, thereby drawing nearer to the imperial Habsburg family.

...
Wikipedia