- Museum number
- 1929,0416.2
- Description
-
The Visitation; Elizabeth greeting the Virgin outside her house, with an old man (Joseph ?) behind
Pen and brown ink, with grey wash
- Production date
- 1488-1531
- Dimensions
-
Height: 217 millimetres
-
Width: 193 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Summary of J.Rowlands, 'Drawings by German Artists and Artists from German-speaking regions of Europe in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum: the Fifteenth Century, and the Sixteenth Century by Artists born before 1530', London, BM Press, 1993, no. 102:
'Until it was acquired by the Department, this drawing was thought to be by Hans Baldung. It had always been assumed that, together with the drawing of the ‘Death of the Virgin’ in Frankfurt (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, inv. no. St. G. 1027; Schilling, op. cit., p. 267, repr.) with which it is readily associated, 1929,0416.2 was the remnant of a series of Marian subjects executed about 1520 for missing paintings. The drawings were in fact, as Falk has made clear, intended as designs by Burgkmair not for paintings but for the carved reliefs of wings for a large altarpiece. The relief of the ‘Death of the Virgin’ is in the Museo di Palazzo Venezia, Rome and that of ‘The Visitation’ appeared at a sale in the Dorotheum, Vienna (auction no. 550, December 1960, lot 474; T. Falk, Pantheon, loc. cit., p. 23, pl. 2). A third relief, for which no preparatory drawing has so far come to light, the ‘Meeting of Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate’, is in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. All three are more or less the same width, but the Berlin piece is taller than the others by about 20 cm. Falk discusses the possibility that these reliefs might have originally formed part of a documented, but mostly lost, altarpiece, signed and dated 1522, by Burgkmair and Sebastian Loscher, the Augsburg sculptor (1482/3-1551), for the parish church at Rauris im Pinzgau, near Salzburg, but the evidence for this is inconclusive and no other sculptor has been named in connection with them. The reliefs are strongly dependent on the decorative features of the Fugger Chapel in the St Annakirche, Augsburg, the first significant Renaissance work produced north of the Alps, partly designed by Dürer.'
Lit from Rowlands: C. Dodgson, BMQ iv, 1929-30, p. 10, repr.; E. Schilling, Wallraf Jahrbuch, NF, ii/iii, I933-4, pp. 266, 271, repr.; P. Halm, Munich Jahrbuch, DF, xiii, 1962, pp. 106, 161, repr.; Falk, Burgkmair, pp. 74, 108, n. 472; T. Falk, Pantheon, xxxi, 1973, pp. 22ff., repr.; BM Dürer and Holbein, pp. 186-7, no. 157, repr.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1988, July-Oct, BM, Age of Dürer & Holbein, no. 157
- Acquisition date
- 1929
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1929,0416.2
