- Museum number
- 1949,0411.115
- Description
-
Justice; draped figure of Justice at centre holding the sword and scales, a crane standing at left holding a stone in its claws, the surrounding architecture seen at an angle from below, a large column at either side supporting an architrave and a vaulted roof between
Pen and black ink, cut along the upper and lower edges
- Production date
- 1585-1590 (?)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 215 millimetres
-
Width: 141 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.392
'The prominence of the emblem of Augsburg, the pine-cone, and the elaborate architectural setting seen from below, suggests that this sheet may have been produced as a preliminary study for a civic wall-decoration. Hopfer is not known to have painted murals, but it could have been drawn for use by another artist. A similar design is seen in the elaborate carved door in linden wood, with Venus and Cupid within decoration and architectural borders reminiscent of contemporary title-pages, which probably came from the house of an Augsburg merchant of the third or fourth decades of the century (Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, inv. no. A 157). The influence of the Venetian artist Jacopo de' Barbari (c. 1440/50-1515), who worked north of the Alps and made a marked impression on several German artists, is unmistakable, both in the features and the pose of the figure of Justice. There is, for example, a striking similarity between Justice and Jacopo's painting of ‘St Catherine’ in Dresden (L. Servolini, ‘Jacopo de' Barbari’, Padua, 1944, pp. 121-2, pl. xxiii). The crane, which holds a stone in its foot, seen to the left of the figure of Justice, is a symbol of vigilance.'
Additional information: Christoph Metzger considers this to be a copy after a lost drawing or etching by Hopfer. He attributes it to Simon Zwitzels,an artist of Augsburg who worked in the 1580s and made designs for fountains. The treatment of perspective and shading on the pillars and other decorative details is, in his opinion, much closer to Zwitzels (see for example, Augsburg Stadtarchiv Planmappe Brunnenwerke. I, Nr 18). than to Hopfer himself whose surviving drawings have a more spontaneous appearance than the present sheet.
Lit from Rowlands 1993: ' W. Wegner, Zeitschr. f. Kunstgesch., xx, 1957, pp. 253f., repr.; Augsburg, Umbruch, ii, pp. 247f., no. 628, repr.; BM Dürer and Holbein, p. 197, no. 168, repr.'
Additional lit: C.Metzger et al, 'Daniel Hopfer: ein Augsburger Meister der Renaissance' exhibition catalogue, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne, 2009-2010, p.509, no. Z.8
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1980 Jun-Sep, Augsburg City Hall, 'Augsburg: A Changing World', no. 628
1988, July-Oct, BM, 'Age of Dürer & Holbein', no. 168
- Acquisition date
- 1949
- Acquisition notes
- According to Dodgson's inventory card, purchased by him from Parsons in November 1916 for £5
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1949,0411.115
