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- Hans Dürer
- Also known as
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Hans Dürer
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primary name: Dürer, Hans
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other name: Dürer, Johann
- Details
- individual; painter/draughtsman; German; Male
- Life dates
- 1490-1534
- Biography
- Painter, younger brother and pupil of Albrecht Dürer. He worked in his youth in the workshop of Michel Wolgemut. Albrecht Dürer executed a portrait drawing of him in 1503, (Washington, National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald collection; Winkler, ‘Dürer’, ii, pl. 280). Hans is recorded for the last time in Nuremberg in 1510; he later journeyed to Poland where he settled. Payments for work in Cracow begin in 1527. He was one of the artists employed in decorating the principal rooms in Wawel Castle at Cracow, and from 1529 he was appointed court painter to King Sigismund I. In 1532 he painted the ‘Tabula Cebetis’ in the deputies' room in the castle, after which he commenced the decoration of two other rooms, with friezes of military parades and tournaments, which on his death were completed by an otherwise unknown artist, Antoni from Wroclaw (Breslau) in Silesia. Hans Dürer's death is noted in 1534 in the account book of the royal salt-mines, although a payment due for work in the royal castle is recorded in the following year.
A number of attempts to reconstruct his oeuvre have been made, but they have been hampered by the heterogeneous nature of surviving works of the period signed with the monogram “H.D.” The most plausible and interesting solutions are noted among the literature listed below.
- Bibliography
- Rowlands 1993
H. Beenken, Zeitschr.f. bild. Kunst, lxiv, 1930/ 1, pp. 88ff.; H. Beenken, Prussian Jahrbuch, lvi, 1935, pp. 59ff.; F. Winkler, Prussian Jahrbuch, lvii, 1936, pp. 65ff. ; K. Sinko-Popielowa, Biuletyn Historii Sztuki i Kultury, v, 1937, pp. 141-63; Meister um Dürer, pp. 92f.; Jan Bialostocki, The Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe, Oxford, 1976, pp. 24, 60.
