- Also known as
-
Hans Schäufelein
-
primary name: Schäufelein, Hans
- Details
- individual; painter/draughtsman; printmaker; German; Male
- Life dates
- c.1482-1539/1540
- Biography
- Painter and designer of woodcuts and glass-paintings. Probably born in Nuremberg, where his father, a successful merchant from Nördlingen, a town to the south-west, moved in 1476. Strongly influenced by Albrecht Dürer, in whose studio in Nuremberg he worked from c. 1503. His early woodcuts include illustrations for Ulrich Pinder's ‘Der beschlossen Gart des Rosenkrantz Maria’ (1505) and ‘Speculum passionis’ (1507). After Dürer left Nuremberg for Italy in 1505, Schäufelein was instructed to paint the altarpiece for Ober-St-Veit (Vienna, Diözesanmuseum) after Dürer's design, for which four of Dürer's drawings have survived. His earliest dated painting is the ‘Crucifixion’ of 1508 (Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum). Probably worked with Hans Holbein the Elder in Augsburg during this period. From 1510 to 1515 he was active in Augsburg, where he designed numerous woodcuts for the local printers. In 1513 he painted the high altarpiece for the Benedictine abbey at Auhausen. In 1515 Schäufelein settled in Nördlingen where he was granted citizenship; his most important painting, the ‘Ziegler altarpiece’, dated 1521 is in Nördlingen ( St Georgskirche). He also produced a number of portraits (Warsaw, National Museum; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, and elsewhere) and many woodcuts, which include contributions to the Emperor Maximilian's ‘Weisskunig’ (1514-16), ‘Theuerdank’ (1517) and ‘Triumphal Procession’ (1516-18). About ninety drawings, mostly from the first fifteen years of Schäufelein's activity, are known to have survived, many of which are signed with his monogram, some with the addition of a small shovel (‘Schäufelein’).
- Bibliography
- Rowlands 1993
Dodgson, ii, pp. 3ff.; Thieme-Becker, xxix, 1935. pp. 557ff. (for further literature); Winkler, K&S; E. Schilling, Zeitschr. f. Kunstwiss., ix, 3/4, 1955, pp. 151ff.; Meister um Dürer, pp. 167ff.; Oldenbourg, Schäufelein; Austin, Nuremberg, pp. 139ff.
Bartrum 1995
The main catalogue on Schäufelein's woodcuts, with a chronology of his life and work, is Karl Heinz Schreyl, 'Hans Schäufelein: Das 'druckgraphische' Werk', 2 vols, Nördlingen, 1990, which reproduces 1214 woodcuts. Further details on the publications in which his woodcuts for books appear are given in M. Consuelo Oldenbourg, 'Die Buchholzschnitte des Hans Schäufelein: ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis ihrer Verwendungen', 2 vols, Strasbourg, 1964. There is no complete catalogue of Schäufelein's paintings. E. Buchner's article, 'Der junge Schäufelein als Maler und Zeichner', in 'Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstage', Leipzig, 1927, pp.46ff is a good study of his early work, which is also well represented in the exhibition catalogue 'Meister um Dürer', Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1961, edited by Peter Strieder et al., pp. 167ff. His drawings are catalogued in F.Winkler, 'Die Zeichnungen Hans Süss von Kulmbachs und Hans Leonhard Schäufeleins', Berlin, 1942. For full details on further literature, see Schreyl, pp. 17ff.
