ALTDORFER, ALBRECHT

ALTDORFER, Albrecht: translation

Albrecht Altdorfer, one of the first true landscape painters, was born in or near Regensburg in Bavaria, where he spent most of his life, and where he was a leading member of the Danube school of painting. A man of property, he was active in civic affairs, for several years serving both as city architect and as a member of the Regensburg city council. Altdorfer was a councillor when Re­gensburg adopted Lutheranism in 1533. But Regensburg had earlier demon­strated other sympathies. After expelling the Jews in 1519, the city demolished their synagogue and in its place erected a shrine to the Madonna, selling im­ages—some of which were made by Altdorfer himself—and encouraging pil­grimages. Martin Luther* criticized the city, writing that this shrine and several others must be leveled.Albrecht Dürer* also commented in 1523 that a "specter against Holy Scripture" had arisen at Regensburg. Altdorfer's small painting ofThe Danube near Regensburg(c. 1530) is often cited as the first true landscape painting, but his work also reflects popular interest in the customs and way of life of the ancient Germanic inhabitants, ideas based on the Germania of Tacitus. Altdorfer included exotic architecture along with natural forms in several paintings; because he was city architect of Regensburg, this is perhaps not surprising. Probably his best-known painting isBattle of the Issusof 1529, depicting the battle in 333 b.c. between Alexander the Great and Darius of Persia, which can also be read as a political commentary on an event in Altdorfer's own time, the defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1529. Altdorfer's contribution to painting was innovative and long-lived, for he helped establish a school of romantic landscape painting that would influence European artists for generations, particularly the Dutch, German, and British landscape painters of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

S. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 1995.

C. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, 1993.