HIRSCHVOGEL, Augustin - b. 1503 Nürnberg, d. 1553 Wien

German glass painter, etcher, cartographer and mathematician, part of a family of artists. They were Nuremberg’s leading stained-glass painters during the late 15th century and the 16th. Veit Hirschvogel the Elder, the son of a glazier named Heinz (d. 1485), established the family workshop and became the city’s official glazier. His son Veit Hirschvogel the Younger (1485-1553) succeeded him as official glazier, being succeeded in his turn by his son Sebald Hirschvogel (1517-89), who remained in the post for 33 years. The brothers of Veit the Younger, Hans Hirschvogel (d. 1516) and Augustin Hirschvogel, also joined the glass-painting workshop, but Augustin, the most talented of the family, left it in 1525 to pursue a varied career outside Nuremberg, producing many etchings and also innovations in cartography. It is supposed that the Viennese goldsmith Veit Hirschvogel (1543-74) was Augustin’s son.

Augustin Hirschvogel trained as a stained-glass painter in his father’s workshop and remained there until his father’s death in 1525. In that year Nuremberg accepted the Reformation, spelling the end of monumental stained-glass commissions. This must have profoundly reduced the production of the workshop, now run by his elder brother Veit, and may have forced Augustin to become more versatile. By 1530 he had established his own workshop but in 1531 formed a partnership with the Nuremberg potters Hanns Nickel (active c. 1530) and Oswald Reinhart (active c. 1530), presumably to share their kiln. This partnership, coupled with Johann Neudörfer’s confusing comments about Hirschvogel in his Nachrichten (1547), formerly led to speculation about his having made a ceramic stove and pots in a classicizing Italianate style. It is more likely that the vessels made by Augustin and described in documents as in a Venetian style were glass, not earthenware.

A Castle Yard

Augustin Hirschvogel was a true man of the Renaissance, a multitalented, restless inquirer in the tradition of D�rer and Leonardo. He produced maps for Ferdinand II, wrote and illustrated books on such disparate subjects as mathematics and travel, and created a pictorial concordance for the Bible. He was an engineer and architect, a surveyor, and a designer of medals, enamels, and coats of arms.

Hirschvogel’s reputation rests today on his splendid landscape etchings sensitive, poetic representations of countrysides with gentle hills, mountains, and sky. Human beings rarely appear in his compositions, for he concentrates on landscape and buildings. Here, as in most of his works, a simple device is employed to suggest movement far into space: a tree is seen in the right foreground, buildings fill the middle plane, and far away in the vast landscape are minuscule trees on a distant mountain top.

With rare economy of means, the artist suggests an atmosphere as well as a linear perspective. The lines are darker and more deeply etched in the foreground, and thinner and fainter in the distant regions. In his knowledge of the laws of optics and of the diminution of contrasts (contrasts of tone that gradually fade and become lighter as the objects recede into the distance), Hirschvogel was ahead of his time. Prints such as this one certainly anticipate the delicately worked plates of Rembrandt.

It is possible that the sensitive variations in the etched lines were obtained by using etching needles that varied from coarse to fine. The delicate nature of the biting suggests that this may be so. But such speculation is academic in view of the end result, as seen here.