LEINBERGER, Hans - b. 1475 Bavaria, d. 1530 Landshut - WGA

LEINBERGER, Hans

(b. 1475 Bavaria, d. 1530 Landshut)

German wood-carver and sculptor. He was the most eminent sculptor in Bavaria in the second and third decades of the 16th century. It is likely that he trained or was employed in the region of the Danube school, whether in Vienna or Regensburg. There is also a possibility that he began his career in Nuremberg. His centre of activity was in Landshut, where his life is documented from 1510 until 1530. He paid tax in 1510 on a house there and between 1516 and 1530 received various payments from the court of Ludwig X (reg 1516–45), but none of his projects for the court is known to have survived. More than 50 individual or multi-partite sculptures have been attributed to him. As a carver of figures for altarpieces, he worked mostly in lime-wood, but also produced sculpture in stone, bronze and fine-grained hardwoods, such as pear-wood and boxwood, selected according to the nature of the piece.

St Stephen

Saint Stephen sits upon a low, partially draped, backless bench. He wears a dalmatic over a long tunic, indicating his position in the church as a deacon, and in his right hand he holds an open book supporting three rocks, referring to his death by stoning. Revered as the first Christian martyr, Stephen’s story is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles (6-7).

The work is carved from three pieces of wood: one was used for the saint and the other two for the lateral extensions of the seat. The modeling is so convincing that when viewed from the front, the figure, in fact a sculpture in relief, appears to be rendered fully in the round. The statue is well preserved except for the loss of much of the original polychromy. The relief probably was once part of a series of seated figures of saints that may have included St Lawrence, another deacon saint often depicted together with St Stephen in Late Gothic art.

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Virgin and Child

The picture shows the central figure in the altarpiece on the high altar.

Over and above the controversies concerning the notion of a “Danube school” in painting, there is general agreement on a close community in spirit and forms between the works of the main representatives of the Danubian style and the sculptures produced concurrently in the same Austro-Bavarian region. The genesis of the new plastic style occurred within the Late Gothic tradition, taking the old methods a step further while developing new rhetoric in perfect osmosis with the contemporary graphic and pictorial language, as shown by the sculptures of Hans Leinberger. If, for example, the tumultuous draperies clothing his figures and soaring far out from the body in arbitrary folds spring from the previous Gothic conception, their treatment avoid angles and breaks in favour of floating undulations at the edges and large inflated folds, tracing long diagonals interrupted here and there by little stiff crinkles on the surface of the fabric: a treatment closely corresponding to the manner of Albrecht Altdorfer. Leinberger appears to have transformed Altdorfer’s graphic inventions into volumes. At the very least he exploited plastically the new formal possibilities offered by the Danubian style, as also initiated by other artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder and J�rg Breu.

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