MAIR von Landshut

German painter, draftsman, and engraver. The signature Mair appears on all but one of his twenty-two engravings and on one of three woodcuts. The rest of his posthumously acquired name derives from the Landshut coat of arms on the engraving Hour of Death (1499), which presumably indicates that Mair was working there. Nine other engravings are dated the same year, the only date to appear on any of his engraved work. None of Mair’s other dated works is earlier than 1495 or later than 1504, years in which he was also associated with Munich and Freising. Stylistic evidence suggesting he assisted Jan Polack c. 1490 in painting an altarpiece for St Peter in Munich tallies with an entry in the Munich tax records from 1490 that lists a ‘Mair Maler von Freising’. In 1495 he executed a lunette panel with scenes from the Life of Christ for the sacristy of Freising Cathedral. He may also have worked temporarily in northern Italy, producing an Ecce homo (1502; Trent Castle) and two scenes of a martyrdom (Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli).

The Freising lunette panel provides a good example of Mair’s fantastic, stage-like architectural settings with multiple niches and platforms used to accommodate many-figured narrative scenes. The plain surfaces and building-block shapes of the architecture, albeit here decorated with much floral scrollwork, are not unusual in contemporary Bavarian painting, but this aspect of Mair’s design also warrants comparison with the geometrically bold and simplified architectural forms of Konrad Witz from the 1430s and 1440s. Mair shared Witz’s predisposition to reduce architectural forms and, in a larger sense, all physical appearances to a state of essential solids and voids.

Mair’s reputation rests above all on his engravings and drawings. He customarily printed and drew on hand-tinted paper, then brushed on highlights in white or yellow. The coloured paper provided a ground tone for the modelling system and a foil to bring out the brilliance of the highlights. Unlike Dürer’s use of a similar drawing technique to clarify the appearance of a solid body in space, Mair emphasized the decorative and atmospheric effects of the colour and highlights - perhaps inspiring Albrecht Altdorfer, whose drawings on toned paper, beginning in 1506, carry forth this graphic technique for related expressive ends. The visual effects that Mair achieved by printing on hand-coloured paper also anticipate by nearly a decade the chiaroscuro woodcuts of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Burgkmair, who further developed a technique for making prints that resemble the appearance of drawings on coloured paper. By the standards of such contemporaries as Martin Schongauer or the young Dürer, Mair’s engravings have an undeniably naive and provincial character, but he remains notable for his technical inventiveness and distinct personality.