German School, Second Half of the 16th Century

The 16^th century in Germany saw both a flowering and a transformation in the art of depicting nature. In this large, imaginatively composed gouache on vellum, which must date from the later years of the century, numerous careful depictions of individual insects, animals and plants are combined into a highly decorative composition that reflects both the ground-breaking innovations in the representation of nature that took place in Germany just after 1500, and the ways in which the new art form that came into being at that time evolved as the century progressed. 

Exquisite, refined images of flowers, birds and insects were no new idea, having featured prominently in the borders of illuminated manuscript leaves for centuries, but it was only in the very first years of the 16^th century, and in the work of the Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), that images of these plants and creatures began to be made as independent works of art. Dürer’s extraordinary watercolours – such as the Hare of 1502, the Great Clump of Earth, executed in the following year, the Stag Beetle of 1508, or the Blue Roller of 1512 – defined for a century or more how artists approached the representation of nature.¹ These works were instantly appreciated and valued, and as the years went by also increasingly served as source material for artists to copy and adapt, giving rise to the late 16^th-century phenomenon known as the ‘Dürer-Renaissance.’

The most significant and accomplished later 16^th-century artist who was profoundly inspired by Dürer was Hans Hoffmann (circa 1530-circa 1591), whose 1582 reinterpretation of Dürer’s 1502 masterpiece, the Hare, came to the market just a few months ago.² That work was, at least in composition, extremely faithful to the inspiring prototype, but Hoffmann subsequently reimagined the subject in a series of works that depart more radically from Dürer’s approach and image, placing the animal in a rich landscape setting, surrounded by innumerable – and very precisely rendered – plants, insects and small animals. One of these, executed like the present work in gouache on vellum, is particularly close to this in the handing of many of the details of plants, butterflies and animals, and also in the technique and palette employed.³

Whether or not an attribution to Hoffmann is ultimately acceptable for the present work, it, like the gouache of the Hare in a landscape, uses the very pure and observational watercolours of Dürer as the springboard for the creation of a similarly refined yet much more decorative and courtly image, in keeping with the fashions and tastes of the later 16^th century. Both are works that would have been totally at home in the late 16^th-century Prague Wunderkammer of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. 

^1. For an overview, and specific information on these works, see F. Koreny, Albrecht Dürer und die Tier- un Pflanzenstudien der Renaissance, exh. cat., Vienna, Albertina, 1985 

^2. Sale, London, Sotheby’s, 7 July 2021, lot 21

^3. Koreny, op. cit., pp. 144-5, cat. 47