Art of Light

by Susan Foister

Published 2 October 2007
By the first half of the sixteenth century, German stained glass had reached astonishing heights of artistic and conceptual sophistication. Although often made for churches, not all stained glass of this period was religious; subject matter included landscapes, genre scenes, and heraldic imagery, as well as Biblical scenes. This title examines a group of German stained glass panels, both religious and secular, alongside paintings of the same period to illuminate the stylistic and compositional relationships between the two crafts. Among the many featured works are prints by Durer that were later used as sources for glass designs as well as drawings by other artists and the stained glass works produced after them. Also included is a striking stained glass window made for Mariawald Abbey and the National Gallery's painted panels of about the same date completed for the altarpiece of Liesborn Abbey. Comparisons of these masterpieces reveal the interconnectedness between artist and craftsman and 'fine' and decorative arts during this time.

An authoritative new volume cataloguing the German paintings before 1800 in the collection of the National Gallery, London
 
This fully illustrated catalogue presents the most up-to-date research on the seventy-five paintings in the National Gallery created in the German-speaking lands before 1800. Among them are important groups of works by artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger—including his famous double portrait The Ambassadors of 1533—Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, Adam Elsheimer, the fifteenth-century Cologne painter known as the Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece and his Westphalian contemporary, the Master of Liesborn.
 
This is the first catalogue of the National Gallery’s German paintings since 1959 and includes revelatory entries on a number of important new acquisitions, among them significant works by Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber, Franz Anton Maulbertsch, Hans Rottenhammer and Hans Wertinger. The German Paintings before 1800 also includes two essays, the first discussing the history of the paintings’ acquisition by the National Gallery and the taste for German painting in Britain, and the second addressing the ways in which these German artists produced their work.
 
Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press