Danube school

Danube School or Donau style is the name for a group of painters of the first third of the 16th century who worked in Bavaria and in the northern part of Austria ( ie, along the Danube ). The term school is misleading, since the majority of counted to her artist never stood in a teacher-student relationship. Your grouping under this term was based rather on their common stylistic features. Usually, the Danube school is considered as a link between the late Gothic and Renaissance.

Conceptual history

The term Danube style was first used and defined in 1892 by Theodor von Frimmel in his review of the dissertation of the Berlin art historian Max Jakob Friedländer Albrecht Altdorfer. He saw in the painting of the Danube region a difference to the art of the rest of Germany and knew Albrecht Altdorfer as their main representative. In the following years and decades, the term has been repeatedly taken over uncritically, although already Max Jakob Friedländer 1922, the inaccuracy of the term criticized and called for a clearer style determination.

Representative

As the main representative of Albrecht Altdorfer and Wolf Huber are usually viewed. Furthermore, Jörg Breu the Elder, Rueland Frueauf the Younger and Christoph Schwartz are often called. Occasionally, Lucas Cranach the Elder is expected to do so. In the area of the woodcut masters such as Augustin Hirschvogel the Danube school are related parties.

Their action sites are next to Regensburg and Passau, Vienna, and also some Austrian monasteries such as Melk and St. Florian.

Features

Characteristic of the Danube School is a new, previously unknown natural feeling. Nature gets back in her paintings an independent rank - by Wolf Huber of the Alps are the first studies of nature without human figures north known. For the first time in Central Europe the events are embedded in a landscape that is highlighted often symbolic. The landscape often gets a the main theme of the image underlining symbolism; is shown, for example, a crucifixion, the sky is often covered by dark clouds that make the entire image seem bleak.

This poetic and symbolic elevation of the landscape corresponds with stylistic devices, often reminiscent of the expressionism more recent observers. Terms such as icons landscape, relevant, accurate landscape, landscape or sympathetic mood landscape are shaped by art historians as Keneth Clark and Goetz Pochat.

Selection of works

Sebastian altar in the St. Florian's Priory by Albrecht Altdorfer

Former high altar of the collegiate church of Melk by Jörg Breu

• Crucifixion by Albrecht Altdorfer (see above)
• Dragon fight of St. Georg von Albrecht Altdorfer; in all the key features of the Danube style are combined in himself
• Illustrations to the life story of Frederick III. from unnamed so-called masters of the Historia et Friderici Maximiliani (perhaps Altdorfer or a student of his )
• High altar of Pulkau the so-called Master of the altar Pulkauer
• Vöhlin'sches founders image in Antonite Memmingen; by an anonymous painter
• Wonder altars in Mariazell from the so-called Master of the wonders of Mariazell
• Christ on the Mount of Olives by Wolf Huber