Danube School (painting)

The Danube school, or Donauschule, refers to a landscape painting tradition developed by artists in the region of the Danube River, an area that includes Vienna and Regensburg in Bavaria. The school was formed by a group of German and Austrian artists, working between 1490 and 1530, who pioneered a new landscape aesthetic that concentrated on the sylvan environment of the Danube.

The free imperial city of Regensburg, an important trade center, officially became a Lutheran city in 1524. Nevertheless, it remained one of the main cities of the Holy Roman Empire and an important Catholic bishopric long after the town had turned to Protestantism. The Church was an important patron of the arts in the region. The Danube school paintings and prints focus on misty scenes around the Danube Valley, which was covered in hills and woods, abundantly dotted with quaint castles, convents, and churches.

Background

The Danube School is named for the region located between Nuremberg to the West and Vienna to the East, with the free imperial city of Regensburg on the river. The Danube, one of the longest rivers of Europe, originates near the Black Forest, flowing through diverse countries. Historically, it was an important waterway for commerce and travel. During the sixteenth century, many young artists undertook traveling the river and painting as part of their education.

Artists associated with the Danube school were informally connected independent painters and printmakers. Although the aesthetic interests of members of the Danube school focused on nearby landscapes, they also included religious themes, urban scenes, and the fantastic. Most subjects, however, usually included some natural scenery. Examples can be appreciated in the work of painter and printmaker Jorg Breu, considered a founder of religious art in the Danube school. Breu produced a series of altarpieces for Austrian monasteries. Another pioneer of the school is Rueland Frueauf the Younger, from Passau, whose Crucifixion in 1496 is considered as representative of the genre.

Scholars associate the Danube School with the Late Gothic and the German Renaissance; however, it is important to differentiate the latter from the Italian High Renaissance, which developed roughly during the same period. While the Renaissance spread through Italy, German artists still produced work following a Late Gothic aesthetic. The Late Gothic overlapped with the German Renaissance; the latter placed great importance on landscape for its own sake rather than as just as a background filler, as was common for other Renaissance artists. Images of scenic beauty became valuable in themselves, even if they were part of a painting with a religious subject matter.

Danube school artists experimented with assorted media; besides oil painting, they produced drawings and engravings as valuable artworks. Prior to that, for instance, printmaking was considered an artisan trade, good for illustrating books, but not as collectable art pieces. Northern Renaissance artists changed that.

Another specific characteristic of German Renaissance art was the profusion of realistic detail, carefully rendered, combined with the use of fantasy in the depiction of subject matter. Some of the best examples of these elements can be appreciated in the work of Albrecht Altdorfer, an influential German painter and engraver from Regensburg, who became one of the pioneers of the Danube School.

Overview

The Danube school, according to experts, was largely unique in the sense that it was not influenced either by the Italian High Renaissance or the Netherlandish Renaissance, which flourished in Flanders and Holland. The artists of the Danube school are referred to as Old Masters. The Little Masters, also known as Kleinmasters, were a related group of Nuremberg engravers and printmakers who worked on a small scale, producing series of collectable prints.

The principal Old Masters of the Danube school were Albrecht Altdorfer, Lucas Cranach, and Wolf Huber. Their lyrical and poetic approach defined the Danube school, and their work depicts in detail the natural wilderness of the region, with plentiful images of water, rocks, forests, and fir trees in an atmosphere blurred by mist and fog. Landscapes were important even for portraits, as can be seen in the work of Lucas Cranach the Elder, who painted portraits of scholars and their wives set in regional landscapes. Cranach, an emblematic representative of the German Renaissance, became the court painter for the electors of Saxony, becoming extremely successful as a painter, portraitist, and printmaker.

Wolf Huber, considered by many experts the most important painter of the Danube school after Albrecht Altdorfer, was influenced by the work of Albrecht Durer and the Italian mannerists. Besides working on paintings, woodcut prints, and landscape drawings both Altdorfer and Huber became local city architects; Altdorfer of Regensburg and Huber the city of Passau. Huber’s contemplative representation of Danube Valley landscapes are characterized for their feelings of intimacy and calm and form the background of many of his paintings. Other Old Masters included Erhart Altdorfer, Jorg Breu the Elder, Melchior Feselen, Rueland Frueauf the Younger, Augustin Hirschvogel, Hans Sebald Lautensack, Hans Leinberger, and Hans Leu the Younger.

The Danube school reflects the values of German humanism, based on the revival of classical aesthetics and literature. It became more democratic, as well. While art had previously been affordable solely to aristocrats and the wealthy, drawings and prints—usually based on etchings or woodcuts—became collectible items, produced serially and affordable to the middle classes. Nature was painted with intricate realism, and religious paintings of the Danube school reflected this realism, as well as innovative tendencies, such as new perspectives and asymmetrical composition. The subject matter often showcased elements of fantasy, causing some scholars to call it fantastic realism, because of the juxtaposition of very realist depictions of nature with imaginative elements of fantasy, such as wild men, demons, and witches.

Albrecht Altdorfer is also considered the most important of the Little Masters. An excellent example of the kleinmasters’ work is Altdorfer’s forty woodcut engravings titled The Fall and Redemption of Man, created around 1515. Art historians consider the Danube school as an innovative movement, arguably the first to paint pure landscapes, and as such a precursor to the German romantic movement and the nineteenth century landscape schools of painting.

Bibliography

Ainsworth, Maryan Wynn, John Waterman, and Timothy B. Husband. German Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350–1600. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013. Print.

Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople. New York: Norton, 2013. Print.

Beattie, Andrew. The Danube School: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.

Chilvers, Ian. The Oxford Dictionary of Art. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.

Cuneo, Pia. Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jorg Breu the Elder and the Fashioning of Political Identity, 1475–1536. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Print.

Heal, Bridget. The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print.

Hourihane, Colum, ed. The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.

Noble, Bonnie. Lucas Cranach the Elder: Art and Devotion of the German Reformation. Lanham: UP of America, 2009. Print.

Trapp, Eugen. World Heritage Regensburg: A Guide to the History and Art History of the Old Town of Regensburg with Standtamhof. Regensburg: Schnell, 2009. Print.

Wood, Christopher. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. Revised and Expanded. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014. Print.