View of Sarmingstein

1511

Pen and black ink

Praun-, Esterházy collection

This view of a river running among high mountains represents Sarmingstein on the Danube, which lies in Austria, between Linz and Melk. The drawing, together with a few works by Albrecht Dürer and Wolfgang Huber, has been regarded as a milestone in art history, not only because it is an early independent landscape, but also because it can be identified as an existing geographical location. Such landscape portraits are rare at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The scene is viewed from an imaginary vantage point above the Danube, which suggests that the drawing was made not on location, but from memory.