The Early Days: Fifteenth-Century Compositions - 2nd view

The museum’s collection has only a few German drawings made before the year 1500, but they are very special indeed. The earliest sheet dates from around 1410–1415, and is a depiction of Saint Margaret, produced in the graceful, decorative style of International Gothic. It was probably executed as a model sheet or a study for a sculpture. It was previously regarded as a work by an artist of Cologne or Vienna, but it is more likely to have been made in Prague, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time. The Virgin and Child with Saint Paul is a composition with an unusual iconography, whose varied structure of lines, evoking sculptural forms, indicates that it was probably a preliminary drawing for an engraving. Two of the sheets shown here are associated with Hans Pleydenwurff, one of the leading painters in mid-fifteenth-century Nuremberg: a design for an altarpiece, and a scene of an elegantly dressed female figure with a dog.