Painters of the so-called “Danube school” worked in the regions along the great river between Regensburg and Vienna in the early sixteenth century. Among their diversely themed paintings and drawings there are numerous “landscape portraits”, which were produced after direct observation and are in part topographically accurate. The most noteworthy exponents of the group were Albrecht Altdorfer of Regensburg, and Wolfgang Huber, court painter to the Archbishop of Passau. Their landscape drawings, together with Dürer’s travel drawings, played a key role in the development of the landscape as an independent genre. Altdorfer’s pen-and-ink View of Sarmingstein, dated 1511, is among the earliest known landscape portraits with a verifiable geographic location. Wolfgang Huber’s studies of willow trees, made in 1514, once featured in a sketchbook; the other compositions of which only survive as copies. Contrasting with the expressive structure of lines in his willow trees, in Huber’s view of Urfahr, he generated an airy sense of space partly through the use of delicate, dotted lines to mark out the contours of the distant mountains, and partly by giving us a daringly wide view of the scene. Hanns Lautensack’s landscapes from the mid-sixteenth century, mostly made as preparatory sketches for etchings, depict sceneries from his own imagination.
The Age of DÜRER
