Book Description
The paucity of documents related to Stefan Lochner has resulted in a lack of agreement on such fundamental issues as the artist's identity, the nature of his oeuvre, the importance of his workshop, and his position in fifteenth-century painting. This volume re-evaluates the oeuvre ascribed to this artist in the light of an extensive examination of his works with infrared reflectography. Although the results of technical studies form the underpinnings of the book, its concerns are broader. Relatively few drawings can be attributed to northern artists of the fifteenth century, and fewer still can be linked with any degree of certainty to Cologne. Our understanding of graphic languages in Germany is based primarily on the print production, a distorted view because the techniques of woodcut and engraving imposed restrictions on printmakers that draftsmen could disregard. It is not until Martin Schongauer, active in Colmar in the last quarter of the century, that we can confidently associate a particular graphic language with a specific locale. In addition to increasing the overall corpus of fifteenth-century drawings, the underdrawings brought to light by the reflectography of Lochner's paintings offer tangible evidence of a graphic style that was practised in Cologne in the 1430s and 1440s. They reveal Lochner to be a draftsman of the first order who practised a style quite new at the time: derived from metalwork, it foreshadows Schongauer's achievements by some forty years. The prominent position of painting in modern museums obscures the fact that in earlier times other media were often more highly esteemed; the goldsmith's work is one of the forms of art to have been severely devalued over the centuries. Lochner selected his pictorial means to establish a conscious parallel with the work of goldsmiths, raising the status of painting by endowing it with the quality of the most revered form of art.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The sumptuous paintings of Stefan Lochner (d. Cologne 1451) are among the most familiar yet least understood images of the late Middle Ages." "This book explores Lochner's oeuvre from various vantage points. Tracing current conceptions of the artist back to the earliest recorded testimonies, it first reviews Lochner's changing critical fortunes. A perceptual account of Lochner's major paintings and illuminated manuscripts follows, clarifying the artist's passion for the nature of representation and the different ways in which he engages the viewer. In addition, study of Lochner's works by means of infrared reflectography reveals a draftsman of the first order: his complex underdrawings foreshadow Martin Schongauer's graphic style of forty years later." The first monograph on Stefan Lochner since 1938, this book as illustrated with 69 color plates and 225 black-and-white reproductions; it includes a bibliography and index.

SYNOPSIS