Hans Baldung Grien

Hans Baldung, known as Grien or Grün, was a German Renaissance painter who also worked as an engraver, printmaker, illustrator and designer of stained glass. Born in Schwäbisch Gmünd in 1484 or 1485 and dying in Strasbourg in September 1545, he is considered the most gifted pupil of Albrecht Dürer. His art sits between the German Renaissance and Mannerism, and it is marked by strong colour, expressive figures and a vivid imagination that led him to allegory, mythology and witchcraft. His importance rests as much on his prints, which far outnumber his paintings, as on the panels themselves.

Childhood and first training

The son of Johann Baldung, a university-trained jurist who from 1492 served as legal adviser to the bishop of Strasbourg, Hans was the first male in his family not to attend university, although he came from an educated household. His earliest artistic training began around 1500 in the Upper Rhine with a Strasbourg artist. The nickname Grien, meaning green in German, probably comes from his fondness for wearing that colour, though it may also echo grienhals, an old word for witch, one of his recurring themes. It also distinguished him from two other Hanses in Dürer's workshop.

Apprentice in Dürer's workshop

Around 1503, during the years of travel expected of artists at the time, Baldung joined Dürer's workshop in Nuremberg, where he worked until 1507. In those years he made prints in a style very close to his master's, partly because the workshop needed a uniform look. Three woodcuts, The Virgin and Child, Saint Barbara and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, are thought perhaps to have formed a triptych. Dürer left him in charge of the workshop during his second stay in Venice, a sign of the trust between them. When the master returned, Baldung chose to set up on his own, on cordial terms that kept their friendship alive until Dürer's death in 1528, when a lock of the master's hair was sent to his former pupil.

Strasbourg and his own workshop

In 1509 he went back to Strasbourg, where he became a citizen and won important commissions. The following year he married Margarethe Herlin, a local merchant's daughter, and they had a daughter. He joined the Zur Steltz guild, opened a workshop and began signing his work with the HGB monogram he would use for the rest of his career. His style grew more deliberately individual, a tendency historians link to Mannerism. Between 1513 and 1516 he worked in Freiburg im Breisgau on the high altar of the cathedral, regarded as his most ambitious religious work: an eleven-panel altarpiece on the life of the Virgin that survives intact. The commission gave him lasting financial security.

Allegories, witches and Death

The side of his output most admired today is his allegory and witchcraft scenes, in which sensual nude women are set alongside Death and demonic creatures. He was the first German artist to bring witches, witchcraft and erotic themes heavily into his work. Many of these pieces are small drawings in pen and ink with white bodycolour on primed paper. Among the best known are Death and the Maiden (Basel, 1517), The Three Ages of Man and Death (Museo del Prado), Adam and Eve (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza) and Two Witches (Städel, Frankfurt, 1523), set before a stormy sky. The prevailing view is that his treatment of witches echoed the playful attitude of Strasbourg's humanists, although it is hard to tell where irony ends and more serious intent begins.

Portraits, prints and stained glass

Baldung was also a portraitist, whose sitters are defined more by personality than by the meticulous detail of Dürer. A portrait of a lady in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is the only signed portrait known by him, and a self-portrait is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg. His output of some 550 woodcuts, more than 400 of them book illustrations, was more important than his painting. His prints are highly prized today, and in 1511 he made a chiaroscuro woodcut of Adam and Eve. His support for the Lutheran Reformation shows in a print of Luther protected by the Holy Spirit and, in 1543, a portrait of the reformer Caspar Hedio.

Legacy

Baldung combined Dürer's inheritance with a language of his own, far from his master's Renaissance calm. His influence can be seen in the way German art of the sixteenth century approached allegory, sensuality and the fantastic. Much of his work survives today in Freiburg's Augustinermuseum and in collections in Nuremberg, Basel, Munich and Madrid.