Renaissance

Dürer’s Era

The life and work of Albrecht Dürer are a lesson in just how the role and self-image of the artist changed fundamentally in the years around 1500, with the individual coming into focus. In the wake of the Reformation painters and sculptors received fewer commissions to decorate churches. Many of the best artists of the time began to create precious and sophisticated works of art for the private sphere; works which were prized and collected by artistically-inclined patrons.

Artists and patrons

In the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, these tendencies can to be followed in the works of Conrad Meit, who worked for one of the most important courts of his time. The upheavals of the time meant that works of portraiture took on a new significance, as expressed by medals, miniatures, paintings, and sculptures in the round. A number of objects originated in the Kunstkammer of the Wittelsbach family, an early form of the modern museum. Many pieces were even specifically made for them, for example the true-to-scale wooden models of the towns in which they had their residences.

After exempla from antiquity

Renaissance means re-birth, and thus it is that works were also produced in this period emulating antique creations, indeed sometimes hardly even distinguishable from them. In the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum this is illustrated by, among other objects, the works of the sculptor Antico, who was not known by this name for nothing.