HANNS LAUTENSACK
CIRCA I52O-CIRCA 1564/66131 Mountain Landscape with an
Imaginary City
Pen and black ink and white gouache heightening on red
prepared paper; H: 18.5 cm (7^5 /i6 in.); W: 15.6 cm (6Vs
in.)
89.00.1 4MARKS AND INSCRIPTIONS: (Verso) inscribed Altdorfer
in brown ink.
PROVENANCE: Private collection, Belgium; art market,
Boston.
EXHIBITIONS: None.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Hendrix, "A New Drawing by
Hanns Lautensack, " J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 17
(1989), pp. 21-28.THIS PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN EXAMPLE CAN BE ADDED
to the handful of surviving drawings by Hanns Lauten-
sack. Although comparable in certain respects to the
blue- and red-grounded landscapes associated with the
Master of 1544 and the Monogrammist HWG, both of
whom were probably active in Nuremberg,^1 it is at once
more grandly conceived and less precious, evidencing a
closer affinity with the landscape style of Albrecht Alt-
dorfer and Wolf Huber. Supporting the attribution to
Lautensack, who was also from Nuremberg, is the
rough, vivacious pen work of the architecture, which
comes close to his drawing of a fantastic city in the Szép-
müvészeti Múzeum (inv. 224), signed and dated 1550.
The sketch Christ and the Centurion (Stàdelsches Kunstin-
stitut inv. 6932) shares with the present drawing the
small, frothy trees interspersed with buildings, the tan-
gled and dark foreground hatching, and the delicately de-
lineated distant mountains. There are also parallels with
etchings by Lautensack, such as Christ Curses the Fig Tree
of I554,^2 which was probably made around the same
time as the drawing. The drawing appears to have been
cut down and thus originally might not have had such a
pronounced vertical format.1. A. Schmitt, Hanns Lautensack, Nürnberger Forschungen 4
(Nuremberg, 1957), nos. 97-99, 102-3, no, no, 120-23; T.
DaC. Kaufmann, Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540-
1680, exh. cat. (Art Museum, Princeton University, and other
institutions, 1982), p. 42, no. 5.
2. Schmitt (note i), no. 73.296 CENTRAL EUROPEAN SCHOOL • LAUTENSACK