Martin Schongauer

The life of Martin Schongauer,
scene by scene

1. 1465Leipzig

   In 1465 a young man from Colmar signs up at the University of Leipzig. His name is Martin Schongauer. Very few dated records of his life survive, and this enrollment is one of them.

   His father, Caspar, was a goldsmith working in Colmar. Cutting fine lines into metal was a goldsmith's craft. Martin does not seem to have stayed long at the university.

2. 1473Colmar

   In 1473 a large altarpiece is set up in the church of Saint Martin in Colmar. Mary sits before a hedge of roses, holding the Christ Child. It is the Madonna of the Rose Bower. The year 1473 is written on the back of the panel, which makes it his only securely dated painting.

   The picture stayed in that church for nearly five hundred years. Then, in January 1972, it was stolen. It came back the next year and now hangs in the former Dominican church next door.

   By then his engravings had made his name travel much farther. Look at The Censer. Spires and little angels crown the incense burner, and its chains spill across the floor in loose coils. At the bottom center sits his monogram, an M and an S with a small cross between them.

   Painted around this timeThe Censer
3. 1487–88Florence

   South of the Alps, in Florence, a boy studies a print that has come all the way from the Upper Rhine. It is Schongauer's Temptation of Saint Anthony, where monsters lift the saint into the air and claw at him. The boy's name is Michelangelo.

   His early biographers, Vasari and Condivi, wrote that the young Michelangelo copied this engraving in paint. A small panel at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, The Torment of Saint Anthony, is thought to be that picture. His lines got there on paper.

   His big engraving Christ Carrying the Cross spread the same way. Christ, in a crown of thorns, has fallen under the heavy beam and braces one hand on the ground. Soldiers with spears and riders on horseback crowd around him, and two dogs run through the foreground.

   Painted around this timeChrist Carrying the Cross
4. 1489Breisach

   In 1489 the Rhine town of Breisach takes Schongauer in as a citizen. He leaves Colmar and settles there.

   He began painting a Last Judgment across the west wall of Saint Stephen's Minster. A report on the church's restoration dates the mural to the summers of 1489 and 1490 and calls it one of his last works. The pen drawing Bust of a Man in a Hat Gazing Upward belongs to these later years too. A man in a broad hat looks up, mouth open, eyes rolled toward something we cannot see.

   Painted around this timeBust of a Man in a Hat Gazing Upward
5. 1491Breisach

   On February 2, 1491, Schongauer dies in Breisach. The Last Judgment on the minster wall remains one of his last large undertakings.

   He never dated a single one of his engravings. So scholars are still comparing lines and handling to work out which plate came first. More than a hundred engravings survive, and every one carries the same monogram.

6. 1492Colmar

   In 1492 a young painter from Nuremberg, about twenty years old, arrives in Colmar. It is Albrecht Dürer. He has come a long way to meet Schongauer. But the master is already dead, and it is his brothers who open the door.

   According to an account by Dürer's friend Christoph Scheurl, the brothers received the young man kindly. Dürer then went on to Basel and looked up another brother, a goldsmith there. Some Schongauer drawings that Dürer kept still carry Schongauer's name, written on them in Dürer's own hand.