Martin Schongauer

Only a few dates about Martin Schongauer’s life are certain: he was born around 1450, probably earlier, the son of a goldsmith, with whom he probably learned the art of copper engraving; afterwards he is probably in the workshop of the Colmar painter Caspar Isenmann, who is strongly influenced by Flemish painting.
He is first recorded in 1465, when Schongauer enrolled at Leipzig University. Due to his stylistic orientation towards Old Netherlandish art, it is assumed that his wanderings in the late 1460s took him to the Burgundian Netherlands. Already in Schongauer’s first engravings we find direct adoptions of pictorial types from the paintings of Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts and Jan van Eyck, with which he imparted to German art in the last third of the 15th century important innovations in figure formation, landscape depiction and detail realism.
In the years after 1470 he was again based in Colmar, where he worked as a painter and engraver. He seems to be successful, for he is attested several times as a house owner. In addition to over a hundred copperplate engravings, which he sold commercially and with which he exerted a great influence on Dürer, he produced several paintings, of which, however, only the “Madonna im Rosenhag”, created in 1473 for St Martin in Colmar, is dated.
In 1489 he is described as a citizen of Breisach, where he works on murals of the Last Judgement on the inner west wall of Breisach Cathedral, which he is unable to complete himself due to his sudden death from the plague.