The separate flowering of the German Late Gothic
While painting in broad areas of Germany had been dominated in the
1460s by fairly similar "Netherlandicizing" traits, towards the end
of the 15th century artists in the south of the country increasingly
began to emancipate themselves from such influences. Production
flourished as private individuals and guilds competed with each
other to crown all the main and subsidiary altars in their city and
parish churches with al-tarpieces. Many cities saw the emergence of
specialized workshops of high technical quality. Leading centres
such as Vienna, Regensburg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Nordlin-gen,
Mainz and Colmar, not to mention Basle and above all Strasburg,
became magnets for artists in their own right. They no longer needed
to refer back to the Netherlands, particularly since Cologne lay
much closer and the focus across Europe was now shifting towards
Italy. Augsburg in particular began to orient itself increasingly
towards the South.
The anonymity of the Gothic artist
An artist's social standing varied considerably even between one
German city and another, and in particular between the North and
Italy. Just how early on the Italian painters had risen above the
status of pure artisans can be seen from the fact that we know
almost all the leading artists of the 14th century by name. While
Vasari and other early writers on art played their part in this,
they themselves lived over 200 years after
Giotto and had to rely
upon earlier records. They were thereby helped by signatures, which
artists in the North were much slower to employ. Although isolated
names are known to us from the 14th century (Theodoric,
Bertram), the majority of artists — including many of the most
prominent — remained nameless even in the final phase of Early Netherlandish painting in the early 16th century.
In order to distinguish between these anonymous artists, about a
century ago makeshift names were invented for them, inspired either
by the characteristics or, more
commonly, the subject (Master of the Life of the
Virgin), patron
(Master Boucicaut),
location, original location or even previous owner of particularly important works. Even
amongst museum curators, there is a tendency to choose works by
known masters over those by anonymous artists — something for which
the works themselves give not the slightest grounds. Without the
Master Boucicaut (active 1405—1420) or the
Master of
the Rohan Book of Hours (active c. 1420-1430),
the history of French painting could not be written, not that of
Bohemia without the painter of the Glatz Madonna
(Master of the Glatz Madonna), the
Master Hohenfurt or the
Master of Wittingau.
