Georg Pencz

German, 1500 - 1550

BiographyBorn c. 1500; died Leipzig or Wrocaw, 10–15 Oct 1550.

German painter, draughtsman and engraver. He arrived in Nuremberg in 1523 and entered Albrecht Dürer’s workshop. On 12 January 1525 he was imprisoned with the brothers Barthel Beham and Sebald Beham and charged with disseminating the radical views of Thomas Müntzer (c. 1490–1525) concerning religion and government. The council banished them from Nuremberg, but, after an appeal and intercession by Graf Albrecht von Mansfeld, Pencz was sent to nearby Windsheim, and on 16 November all three were pardoned, though placed under orders regarding their future behaviour. The three artists were later nicknamed the Little masters on account of their influential small-scale prints.

Pencz’s prints of the 1520s include copies (1523) after prints by Dürer using the northern Italian style and a series on the Virtues, which is closer to Marcantonio Raimondi, with its round internal lines and complete avoidance of parallel hatching. Pencz’s identification with master i.b. (see Masters, anonymous, and monogrammists, §III) is doubtful. Pencz was probably in northern Italy and Venice in the late 1520s and returned to Nuremberg c. 1529. There are two engravings signed gp, dated 1529, and two signed, undated paintings of c. 1529: the Portrait of a Man (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.), wearing a cap and an open shirt, and an Adoration of the Magi (three fragments, Dresden, Gemäldegal. Alte Meister; intact copy, ex-Prince Lubormirski priv. col., Lemberg). Pencz emerges as a disciple of Dürer, especially in the portrait. The Adoration makes little emotional impact though the details are well observed, and Pencz’s style is closer to the sumptuous concepts of Augsburg than the detailed approach of Nuremberg. Striking features are the platform and the smartly cleaned masonry, which look rather tidied up and barren, and the young man with a characteristic turn of the head: the only self-portrait of the painter. A painting of Judith (Munich, Alte Pin.) is signed and dated 1531; it shows a half-length figure in the manner of the early work of Palma Vecchio or Titian.

Pencz married the daughter of the painter Matthes Prunner, and they had at least six children. On 31 May 1532 the council granted him an annual sum of 10 Rhenish gulden (later increased) for drawing, painting, designing and various other work. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned by John, Elector of Saxony, to copy two portraits of emperors (Nuremberg, Ger. Nmus.) by Dürer: the superb head-and-shoulders of Charlemagne and Sigismund I (both Zurich, priv. col.), previously attributed to Dürer.

In the following years Pencz made several large ceiling pictures on canvas; the one from the house of Lienhard Hirschvogel (Nuremberg, Stadtmus. Fembohaus) has been heavily painted over and added to. He was unfamiliar with wall painting and definitely did not contribute to the frescoes in the Rathaus at Nuremberg, as had long been supposed, but was the first in Germany to conceive of ceiling pictures as a continuous whole. Hirschvogel commissioned another ceiling painting, this one of the Fall of Phaethon (preparatory drawing, Nuremberg, Ger. Nmus.), for the main room of the Bolognese Renaissance-style house (1534; destr. World War II) built in his pleasure grounds. Peter Flötner provided the interior decoration, and Pencz’s painting was clearly influenced by the furnishing and decoration by Giulio Romano of the Palazzo del Te, Mantua, which he saw in the late 1520s. Another ceiling painting (preparatory drawings, London, U. Coll., and Oxford, Christ Church), which must have been executed immediately afterwards, for what were later the Volckamer Lustgärten (destr. 1819), was enthusiastically admired by Joachim von Sandrart and is known from an early Baroque copy (Frankfurt am Main, Mus. Ksthandwk). Again painted on flat canvas, it used a longitudinal perspective to depict with breathtaking foreshortening an open timber roof frame with carpenters and joiners at work and birds flying into the building from the clouds above; it was influenced by Hellenistic accounts of pictures by the ancient Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios and by the ceiling painting of 1519 by Garofalo in the Palazzo Trotti in Ferrara.

Pencz completed the prestigious commission from King Sigismund I of Poland to paint scenes from the Passion (1538) for the silver altarpiece in the Jagiellonian chapel in Wawel Cathedral, Kraków (in situ), unfinished after the death of the court painter Hans Dürer. It was Pencz’s only commission within a church, but the work, on the outside and wings, is disappointing: Albrecht Dürer’s small woodcut version of the Passion has been rather facilely translated into Renaissance forms. Flötner made the wooden models for the altarpiece’s silver reliefs of the Life of Mary, which were then executed by Melchior Baier.

In 1539–40 or 1541–2 Pencz seemingly made a second journey to Italy, going as far as Rome. There are many indications of this in surviving drawings and engraved prints from the period. A revisit to Mantua is indicated by the large engraving of the Capture of Carthage (b. 86) after Giulio Romano’s work of 1539. Drawings of the Last Judgement (St Petersburg, Hermitage), showing the event from a bird’s-eye view, and various engravings, including Judith and Holofernes (b. 24–5), are evidence that Pencz had studied and freely adapted Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (1541) and the spandrel pictures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. After his return to Nuremberg, there was a distinct change in his style of painting and drawing. The cool influence of Mannerism in Rome and Florence appeared particularly in his painted portraits, drawings and prints. The Portrait of a Young Man (1543; London, Hampton Court, Royal Col.) posed in front of a flat rectangular niche differs little from portraits by Bronzino and must have seemed very modern in Nuremberg. On the occasion of the Imperial Diet in Nuremberg in February 1543, Pencz painted a portrait of the Emperor’s chancellor Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (untraced) to recommend himself. From then on he was in demand as a portrait painter: sitters included the painter Erhard Svetzer and his Wife (Berlin, Gemäldegal.), the goldsmith Jakob Hofmann (Darmstadt, Hess. Landesmus.), the general Sebald Schirmer (Nuremberg, Ger. Nmus.), the mint assayer Jörg Herz (Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle) and the nobleman Sigismund von Baldinger (Kassel, Schloss Wilhelmshöhe). The first two examples date from 1544; the other three are from 1545 and have three-quarter-length poses, as do his final two portraits, in which the subjects face straight ahead: the Portrait of a Young Man with Gloves (1548; London, Hampton Court, Royal Col.) and the Portrait of a Sculptor Aged 27 (?George Vischer) (1549; Dublin, N.G.); in these works Pencz realized his full potential.

Pencz’s second Italian journey also affected his religious and mythological paintings, which mostly contain a few figures shown half-length in the Venetian style. The pictures of St Jerome (1544, Nuremberg, Ger. Nmus.; and 1545, Würzburg, Städt. Gal.) are still in his old style, derived from Jan Massys, but the version made in 1548 (Stuttgart, Staatsgal.) shows Vasari’s influence. One of Pencz’s richest Old Testament paintings is Lot and his Daughters (Kraków, N. Mus.). Another work in his later Florentine Mannerist style is Cimon and Pero (versions, 1538, Warsaw, N. Mus.; 1541, Switzerland, priv. col.; 1546, Stockholm, Nmus.), a subject he also drew.

Pencz had financial difficulties in the last years of his life and was reduced to offering a St Jerome picture to the council for 80 gulden. On 5 September 1550 the Prussian Duke Albert sent for him to come to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) as a court painter, at the instigation of the preacher Andreas Osiander, whose miniature portrait (Rome, Vatican, Bib. Apostolica) Pencz had painted in 1544. He set out but died en route. Pencz was an artist keenly aware of current trends; his work is erratic in quality. The use of Venetian motifs gave his painting from the outset a hard, cool effect.

Hans Georg Gmelin. "Pencz, Georg." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T066164 (accessed April 27, 2012).

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