born c. 1484, Schwabisch Gmünd, Württemberg [Germany]
died 1545, Imperial Free City of Strasbourg [now Strasbourg, Fr.]
painter and graphic artist, one of the most outstanding figures in northern Renaissance art. He served as an assistant to Albrecht Durer, whose influence is apparent in his early works, although the demonic energy of his later style is closer to that of Matthias Grunewald.
German painter, printmaker, draughtsman and stained-glass designer. Such contemporaries as Jean Pelerin (De artificiali perspectiva, 1521) and the Alsatian humanist Beatus Rhenanus in 1526 counted him among the greatest artists of his time. In the opinion of specialists today, Baldung’s work places him only half a step behind Grünewald, Durer and Hans Holbein the younger. A prodigious and imaginative artist of great originality, versatility and passion, Baldung was fascinated with witchcraft and superstition and possessed a desire for novelty of subjects and interpretation that sometimes borders on the eccentric. The new themes he introduced include the supernatural and the erotic. He was the first to show the erotic nature of the Fall in his chiaroscuro woodcut of Adam and Eve (1511; Hollstein, no. 3) and illustrated the successive stages of mating behaviour of horses in his woodcut series of Wild Horses in the forest (1534; Hollstein, nos 238–40); and he is remembered especially for his images of witches. Durer influenced him only in an early stage but not lastingly. Baldung had a very different sensibility and lacked Durer’s sense of decorum. Grunewald, whose monumental Isenheim Altarpiece (Colmar, Mus. Unterlinden) was created near by during the years Baldung worked in Freiburg im Breisgau, influenced him only temporarily.
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