In this volume, the work of two printmakers is presented, Philipp Uffenbach and Heinrich Ulrich the Elder.
Uffenbach’s prints are only a minor part of his artistic output as he was a trained as a painter and, judging from the projects he was involved in, must have been something of an art manager. The prints are highly original in design and in some cases in iconography too.
Heinrich Ulrich is here called the elder because of the two prints by a later printmaker of the same name, possibly his son, that will appear in the following volume. While collecting Ulrich’s work, it has grown to 528 Hollstein numbers, while Nagler knew only 67 of his prints. It is thanks to the diligence of the compiler that a major printmaker of his time in Nuremberg now becomes visible. The most interesting aspects of his output are, for one, the surprisingly wide scope of his subject matter. After his own designs and that of others he produced broadsheets, ornament prints, devotional series, stately portraits, book illustration and a lot more. Furthermore it turns out that many of Ulrich’s finest sheets are copies after prints originally produced in the Netherlands. Ulrich’s greatest champions seem to be Maerten de Vos and Hendrick Goltzius. In some cases, the time-span between the editions of the originals and the copies must have been only a few years. This on the one hand points to the quick proliferation of the Dutch and Flemish inventions and on the other hand to the great demand in a place as remote from the Low Countries as Nuremberg. The demand was satisfied by Ulrich, who not only made outright copies but also used motifs of his models in more creative ways. We certainly have not traced all the models as our task was the presentation of Ulrich’s output, not its art historical evaluation.
Published in 2022
Compiler: Dieter Beaujean
Editor: Gero Seelig
ISBN: 978-94-91539-89-3
282 pp.
