Hans Leonard Schaufelein Nuremberg 1480 - 1538/40 Nördlingen

Professor Cantacuzino, Bucharest
Bears old collector's numbering in red ink, upper right of old mount: N.1674.

F. Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, Berlin 1936, vol. I, p. 144, cat. no. 206, reproduced, as Albrecht Dürer;
W.L. Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, New York 1974, vol. VI, pp. 2960-2961, cat. no. XW.206, as workshop of Dürer;
J. Rowlands, The Age of Dürer and Holbein: German Drawings 1400-1550, London 1988, exhibition catalogue, pp. 70-72, under no. 45, as Dürer and workshop;
J. Rowlands, Drawings by German Artists, London 1993, vol. I, pp. 66-67, under cat. no. 142, as Dürer and workshop;
B. Butts, L. Hendrix, et al., Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles 2000, under no. 14, reproduced p. 100, fig. 14, as Albrecht Dürer.

This drawing is the design for a painted glass panel, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Fig. 1), one of a series of twelve panels illustrating the life of St. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-547), which seem to have been made for the Tetzel family chapel in the monastery of St. Aegidius in Nuremberg, and were probably commissioned in honour of Freidrich Tezel the Younger’s marriage to Ursula Fürer, in 1496.  In any case, it seems highly likely that the panels were at least commissioned, if not actually made, before the death in 1504 of Johannes Rotenecker (Radenecker), who had been abbot of St. Aegidius from 1477 and was particularly interested in the history of the Benedictine Order.  Determining the precise location for which they were made, and when, is, however, complicated by the fact that the church was destroyed by fire in 1696.  Only three of these glass panels are known to have survived into the 20^th century (and one of those was lost from the Schlossmuseum, Gotha, in 1945), but we still have the designs for eleven of the twelve compositions.  For the most complete recent discussion of the cycle, see Butts/Hendrix, op. cit., pp. 94-102, and for a full list of the extensive earlier literature, see Strauss, loc. cit.

Despite the fact that one of the drawings for the series, the Saint Benedict Teaching, in Nuremberg (Winkler, op. cit., no. 202), bears an inscription in Dürer’s own hand on the verso, the attribution of the drawings in the St. Benedict cycle, and the extent and nature of Dürer’s own involvement in the project, has been much debated.  Some have suggested that the commission was given to Dürer’s former teacher, Wolgemut, and that Dürer worked on the cycle during the period before he set up his own independent workshop, while others date the whole project slightly later and consider that Dürer was the controlling, and possibly delegating, master.  Friedrich Winckler argued that all but two of the drawings were by Dürer and the other two were anonymous copies of lost designs, also by Dürer.  Although the drawings vary in their degree of finish – four are rather more elaborate than the present example and are worked up with touches of watercolour – the essential principle that the designs were the work of one artist has been generally accepted.  Winckler’s view that this artist was Dürer has been followed by a number of leading scholars, but others have proposed attributions to Hans von Kulmbach, Hans Schäufelein, or an unidentified master in the Dürer workshop, sometimes dubbed the “St. Benedict Master”.  In the most recent publication on the drawings (see Butts/Hendrix, loc. cit.), the attribution to Dürer himself is vigorously retained, but Fritz Koreny has made a very persuasive argument, soon to be published, that although the handling and physiognomy of the figures are closely comparable with Dürer’s woodcut style of the late 1490s, the parallels with his drawing style of those years are not convincing.  Koreny believes that the specific details of facial features and penmanship seen here, together with the strong link with Dürer’s early woodcut style, argue for an attribution to the young Hans Schäufelein, who worked in Dürer’s studio between 1503 and 1507, and argues that these drawings should be considered early works by Schäufelein.

When the present drawing is compared with the final glass panel, at least two significant compositional differences are evident.   The first is that the drawing shows two alternative positions for the Saint’s left hand:  the completed pen drawing shows the hand lowered, but it is also lightly drawn in chalk in a different, raised position, which is how it ultimately appears in the glass panel.  The arms in the lower right corner have also been changed.  In the drawing, the coat of arms combines the crests of Jobst Tetzel’s first and second wives, Agnes Rummel and Margareta Pessler, but in the glass this has been replaced by the crest of the Tetzel family, surrounded by the collar of the Chivalric Order of the Jug.  Both versions in any case appear to honour Jobst Tezel (d. 1474), who had been the guardian of the church where the Tezel family chapel was located, and the changes in the arms must reflect ideas of how it was most appropriate to pay respect to this eminent family member.  

Whether this drawing and the others in the group are by Dürer himself or were executed by the young Schäufelein when he was working in the Dürer workshop (and we find Koreny’s arguments for the latter theory persuasive), the drawing remains of the greatest significance.  It is the only design still in private hands for the celebrated series of glass panels illustrating the life of St. Benedict, one of the most important such cycles to have been commissioned and executed in Nuremberg at around the time that Dürer was establishing himself as an independent master in that city.