Daniel Hopfer: Gib Frid - three old women beating a devil on the ground. Before the Funck number.

Daniel Hopfer (circa 1470, Kaufbeuren – 1536, Augsburg) was a German artist who is widely believed to have been the first to use etching in printmaking, at the end of the fifteenth century. He also worked in woodcut. Events May 15 - Charles VIII of Sweden who had served three terms as King of Sweden dies. ... Kaufbeuren is an independent city in the Regierungsbezirk of Schwaben, southern Bavaria. ... Year 1536 was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. ... Augsburg is a city in south-central Germany. ... Etching is an intaglio method of printmaking in which the image is incised into the surface of a metal plate using an acid. ... Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. ... Four horsemen of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer. ...

Life

The son of Bartholomäus Hopfer, a painter, and his wife Anna Sendlerin, Daniel moved to Augsburg early in his life, and acquired citizenship there in 1493.

In 1497 he married Justina Grimm, sister of the Augsburg publisher, physician and druggist Sigismund Grimm. The couple had three sons, Jörg, Hieronymus and Lambert, the last two of who carried on their father's profession of etching, Hieronymus in Nuremberg and Lambert in Augsburg. The two sons of Jörg, Georg and Daniel (junior), also became distinguished etchers, patronised by no less than the Emperor Maximilian II, whose successor, Rudolf II, raised Georg to the nobility. Nuremberg (German: Nürnberg, German-Franconian dialect: Närnberch) is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. ... Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II Maximilian II of the Habsburg dynasty was born in 1527 at Vienna and died in 1576 in Regensburg. ... Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II Rudolf II Habsburg was an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, king of Bohemia, and king of Hungary. ... Nobility is a traditional hereditary status (see hereditary titles) that exists today in many countries (mainly present or former monarchies). ...

Daniel was trained as an etcher of armour. There are only two proven examples of his own work on armour: a shield from 1536 now in the Real Armeria of Madrid and a sword in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum of Nuremberg. An Augsburg horse armour in the German Historical Museum, Berlin, dating to between 1512 and 1515, is decorated with motifs from Hopfer's etchings and woodcuts, but this is no evidence that Hopfer himself worked on it. For other uses, see Armour (disambiguation). ... Germanisches Nationalmuseum, founded in Nuremberg, Germany in 1852, houses a significant collection of items relating to German culture and art extending from prehistoric times through to the present day. ... Facade of the Zeughaus, the Museums main building The Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM), German Historical Museum, was founded in 1987 on the occasion of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin. ... Berlin is the capital city and one of the sixteen states of the Federal Republic of Germany. ... Four horsemen of the Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer. ...

The etching of metals with acid was known in Europe from at least 1400, but the elaborate decoration of armour, in Germany anyway, was an art probably imported from Italy around the end of the 15th century – little earlier than the birth of etching as a printmaking technique. Although the first extant dated etchings are the three by Albrecht Dürer of 1515, and despite the fact that none of his works are dated, stylistic evidence suggests that Daniel Hopfer was using this technology as early as 1500. Albrecht Dürer (pronounced /al. ... 1515 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Daniel Hopfer: Mary with Jesus, an example of the "Hopfer style". Note the Funck number lower left: "133".

The Hopfers prospered in Augsburg, and by 1505 Daniel owned a house in the city centre. He sat on the committee of the Augsburg guild of smiths, which at this time included painters and etchers, probably because these crafts were uniquely connected in the town, one of Europe's principal manufacturing places of arms and armour.

Daniel died in Augsburg in 1536. His achievement was widely recognized during his time, and in 1590 he was posthumously named as the inventor of the art of etching in the imperial patent of nobility bestowed upon his grandson Georg.

Works

Daniel Hopfer's early etchings were done in line-work, but he and his sons soon developed more sophisticated techniques, referred to by armour historians as the Hopfer style. Applied to prints, this produced silhouetted designs on a black ground, doubtless by multiple bitings of the plates. The technically-demanding procedure seems to have been both delicate and labour-intensive, and no other artists are known to have used this exact method. Their plates were all iron, rather than the copper that the Italians later introduced.

Hieronymus Hopfer: Three ornate vessels, probably a model for goldsmiths. With the Funck number, lower right: "68".

None of the Hopfer family was a trained artist, or a natural draughtsman: their designs show a certain naïveté that never gained an artistic following. But the extraordinary diversity of the Hopfers' works have made them collectors' items. From religious prints to designs for goldsmiths, secular subjects such as peasants, military figures (especially Landsknechts), portraits of contemporary worthies, mytholological and folkloric themes, the sheer range of the Hopfers' productions are both remarkable and unique, designed to appeal to a clientele far wider than the metalsmiths who bought his patterns to create their wares. However, the Hopfer family did not hesitate to plagiarize the work of their contemporaries: of Daniel's 230 known prints, 14 are copies of other masters, mainly Mantegna, whilst only a minority of Hieronymus' plates are his original work - no less than 21 are copies of Durer's works, and around 30 others are copies from Jacopo de' Barbari, Raimondi and Altdorfer among others. The term Old Master Print is used to describe works of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition (European or New World). ... Categories: Stub | Jewellery | Smiths ... In a detail of Brueghels Land of Cockaigne (1567) a soft-boiled egg has little feet to rush to the luxuriating peasant who catches drops of honey on his tongue, while roast pigs roam wild: in fact, hunger and harsh winters were realities for the average European in the... Period illustration of Landsknecht soldiers. ... Albrecht Dürer (pronounced /al. ... Jacopo de Barbari, sometimes known or referred to as: deBarbari, de Barberi, de Barbari, Barbaro, Barberino, Barbarigo or Barberigo etc. ... Marcantonio Raimondi (c. ...

In the next century, a distant relative of the Hopfers, David Funck (1642-1705), a bookseller of Nuremberg, acquired 230 of the Hopfers' iron plates, and reprinted these under the title Operae Hopferianae, adding a somewhat crudely scratched number, known as the Funck number, to each one, thus creating a second state of the hitherto unretouched plates. The Three Crosses, etching by Rembrandt. ...

A further print run of 92 plates was made in 1802 by the publishers C.W. Silberberg of Frankfurt under the title Opera Hopferiana. The quality of the prints is a tribute to the care with which the Hopfer family maintained these rust-prone plates, many of which are in the Berlin print cabinet today. The Print Room is an office in the Royal Collection Department of the Royal Household of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom. ...

References

• Daniel Hopfer von Kaufbeuren, Meister zu Augsburg 1493-1536. Ed. Eyssen: Dissertation, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg, 1904
• Hollstein's German Engravings Etchings and Woodcuts 1400-1700. Vol. XV. A.L. Van Gendt B.V., Blaricum, 1986.
• The Renaissance Print 1470-1550. David Landau and Peter Parchall. Yale University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-300-06883-2

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