The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Imperial Augsburg: Renaissance Prints and Drawings, 1475–1540

About the Show

The city of Augsburg in southern Germany enjoyed a cultural golden age in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Its artists created an astonishing range of work for the Habsburg court and the city’s thriving market—from paintings, drawings, prints, and illustrated books, to sculpture and metalwork, including armor. Open to new ideas, this fertile community introduced innovations in the graphic arts such as color printing and etching. Developing in about 1475, just as the influence of the Italian Renaissance reached the city, this flourishing of the arts continued through the social, political, and religious upheavals of the Reformation in the 1520s and 1530s. 

Like Albrecht Dürer’s Nuremberg, the city of Augsburg was vital to the flowering of the Renaissance in Germany. The exhibition features prints, drawings, illustrated books, medals, and armor from Augsburg and addresses the themes of Christian devotion and the Reformation, moral conduct and everyday life, and art made for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.

The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It is generously supported at Vassar by the Evelyn Metzger Exhibition Fund.