Lot 75: A bishop saint holding a crozier and a bible

Attributed to Hans Springinklee ( circa 1495-1540 Nuremberg) A bishop saint holding a crozier and a bible with date '1515' pen and brown ink 7½ x 3¾ in. (190 x 94 mm.)

NORTHERN SCHOOLS


Comparable to the figure of Saint Sebald, attributed by Campbell Dodgson to Springinklee, on the verso of the title page to Die hystori des lebens ... Sant Sebalds, published by Hieronymus Hölzel in Nuremberg in 1514 (Bartsch VII, 19 (179); C. Dodgson, Catalogue of Early German and Flemish Woodcuts ... in the British Museum, London, 1903 [reprinted 1980], I, p. 381, no. 3).

Springinklee is chiefly remembered as a pupil and assistant of Albrecht Dürer, in whose house in Nuremberg he lived. The latter's influence is clearly seen in early work such as the present drawing, which recalls Dürer's woodcut The Patron Saints of Austria (Bartsch 116). This appeared with six saints in circa 1515, and with a further two bishop saints, sometimes attributed to Springinklee, added in 1517. Two signed drawings by Springinklee are known, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, dated 1514, in the British Museum (J. Rowlands, Drawings by German Artists ... in the British Museum, London, 1993, no. 468) and Christ as the Man of Sorrows in the Kupferstichkabinett, Basel (P. Strieder et al., Meister um Albrecht Dürer, exhib. cat., Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1961, pl. 67.