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Lot Essay
The son of an equerry at the Bavarian ducal court in Munich, Hans
Rottenhammer the Elder was apprenticed circa 1582-1588 to the court painter Hans Donauer, before travelling to Italy, a requisite for ambitious northern artists of his generation, probably at the sponsorship of Duke William V. It was in Italy, where he was exposed to Roman antiquities and the art of the High Renaissance, as well as to the itinerant community of some of the most talented northern artists of the age, that Rottenhammer was to become arguably the outstanding German painter of his generation. He was documented in Rome 1591-1595, where he befriended Jan Breughel the Elder and the brothers Paul and Matthijs Bril; Jan Breughel and Paul Bril would become Rottenhammer's collaborators in a number of paintings on copper, for which the Antwerp masters would provide the landscape setting and Rottenhammer would fill in the figures. This practice continued even after the friends had parted, with half-finished copper panels being sent between studios as distant as Antwerp and Venice in the post. Much of Rottenhammer's Italian sojourn was spent in Venice, where he came under the powerful influence of Tintoretto, whose elongated, mannerist figural types find an echo in Rottenhammer's works; Paolo Veronese, whose vibrant colouring, if not its subtler balance, is matched by Rottenhammer; the Bassani and Palma Giovane. By circa 1598-1600 he came into contact with the titan of the next generation of German painting, Adam Elsheimer, fourteen years Rottenhammer's junior; Rottenhammer's influence, or at least a shared vocabulary of Venetian sources, is apparent in Elsheimer's coppers of that period and later. At the turn of the century, Rottenhammer's patrons included the Emperor Rudolph II, for whom Rottenhammer worked as an Italian agent as well as a court painter at large. In 1606 Rottenhammer returned to Germany, settling in Augsburg, and increasingly began to paint on a larger scale and on canvas.
The subject of a large-scale, reclining nude occurred in its most celebrated and enchanting examples in Venice, in the guise of Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie and Titian's Venus of Urbino (Florence, the Ufizzi), reverberating through the work of other artists in a legacy which could not have failed to touch Rottenhammer. He painted a Venus and Cupid in collaboration with Paolo Fiammingo (who provided the landscape) no later than 1596 (canvas, Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum), and several Venuses and Danaës on copper. A beautiful ink drawing (fig. 1) of Venus and Cupid in a landscape, proudly signed, inscribed as a work done in Venice and dated 1601 records Rottenhammer's continued fascination with the subject matter and its enticing, enigmatic potential. The present work belongs to the same year as a closely related Venus and Cupid on canvas, of smaller size, similarly signed and dated HR (linked) 1620 which (like Giorgione's Venus) is in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (fig. 2). The two pictures were confronted at the time of the landmark Rottenhammer exhibition in 2008-2009. At the time of the 2010 sale, the attribution to Rottenhammer was independently confirmed by Ugo Ruggeri and Hans Borggrefe, the latter also suggesting that the landscape background is the work of Paul Bril. We are grateful to drs. Luuk Pijl for confirming the attribution to Rottenhammer on the basis of first-hand knowledge of the picture.
A wry self-portrait in the guise of Bacchus appears in the artist's Feast of the Gods, a collaboration with Jan Brueghel the Elder (see Christie's, Paris, 21 June 2012, lot 15, estimate Euro 600,000-1,000,000).
Rottenhammer the Elder was apprenticed circa 1582-1588 to the court painter Hans Donauer, before travelling to Italy, a requisite for ambitious northern artists of his generation, probably at the sponsorship of Duke William V. It was in Italy, where he was exposed to Roman antiquities and the art of the High Renaissance, as well as to the itinerant community of some of the most talented northern artists of the age, that Rottenhammer was to become arguably the outstanding German painter of his generation. He was documented in Rome 1591-1595, where he befriended Jan Breughel the Elder and the brothers Paul and Matthijs Bril; Jan Breughel and Paul Bril would become Rottenhammer's collaborators in a number of paintings on copper, for which the Antwerp masters would provide the landscape setting and Rottenhammer would fill in the figures. This practice continued even after the friends had parted, with half-finished copper panels being sent between studios as distant as Antwerp and Venice in the post. Much of Rottenhammer's Italian sojourn was spent in Venice, where he came under the powerful influence of Tintoretto, whose elongated, mannerist figural types find an echo in Rottenhammer's works; Paolo Veronese, whose vibrant colouring, if not its subtler balance, is matched by Rottenhammer; the Bassani and Palma Giovane. By circa 1598-1600 he came into contact with the titan of the next generation of German painting, Adam Elsheimer, fourteen years Rottenhammer's junior; Rottenhammer's influence, or at least a shared vocabulary of Venetian sources, is apparent in Elsheimer's coppers of that period and later. At the turn of the century, Rottenhammer's patrons included the Emperor Rudolph II, for whom Rottenhammer worked as an Italian agent as well as a court painter at large. In 1606 Rottenhammer returned to Germany, settling in Augsburg, and increasingly began to paint on a larger scale and on canvas.
The subject of a large-scale, reclining nude occurred in its most celebrated and enchanting examples in Venice, in the guise of Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie and Titian's Venus of Urbino (Florence, the Ufizzi), reverberating through the work of other artists in a legacy which could not have failed to touch Rottenhammer. He painted a Venus and Cupid in collaboration with Paolo Fiammingo (who provided the landscape) no later than 1596 (canvas, Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum), and several Venuses and Danaës on copper. A beautiful ink drawing (fig. 1) of Venus and Cupid in a landscape, proudly signed, inscribed as a work done in Venice and dated 1601 records Rottenhammer's continued fascination with the subject matter and its enticing, enigmatic potential. The present work belongs to the same year as a closely related Venus and Cupid on canvas, of smaller size, similarly signed and dated HR (linked) 1620 which (like Giorgione's Venus) is in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (fig. 2). The two pictures were confronted at the time of the landmark Rottenhammer exhibition in 2008-2009. At the time of the 2010 sale, the attribution to Rottenhammer was independently confirmed by Ugo Ruggeri and Hans Borggrefe, the latter also suggesting that the landscape background is the work of Paul Bril. We are grateful to drs. Luuk Pijl for confirming the attribution to Rottenhammer on the basis of first-hand knowledge of the picture.
A wry self-portrait in the guise of Bacchus appears in the artist's Feast of the Gods, a collaboration with Jan Brueghel the Elder (see Christie's, Paris, 21 June 2012, lot 15, estimate Euro 600,000-1,000,000).