Mountainous Landscape, in the Middle a River and a Citadel

Hanns Lautensack was the youngest of the small group of landscape etchers collectively known as the Danube School, which included Albrecht Altdorfer (circa 1480-1538), Wolf Huber (circa 1485-1553) and Augustin Hirschvogel (1503-1553; see previous lot), who were the first printmakers to depict pure landscapes, and chose etching as their preferred technique. Lautensack was born in the Franconian city of Bamberg, the son of a painter, but moved to Nuremberg as a child. When Dürer died in Nuremberg in1528, he would have been only about eight years old. For the final years of his life he lived in Vienna, where he presumably worked for Emperor Ferdinand I.
Being at least a generation younger than the other German etchers of the early 16th century presumably meant that the etching method had been evolved and perfected by the time Lautensack began using it. Although not the most expressive, he was technically the most accomplished of the landscape etchers, and his prints display an intricacy, wealth of detail and subtlety of line not achieved by his predecessors. The Mountainous Landscape, in the Middle a River and a Citadel is closely related to another landscape by the artist, A Landscape with a Castle on a Rock on the left top right, the Sun radiating in the Sky (Hollstein 24) sold at Christie's in December 2021. It is very similar not just in composition, format and style, but was printed on paper with the same watermark, is of similar printing quality, with the same filing marks and tone along the lower sheet edge, and even comes from the same princely collection. It was sold for £20,000 (incl. premium), the highest price for a print by the artist at auction.
Hollstein records a total of eight impressions of the present plate in public collections.