Biography

German glass painter, etcher, cartographer and mathematician, part of a family of artists. They were Nuremberg's leading stained-glass painters during the late 15th century and the 16th. Veit Hirschvogel the Elder, the son of a glazier named Heinz (d. 1485), established the family workshop and became the city's official glazier. His son Veit Hirschvogel the Younger (1485-1553) succeeded him as official glazier, being succeeded in his turn by his son Sebald Hirschvogel (1517-89), who remained in the post for 33 years. The brothers of Veit the Younger, Hans Hirschvogel (d. 1516) and Augustin Hirschvogel, also joined the glass-painting workshop, but Augustin, the most talented of the family, left it in 1525 to pursue a varied career outside Nuremberg, producing many etchings and also innovations in cartography. It is supposed that the Viennese goldsmith Veit Hirschvogel (1543-74) was Augustin's son.

Augustin Hirschvogel trained as a stained-glass painter in his father's workshop and remained there until his father's death in 1525. In that year Nuremberg accepted the Reformation, spelling the end of monumental stained-glass commissions. This must have profoundly reduced the production of the workshop, now run by his elder brother Veit, and may have forced Augustin to become more versatile. By 1530 he had established his own workshop but in 1531 formed a partnership with the Nuremberg potters Hanns Nickel (active c. 1530) and Oswald Reinhart (active c. 1530), presumably to share their kiln. This partnership, coupled with Johann Neudörfer's confusing comments about Hirschvogel in his Nachrichten (1547), formerly led to speculation about his having made a ceramic stove and pots in a classicizing Italianate style. It is more likely that the vessels made by Augustin and described in documents as in a Venetian style were glass, not earthenware.