STOSS, Veit
(b. ca. 1438, Horb, d. 1533, Nürnberg)

Tobias and the Angel

1516
Wood
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg

Beginning in Nuremberg, the artistic activity of Stoss, a citizen of that city, reached its peak in the gigantic Cracow altarpiece, then ended in the bitterness of legal disputes and professional misfortunes, again in Nuremberg, where he eventually came to be a quite isolated figure. His modernity appears in his creation of a new transparency in carving and in renunciation of polychromy, which he did not use in his later sculpture; but his outlook remained medieval, his impetuous temperament and his conception of gesture, entirely Gothic. The Tobias and the Angel was commissioned by an Italian patron.