LEINBERGER, Hans
(mentioned 1510-1530 in Landshut)

Virgin and Child

1511-14
Polychrome limewood
Parish church, Moosburg (Bavaria)

The picture shows the central figure in the altarpiece on the high altar.

Over and above the controversies concerning the notion of a "Danube school" in painting, there is general agreement on a close community in spirit and forms between the works of the main representatives of the Danubian style and the sculptures produced concurrently in the same Austro-Bavarian region. The genesis of the new plastic style occurred within the Late Gothic tradition, taking the old methods a step further while developing new rhetoric in perfect osmosis with the contemporary graphic and pictorial language, as shown by the sculptures of Hans Leinberger. If, for example, the tumultuous draperies clothing his figures and soaring far out from the body in arbitrary folds spring from the previous Gothic conception, their treatment avoid angles and breaks in favour of floating undulations at the edges and large inflated folds, tracing long diagonals interrupted here and there by little stiff crinkles on the surface of the fabric: a treatment closely corresponding to the manner of Albrecht Altdorfer. Leinberger appears to have transformed Altdorfer's graphic inventions into volumes. At the very least he exploited plastically the new formal possibilities offered by the Danubian style, as also initiated by other artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder and Jörg Breu.




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