It may seem almost incredible that Georg Pencz has never previously been the subject of a substantial monograph, but it goes to show that there are still some artists of real substance who manage to slip through the cracks. Though he is not exactly a household name, Pencz (around 1500-50) was the most important artist active in Nuremberg after the death of Dürer in 1528, and like his great precursor worked as a printmaker as well as a painter with a notable gift for portraiture. Indeed, the best of his portraits, which mainly depict well-fed middle-aged men, are compelling likenesses of personalities whom it is not too fanciful to imagine as having stepped straight out of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, whose hero, the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs (1494-1576), was Pencz’s fellow townsman and almost exact contemporary.
Katrin Dyballa’s Georg Pencz follows on from a dissertation on the artist completed in 2010. Perhaps in consequence, it comprises a series of three lengthy chapters on crucial if diverse themes, including the issue of whether he visited Italy once, twice or not at all. Only after this does Dyballa engage with Pencz’s major works in painting in a final chapter, which is followed by comprehensive catalogues of both his paintings and his drawings. Since it is also lavishly illustrated with numerous excellent colour reproductions, Dyballa’s study of Pencz undeniably fills a gap—but alas it does also leave one.
Dyballa engages directly and exhaustively with the question of Pencz’s authorship of the prints of the Master IB, but for all but the most committed adherents, for or against, it does not really matter which way she inclines (in favour of IB being Pencz, as it happens). But what is missing is a fully illustrated catalogue of the prints. Many—but not all—of them are reproduced along the way, but the final result is a mighty tome of 480 pages, which nevertheless fails to be a complete catalogue of the artist’s oeuvre. What is more, and given all the other merits of this production, there is hardly likely to be another Pencz monograph before we are all long dead and buried.
The question of whether Pencz followed in Dürer’s footsteps over the Alps is an intriguing one, and Dyballa is surely right to point out that almost none of the undoubted evidences of knowledge of Italian works of arts necessitates such a journey. To cite an example where the connection has thus far gone unobserved, Pencz’s drawing Allegory of Justice of 1533 in the J. Paul Getty Museum is inspired by an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi of Bacchus in a Niche after the antique, but that does not prove Pencz went to Rome, since one of the principal reasons prints were made was precisely to disseminate visual ideas as widely as possible. Conversely, the uncanny closeness of the daughter in profile in Pencz’s Lot and his Daughters (1544) in Krakow’s Wawel Castle to Carpaccio’s The Virgin Reading (around 1505) in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., did make me wonder if he might not have made it to Venice after all.
• David Ekserdjian is the professor of art history at the University of Leicester
Georg Pencz
Katrin Dyballa
Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 480pp, €99 (hb). In German only