Veit Stoss

Biography

In December 1503 a Nuremberg court sentenced Veit Stoss to be branded: both his cheeks were pierced with a red-hot iron. The sculptor was about fifty-five. Behind him lay the Kraków altar, which is called the largest Gothic carved altarpiece in the world.

His year of birth is not known for certain. 1447 is the traditional date, but a range of roughly 1445 to 1450 is more likely. The place most often given is Horb am Neckar, though there is a hypothesis that he was born in Horben near Aarau in Switzerland, where his brother was certainly born. Where he trained is unknown. His work shows the influence of Upper Rhine masters, above all Nikolaus Gerhaert, as well as the Ulm school and Netherlandish art; study under Gerhaert himself remains a hypothesis. Reliable information begins in 1473, when he is in Nuremberg and marries Barbara Hertz. Their eldest son, Andreas, was born there before 1477.

In 1477 Stoss left for Kraków. He received the commission for the high altar of St Mary’s Church, the parish church of the city’s German community, from that community. A large workshop was put together for the work: joiners, carvers, painters, gilders. The altar was finished in 1489. It stands about 13 metres high and about 11 wide, and the figures in the central section reach 2.8 metres. At the same time Stoss made the tomb of King Casimir IV Jagiellon in red marble in Wawel Cathedral (1492) and the slab for Archbishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki in Gniezno. In 1481 he bought a house in the old town between the Main Square and Wawel, and in 1484 he was granted a rare privilege: exemption from taxes.

In 1496 Stoss returned to Nuremberg with his wife and children. His wife died in July of that year; a year later he married Christine Reinolt. He regained his citizenship and again worked mostly in lime wood. From this period survives the relief known as the Volckamer Memorial Foundation in St Sebald’s Church (1499). In the same year he bought a large house in the centre of the city. An altar for the church at Schwaz in Tyrol (1500–1503) has not survived.

What follows is a story in which the sculptor looks worse than he does in the workshop. On the recommendation of an acquaintance, the merchant Jakob Baner, he invested 1,265 gulden in the venture of the cloth merchant Hans Starzedel; the venture collapsed. Stoss sued Baner and, when Baner’s written guarantee was demanded in evidence, produced a forgery of the stolen document. He was exposed. He escaped the death penalty, it is thought thanks to his fame, but was branded in December 1503 and forbidden to leave the city without the council’s permission. In 1504 he nevertheless fled to Münnerstadt, to his son-in-law Jörg Trummer. There he painted and gilded the altarpiece by Tilman Riemenschneider that had been left unpainted ten years earlier, and painted four panels of the saints Kilian, Colonatus and Totnan, the only paintings known to be his. In 1505 he returned of his own accord and was arrested again. A pardon from the future emperor Maximilian I was not accepted by the Nuremberg council, which treated it as interference in its affairs. In 1506 he was entered in a register as a troublesome citizen, “erring and clamorous”.

Commissions did not stop, however. In 1500–1505 he engraved on copper; of thirty-five sheets mentioned, ten survive, made under the influence of Martin Schongauer. The merchant Raffaele Torrigiani ordered from him the group “Tobias and the Angel” (1516) and a statue of St Roch for the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence. Vasari praised it and called it “a miracle in wood”, though he attributed it to the wrong artist. In 1517–1518, for Anton Tucher, he carved for St Lawrence’s Church the “Angelic Salutation”: figures of Mary and the Archangel Gabriel in a wreath of roses with seven medallions, hung beneath the vault of the choir. In 1514 the council had allowed him to open a foundry in order to cast the model of a statue for the tomb of Maximilian I in Innsbruck; the bronze venture seems to have met with little success.

His last commission came in 1520 from his son Andreas, prior of the Carmelite monastery in Nuremberg: the high altar of the monastery church. The work went on until 1523, and by design the wood was to carry no paint. After the Reformation the monastery was closed, the final payments were never made, and the altar ended up in Bamberg. Since 1937 its parts have been shown in Bamberg Cathedral.

The Kraków altar went through one more story. Around 1941, on the order of Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland, it was dismantled and taken to Germany. In 1945 it was found in Bavaria, in the basement of the heavily bombed Nuremberg Castle. After restoration in Poland it was returned to the church ten years later. I have found nothing more precise about how exactly it came to be in that basement.

Stoss died in 1533, on the traditional date of 20 September, and is believed to have died wealthy. He was buried in St Johannis cemetery in Nuremberg. His sons carried on the craft: Stanisław worked as a carver in Kraków, Johann, Martin and Veit the Younger settled in Transylvania, and a grandson, Philipp, helped in the Nuremberg workshop.