Author Description

This volume documents the collection of early German paintings in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., which includes outstanding works by such fifteenth- and sixteenth-century masters as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger as well as the only painting by Matthias Grünewald in the United States. Following an introduction to the collection, entries on the paintings are arranged alphabetically by artist, with a biography and bibliography for each; individual entries provide full and up-to-date scholarly and technical information. Questions of attribution, iconography, social and religious function, and historical context are also discussed, and where relevant, comparative examples, reconstructions of altarpieces, x-radiographs, and infrared reflectogram assemblies are supplied. This catalogue, the most complete record of the collection available, also contains the results of dendrochronological examinations of the panel paintings.