Augustin Hirschvogel

Augustin Hirschvogel was a German artist, mathematician, and cartographer known primarily for his etchings. His thirty-five small landscape etchings, made between 1545 and 1549, assured him a place in the Danube School, a circle of artists in 16th-century Bavaria and Austria.

He began work in his birthplace, Nuremberg, where he was trained in glass painting by his father, Veit Hirschvogel the elder (1461-1525), who was the city's official stained glass painter. In 1525, Nuremberg accepted the Protestant Reformation, putting an end to lavish stained glass commissions. Veit the elder's workshop was then being run by Augustin's elder brother Veit; their father died the same year. The younger Hirschvogel had his own workshop by 1530, and soon formed a partnership with the potters Oswald Reinhart and Hanns Nickel.

Hirschvogel left in 1536 for Laibach (the German name for Ljubljana in present-day Slovenia), returning to Nuremberg in 1543. During this period he produced his earliest known work as a cartographer: maps of Turkish borders (1539) and of Austria (1542), the latter made for Ferdinand I. His commissions for armorials (for Franz Igelshofer and Christoph Khevenhüller) show that he had been in contact with the Imperial Court of Vienna by 1543.

With his move to Vienna in 1544, he rendered his services to the city, court, and citizenry. The city employed him in 1547 to develop designs for bastions, to create etched views of Vienna, and to produce a plan for the city following the Siege of Vienna. These views were the first ever rendered according to scale, and the circular city plan was the first ever produced by triangulation, a system of surveying that Hirschvogel developed. Vienna's council sent him to explain his work to Ferdinand I in Prague and to Charles V in Augsburg; Ferdinand granted him a pension of 100 florins for it.

He died in Vienna in 1553.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023