Hans Ardüser
Hans Ardüser (* 1557 in Davos ; † around 1617 in Thusis ) was a wandering painter , schoolmaster and chronicler from the Swiss canton of Graubünden .
Life
Hans Ardüser was born in 1557 as the son of Hans Ardüser the Elder. As a builder, his father was the builder of the Davos Town Hall and later became Landammann . From 1570 to 1573, the young Ardüser attended the Latin school in Chur, after which he began studying as a preacher in Zurich . Since he was evidently received in a very unfriendly manner, he immediately dropped out. After a short teaching activity in Maienfeld , he took lessons from the painters Moritz and Jörg Frosch in Feldkirch . Because of bad nutrition - when I had enough food to eat then 3 times a day, I stopped to grow more home - he left Feldkirch and worked for two summers as a journeyman for the wall and facade painter Franz Appenzäller in Chur. In 1580 he worked with Appenzäller at the house of the district judge Rageth von Capol in Flims (today Hotel Bellevue), where he painted the large hall. The paintings were painted over in 1886.
Ardüser later went into business for himself and continued his self-taught education as a teacher, poet and painter. In winter he worked as a schoolmaster in various places, in summer he walked through the canton of Graubünden and extolled his services as a painter. In 1583 he married Menga, the 19-year-old daughter of the governor Nütt Malet von Lantsch / Lenz , who often accompanied her husband as an assistant on his travels until her death in 1603. The couple lived in Thusis from 1583–1586, in Lantsch / Lenz from 1586–1598 and then again in Thusis. In 1584 he painted the facade of the Tscharner house in Rothenbrunnen . In 1597, as a Reformed man, he was able to decorate the Catholic Church of St. Maria Coronation in Tomils with wall paintings. In 1603 his wife died, which plunged him into deep grief and crisis. In 1605 he painted the house of Christoffel Gees in Scharans .
The circumstances of Ardüser's death are unknown. The autobiography breaks off in 1605; at that time he was teaching in Thusis. The chronicle led to the year 1614. The last work that the art historian Johann Rudolf Rahn Ardüser attributed was dated 1617.
style
Ardüser took the motifs for his paintings largely from chronicles, animal books and religious writings, from which he copied the illustrations and used them as templates. In his biography he mentions that he has read over 100 books .
His mostly brightly colored works testify to his inability to correctly reproduce human proportions. The rules of spatial perspective didn't seem very familiar to him either. But the carefree way in which Ardüser […] translates lavish ornaments, contemporary costumes, ancient allegories, biblical scenes, exotic animals into monumental form and sometimes additively juxtaposed them without any recognizable compositional principle, gives his work a freshness and forcefulness that is second to none.
Works
Hans Ardüser was just able to publish one of his writings: his description of a number of wonderful and highly annoyed people in old Freyer Rhetia was a directory with almost a hundred articles. As soon as the book was published, the Bundestag , the supreme authority of the Free State of the Three Leagues, ordered its destruction, presumably because of the nobility-critical tones in the introduction ( namely that he is noble / who lives there without perfect ); a contribution by Churer Adam Saluz.
Ardüser later wrote two chronicles covering the period from 1572 to 1614. Ardüser described political actions as well as the everyday life of the common people. In his autobiography , published in 1598, he describes the arduous life of an intellectual and artist of the 16th and 17th centuries around 1605. Bookkeeping takes up a lot of space in Ardüser's biography: he calculated his success from the ratio of income to distance covered. For the painting of a house Ardüser asked between 2 and 15 guilders.
Of the over one hundred works in 45 villages that he himself mentions, just under twenty have survived; five of them are signed. With the exception of the altar of the village church in Vella, painted in 1601, there are wall paintings with naive depictions with biblical and allegorical representations on facades and in the interiors of peasant and aristocratic private houses as well as in churches of both denominations. The fact that the Protestant Ardüser also painted in Catholic churches and taught in Catholic villages gives an indication of the relaxed relationship between the denominations in the Three Leagues of that time.
Paintings by Ardüser have been preserved at the Tscharner house in Rothenbrunnen (1584), the Parpan castle (1588–1591), the Tumegl / Tomils Catholic church (1597), the Gees house in Scharans (1605), and the Capol house in Andeer (1614), in Rhäzüns Castle , on residential houses in Alvaschein , Lantsch / Lenz and Filisur , on churches or chapels in Vella , Cumbel , Degen and Siat .
literature
- Walter Müller: The traveling painter Hans Ardüser. Surselva Tourism
- Ludmila Seifert, Leza Dosch: Art guide through Graubünden. Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich 2008, pp. 130/131.
- Alfred Wyss: Ardüser, Hans (the younger). In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- Paul Zinsli: The painter-poet Hans Ardüser. A popular dual talent at the turn of the 16th century . Terra Grischuna, Chur 1986.
- In the footsteps of Hans Ardüser . Terra Grischuna, issue 5, Chur 2012
Individual evidence
- ↑ Yaël Debelle: A painter between mountain and valley. The Graubünden artist Hans Ardüser created fascinating wall paintings 450 years ago. In: Observer , No. 13, Zurich, June 24, 2016, pp. 36–40.
- ↑ Ludmila Seifert, Leza Dosch: Art guide through Graubünden. Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich 2008, p. 131.
- ↑ Handbook of Graubünden History. Volume 4: Sources and Materials. Chur 2005, p. 236.
Web links
- Publications by and about Hans Ardüser in the Helveticat catalog of the Swiss National Library
- Leza Dosch: Ardüser, Hans. In: Sikart
- Hans Ardüser at Graubünden culture
- Walter Müller: series of publications with photographs about Hans Ardüser and his works
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ardüser, Hans |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Graubünden hiking painter, teacher and chronicler |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1557 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Davos |
| DATE OF DEATH | around 1617 |
| Place of death | unsure: Thusis |