Hans Seyfer

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Copy of the crucifixion group by Hans Seyffer at the Leonhardskirche in Stuttgart
Sculptures in the shrine of the altar of the Kilian's Church Heilbronn

Hans Seyfer , also known as Hans Seyffer , Hans Syfer and Master Hans von Heilbronn (* around 1460 in Sinsheim ; † 1509 in Heilbronn ), was a German stone sculptor and wood carver .

Life

Little is known of his life. The earliest works attributed to Seyfer show connections to Upper Swabian and Alsatian art, so that it was there that he probably received his artistic stamping. He may have received his training from Conrat Sifer von Sinsheim, who could also have been related to Hans Seyfer. Another teacher of Seyfers could have been Hans Bilger from Worms . Furthermore, perhaps on a journeyman's hike, he could have been exposed to Swabian-Ulmerian influences and, finally, a biographical relationship to Esslingen am Neckar must be assumed, since he initially named two people as guarantors for his last major assignment, the Speyer Mount of Olives who lived in this city, and only later resorted to two Heidelberg residents, one of whom, Lorenz Lechler , in turn had ties to Esslingen.

Presumably Hans Seyfer was among the artists who created the artistic decoration of the Worms cathedral cloister from 1484 , where it could also have been shaped by master Hans von Worms. In 1498 Seyfer created the main altar of Heilbronn's Kilianskirche , in 1501 the crucifixion group of Stuttgart's Leonhardskirche .

In 1502 Hans Seyfer received the citizenship of Heilbronn, before he was probably resident in Heidelberg. His civil rights were associated with various privileges that indicate that the city held the artist in high regard. In 1505 he created a stone crucifix that was set up in front of the Sülmer Tor in Heilbronn, of which, however, only the head of the crucified has survived today. In 1506 Seyfer was commissioned by the St. Anna Brotherhood in Heilbronn's Kilian Church for a carved Anna panel. This order is the only documentary evidence that he was actually a wood carver. At around the same time he was also commissioned to create a group of mounts of olives in the cloister of Speyer Cathedral , the main characters of which were probably created by 1508. He only partially completed the Mount of Olives, as he died in 1509 before his planned move to Speyer and his brother Lenhart S (e) yfer is named in the documents as the foreman of the Mount of Olives, which was completed in 1511.

Seyfer is also called Syfer or just Master Hans in the documents . Apparently appreciated at times during his lifetime, he was later forgotten; one of his main works, the high altar retable of Kilian's Church in Heilbronn, was ascribed to Tilman Riemenschneider for a long time . It was not until 1909 that the person Hans Seyfer was rediscovered by the Heilbronn archivist Moriz von Rauch , which led to Seyfer being assigned numerous works of art that were later revoked.

Works

One of Seyfer's main works is the high altar retable in Heilbronn's Kilian Church, which was completed in 1498. The wood-sighted work, the figures of which are each cut from one piece, evidently showed great resemblance to the high altar retable of the Ulm Minster, about 20 years older . Only the plan drawings of this have survived, which show one major difference to Seyfer's Heilbronn work: the canopy zone above the figures in the shrine was not yet equipped with figure niches in the Ulm reredos. The Heilbronn retable, for its part, can be seen as a model for the front altar of the Strasbourg cathedral , which was completed in 1501. The Besigheim Altarpiece, completed around 1520, is also designed according to the Heilbronn model. Like the Heilbronn reredos, the work in Ulm was not painted in color, at least in the first decades of its existence. Seyfer's carvings in Kilian's Church were painted over with white lead and varnish in 1784 , and Christ's loincloth and crown of thorns were gilded. These changes were reversed in the 1960s.

While the Heilbronner Altar survived the air raids during the Second World War, partly through relocation, and partly reconstructed true to the original, the Kreuzberg of the Leonhardskirchhof in Stuttgart has undergone changes. To protect them from the weather, the figures were moved from the Leonhard Cemetery to the Hospital Church in 1889 , where they stand on modern plinths, which is not in the spirit of the composition from 1501. In the original place of the crucifixion group is a copy today. This work was donated by the married couple Jakob Walther, called Kühorn, mayor and Vogstamtverweser in Stuttgart, and Klara, geb. Skinny. This couple planned to have their tomb erected in the Leonhardskirche in Stuttgart, and to this end donated the crucifixion group commissioned by Hans Seyfer, which was to be placed as a cemetery cross on the church choir. It had a hexagonal architectural base on which an artificial rock mound rested, on which the year of completion, 1501, could be read. Furthermore, the coat of arms of the donor couple was attached to this hill. Skulls, bones and animals were draped on the hill, and above it rose the cross of Christ, which, although made of stone, looked deceptively real as wood. The figure of Christ hung on this cross with extremely stretched limbs and loincloths waving in the wind. At her feet, Mary Magdalene kneeled as a figure from her back, to the right and left of the cross the Mother of God and the disciple John were to be seen, the trilingual titulus was attached to the head of Christ. This expressive group was particularly valued in the 19th century; Thomas Dibdin, for example, who actually found Stuttgart terribly disappointing for lovers of art and antiquity, emphasized it in his travel description published in 1821 and even had his description of the group provided with an illustration. Halbauer emphasizes that the group, for example in comparison to Hans Backoffen's creations , extends much more strongly into the space through the back figure and other elements and thus achieves a correspondingly high impact.

At most, a work that Albrecht Dinkelsbühl commissioned from Seyfer in 1505 has survived, the crucifix mentioned above, which was to be set up in front of the Sülmertor on Frauenweg by the Barbara Chapel. This crucifix was completed a few months after the order was placed and was probably destroyed during the Thirty Years' War . In 1905, during renovation work in the Heilbronn house at Klostergasse 4, a stone head of Christ was found, which apparently belonged to a crucifix. When this fragment was declared by Paul Ferdinand Schmidt and Moriz von Rauch as the work of Hans Seyfer in 1909 , no connection to the lost crucifix was made. However, due to the size of the head, it is now believed to exist.

Mount of Olives at Speyer Cathedral

The small carved retable ordered from Seyfer by the Heilbronn St. Anna Brotherhood in 1506, which was to be displayed in Kilian's Church, has not survived. In that year Seyfer was also awarded the contract for the Mount of Olives to be built in the Speyr cathedral cloister, for which he had applied in 1505 with a plan drawing. At the same time as the work on this group, the Mount of Olives was erected on the choir of the Regiswindis Church in Lauffen , which was completed in 1507 and, although damaged, has been preserved. At the end of 1508, Seyfer intended to live on site for the construction of the Speyer Mount of Olives, the figures of which were already largely completed, and asked the cathedral chapter for help in finding a suitable house. A few months later, between March 13th and 21st, 1509, he died suddenly without having finished his work. His brother Lenhart did not feel able to complete the Mount of Olives, which is why Lorenz Lechler , who had traveled to Speyer with Hans Kamberger as guarantor for Hans Seyfer, took over the architectural part of the remaining work. According to the minutes of the Speyer cathedral chapter, Lechler and Lenhart Seyfer completed the work in 1511. The Mount of Olives was a monumental hexagonal central building and had a pyramid roof over the Golgotha ​​scene: the figures of Jesus praying and his three sleeping disciples on the top of the mountain as well as were life-size of the 15 captors led by Judas who went up on a spiral path around the mountain. Inside the artificial mountain there was a chapel. The Mount of Olives in Speyer was very much admired and described by Thomas Coryate as one of the most subtle works of art in Europe.

Seven pen drawings from the early 17th century, which are in the art collections of the University of Göttingen, provide information about the original condition of this work of art. The Mount of Olives was badly damaged twice in the Palatinate War of Succession ; Among other things, the roof collapsed and the remains were overgrown by plants. In the late 19th century, a sculptor who was commissioned with the restoration of the Seyfer Mount of Olives created several new figures; in the 20th century an emergency roof was built over the group; Karl Halbauer stated in 2009 that as a result this Mount of Olives was only a shadow of itself. Fortunately, however, the replaced figures and some other remains have been kept and are still very impressive as fragments.

Many other works of art in south-west German churches are attributed to Seyfer or his circle:

Exhibitions

  • November 29, 2002 to January 26, 2003: Hans Seyfer - sculptor on the Neckar and Rhine around 1500 , exhibition in the Sculpture Museum of the Heilbronn Municipal Museums and in Heilbronn's Kilian Church

literature

  • Karl Halbauer:  Seyfer, Hans. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 293 ( digitized version ).
  • Hans Koepf : The Heilbronner Kilianskirche and its masters , Stadtarchiv der Stadt Heilbronn, Brok & Feierabend, Heilbronn 1961
  • Heinrich Niester: About rediscovered medieval crucifixes. In: Badische Heimat , 38th year 1958, issue 3/4
  • Andreas Pfeiffer, Karl Halbauer (ed.): Hans Seyfer - sculptor on the Neckar and Rhine around 1500 , Städtische Museen Heilbronn, Edition Braus in the Wachter-Verlag, Heilbronn 2002, ISBN 3-930811-95-2
  • Eva Zimmermann: The Syfer - Three late Gothic sculptors on the Upper Rhine . In: Kraichgau - contributions to landscape and local research . Episode 4. Heimatverein Kraichgau, Sinsheim 1974/75, ZDB -ID 127933-6 .

Web links

Commons : Hans Seyfer  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to Halbauer 2009 and NDB 2010, the place of birth is not known.
  2. ↑ a b c Karl Halbauer, An outstanding sculptor of the late Middle Ages. Hans Seyfer (around 1465 - 1509). In: Christhard Schrenk (Ed.), Heilbronner Köpfe V. Pictures of life from five centuries , Heilbronn 2009 (= Small series of publications from the Heilbronn City Archives 56), ISBN 978-3-940646-05-7 , pp. 232–248
personal data
SURNAME Seyfer, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Seyffer, Hans; Syfer, Hans; Hans of Heilbronn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German stone sculptor and wood carver
DATE OF BIRTH around 1460
PLACE OF BIRTH Sinsheim
DATE OF DEATH 1509
Place of death Heilbronn