Hieronymus Holzschuher

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Portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher, Albrecht Dürer , 1526 ( Gemäldegalerie Berlin )

Hieronymus Holzschuher (* 1469 in Nuremberg ; † May 9, 1529 ibid) was a Nuremberg patrician from the Holzschuher family , one of the oldest councilors in the city, who ran a trading company operating across Europe. Today he is still known worldwide for his portrait, which his friend Albrecht Dürer painted in 1526.

He was a son of Karl Holzschuher, who died in 1480 and was appointed third captain by the Nuremberg Council. Together with his brother Lazarus d. Ä. Hieronymus owned the large house on the bridge near the Heilig-Geist-Spital , the later Harsdörfferhof, in the place of which the main synagogue on Hans-Sachs-Platz was built in 1874 , which was demolished in 1938.

He enrolled at the University of Ingolstadt in March 1487 and went to Italy in 1491 to study law in Padua. Returning to Nuremberg in 1498, he married Dorothea Münzer, the daughter of the city doctor, geographer and humanist Hieronymus Münzer . As early as 1499 he was accepted into the inner council of the imperial city of Nuremberg and rose to the position of third captain.

Until his death in 1529 he belonged to the inner circle of the city regiment and held the office of both the younger and the senior mayor (see: History of the City of Nuremberg ) . He was also a member of the Sodalitas Staupitziana , which, in addition to the dean of the theological faculty in Wittenberg, Johann von Staupitz, also included the Nuremberg council clerk Lazarus Spengler , the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer and Christoph Scheurl and Albrecht Dürer, with whom Hieronymus was friends. Despite initial sympathy for Martin Luther, he later joined the Catholic camp - like Scheurl, Pirckheimer and other humanists, by the way .

Hieronymus owned a very extensive library, most of which came from the legacy of his father-in-law Hieronymus Münzer. At Gillhofer & Ranschburg (catalog no. 200) a large part of its library was offered for sale around 1926. It contained incunabula a. a. a Cicero edition (Mainz 1465), also prints by Plutarch, Ptolomaeus and Galen, Steinhöwel's 'Aesop' in the Latin edition (Strasbourg, Hans Knoblochtzers, 1481), further works by Sebastian Brant and Johannes Reuchlin and Locher's Panegyrus on Maximilian and other ancient and humanistic titles. The well-known Nuremberg book printer Anton Koberger ( Schedelsche Weltchronik ) was married to a cousin Holzschuher, who in 1513 became Koberger's executor and guardian of his children.

Dürer's “Lamentation of Christ” was commissioned by Hieronymus Holzschuher around 1499, although it is unclear whether it was originally intended for the Sebalduskirche , in which it later hung, or for the Barefoot Church or for the burial chapel at the Nuremberg Johannisfriedhof , which was designed by the city master builder Hans Beheim the Elder built around 1515 for Holzschuher's brother-in-law Peter Imhoff and which was later called the Holzschuherkapelle because it is also his grave. After 1580, the painting is recorded in the Sebalduskirche, where it remained until it was sold to the Peller family (see Pellerhaus , Pellerschloss ) in 1620. Since then there has been an early copy in the Sebalduskirche, possibly by Georg Gärtner the Elder. J. (1577-1654). In contrast to the original, the coats of arms of the copy are painted with Holzschuher's coat of arms.

Web links

Commons : Hieronymus Holzschuher  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Leitschuh: Albrecht Dürer's diary of the trip to the Netherlands. FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1884, p. 168 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ The authorship and dating of the Holzschuher Lamentation by Albrecht Dürer and its relation to the plaque with the same motif in Sankt Sebald by Thomas Eser, Anne Fritschka, Neues aus der Dürerforschung , 2009
personal data
SURNAME Holzschuher, Hieronymus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Holzschuher, Hieronymus von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Nuremberg patrician
DATE OF BIRTH 1469
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 1529
Place of death Nuremberg