Lenhart Seyfer

Lenhart Seyfer (* in the 15th century ; † in the 16th century ) was a German stonemason and sculptor as well as a box and bell founder .

Life

Lenhart Seyfer was a brother of the sculptor Hans Seyfer . It is doubtful whether he worked on the Marian retable of his brother in Heilbronn's Kilian Church, completed in 1498 . Although there was an inscription written in red chalk on the back of the wing relief with the death of the Virgin , which can be interpreted as "lenhart h", there are weighty arguments against interpreting this inscription as an artist's signature and assigning it to Lenhart Seyfer. The inscription may be considerably younger.

The Mount of Olives in Speyer

What is certain is that Lenhart Seyfer, after his brother died in 1509, was supposed to complete the work he had begun, the Mount of Olives in Speyer . However, he had to refuse because he lacked the architectural knowledge for such a building, which is why he only carried out the sculptural work still to be done on this Mount of Olives and made sure that his brother's sculptures were properly installed. This lasted until 1511. From 1513 on, he lived with his brother Peter in Heilbronner Judengasse, but without obtaining citizenship. In 1514 he was granted resident rights for four years, albeit with the restriction that he could only work as a sculptor and not compete with the local painters and carpenters. In 1518 he received another approval from the Heilbronn council to take up residence in the city for four years, this time with the same tax privileges as Hans Seyfer had once enjoyed. The fact that Lenhardt Seyfer received privileges in 1518 is probably related to his activity as a foundryman and the position of the foundry of Bernhart Lachaman the Elder, who had previously dominated this area in Heilbronn . Ä. The workshop continued by his sons apparently no longer flourished. The last bell made in the Lachmannschen Gießhütte dates from 1526; In the same year Seyfer made the first attested rifle castings for Heilbronn, which, according to Hubach, was hardly due to chance.

Apart from these coherent-sounding testimonials about Hans Seyfer's brother, there are numerous other details that probably largely relate to one and the same person, but whose assignment to the Lenhart Seyfer described here is controversial or due to the varying name spelling and possible inconsistencies in the fields of activity specified was at least discussed:

From 1517 Lenhart Seyfer was appointed gunsmith and caster in the Palatinate for four years. In 1522 two bells were cast that were signed “lenhart seifer”. You are in Daudenzell and Aglasterhausen .

For 1523 the participation of a "Master Leonhartten" as entrenchment master in the procession of Elector Ludwig V against Franz von Sickingen is documented. During the siege of the castles Nanstein and Ebernburg, he was in charge of setting up the guns and setting up the entrenchments. In 1526 there were difficulties in casting 50 hook boxes for Heilbronn; the following year, however, Lenhart Seyfer received payment for the casting of 114 copies.

A Leonhart Syffer is said to have been among the court officials in Neuenheim in 1531 , in 1532 Leonhart Syffer is mentioned as a Heidelberg bell founder, in 1535 he is said to have stayed in Heilbronn, around 1558 a Lienhart Seiffer died, whose identity with his brother Hans Seyfers z. B. is rejected by Hanns Hubach.

In addition, there was a contemporary named Leonhard Sydler, whose name has also been handed down in different spellings and who also worked as a bell founder. He was the son of the Esslingen piece and bell caster Pantlion Sydler and worked for ten years as a gunsmith from Esslingen before moving to Heidelberg in 1517. After the murder of his brother Sebastian, who had continued the father's workshop in Esslingen, Sydler returned to Esslingen in 1526, where he signed a contract for the manufacture of rifles in 1528 (as Lienharten Pantleon ) and where he received several bells from the Esslingen casting site from the years 1526 to 1535 can be assigned. He died in Esslingen in 1544. In 1963, Hans Rolli spoke out in favor of Leonhard Sydler's identity with Lenhart Seyfer, but made no connection between Lenhart and Hans Seyfer. The bell researcher Norbert Jung also equates the people, but also points out the contradicting interpretations of family membership and the different places of origin of the sculptor family Seyfer (Sinsheim) and the foundry family Sydler (Esslingen).

Works

According to Hubach, the sculptor Lenhart Seyfer can only be assigned the double grave of the couple Hans von Ingelheim and Margarethe von Handschuhsheim in the Vitus Church in Handschuhsheim and the grave of Hans von Wolfskehl in the Katharinenkirche in Oppenheim ; further sculptural work is attributed to a Seyfer workshop, but not necessarily to him. Both monuments were created in 1519. They bear the same stonemason's mark as well as a sequence of letters, which were interpreted as the abbreviation for “Master Lienhard Seyfer Pildhauer von Heidelberg (sculpsit)”.

These signatures, in turn, are very similar to the inscriptions on the bells in Daudenzell and Aglasterhausen, which Hubach quotes as “maister lenhart seifer glockengißer from heidelberg gosz mich”. Hans Rolli, however, quotes a somewhat longer inscription for the bell in Aglasterhausen, somewhat differently: "In sat lux marx matheus and sat johanes ere guos me meinster lenhart seifer glockengiesser from heidelberg 1522".

In the year 1526, for which the first Seyfert rifle casts in Heilbronn are documented, a series of marked and unmarked bell casts from Esslingen begins, which are assigned to the Sydler son:

• Bell in the Wörnitzer gate tower in Dinkelsbühl, dated 1526, unmarked
• Bell in the Liebfrauenkapelle in Horb, dated 1530, inscribed Lenhar (t) Seidler, Esslingen
• Bell in the Schütte chapel in Horb, dated 1530, unmarked
• Bell in Horb-Sigmarswangen, dated 1531, inscribed Lenhart Seidler, Esslingen
• Bell in the Wolfstor in Esslingen, dated 1533, inscribed Leinhart Seidler, Esslingen
• Bell in Hechingen-Wessingen, dated 1535, inscribed Lenhart Seidler, Esslingen

Identity question

According to the documents and the preserved bells, a clear separation between the Seyfer brother and the Sydler son is not possible, especially since the bells in Daudenzell and Aglasterhausen from 1522 can be used for both and the (new) admission for both bell production in 1526 and the casting of cans in the following years are documented. It could well be the same person, but it could also be two craftsman personalities operating independently of one another. It would even be possible that the Seyfer brother in Heilbronn, the Sydler son in Esslingen and the bell founder Seifer in Heidelberg are three independent people.

According to Hubach, the identity of the sculptor Lenhart Seyfer from Heilbronn with the bell founder Lenhart Seifer from Heidelberg, which Eva Zimmermann still doubted in the 1970s, can be assumed to be relatively certain. He does not consider the equation made by Hans Rolli with Leonhard Sydler and he rejects Zimmermann's objection that the two different fields of activity did not fit together for guild law reasons, arguing that Seyfer, as a Palatine gunsmith and thus as a freedman, was not bound by guild law be. In addition, the profession of gunsmith or gun founder was often exercised by people who originally had to do with building, stone-working or the carpentry trade. The Esslingen City Archives, on the other hand, consider it unlikely that a multi-faceted specialist will work and only allows a craftsman to cast bells and guns at the same time. In favor of equating the Seyfer brother with the Esslinger foundry Sydler / Seidler, however, the fact that Hans Seyfer asked, before the construction of the Speyr Mount of Olives in 1506, of all places, for the provision of guarantors, which were then not approved by the Speyr cathedral chapter, but what nevertheless a connection between the sculptor family Seyfer and Esslingen is documented. The stonemason Lorenz Lechler, who worked in Heidelberg and Esslingen, vouched for Lenhart Seifer several times.

literature

• Julius Baum : Seyfer (Sefer, Seifer, Seiffer), Lienhart . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 30 : Scheffel – Siemerding . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1936.
• Norbert Jung: Forgotten bell-makers. Heilbronn 2014, ISBN 978-3-934096-36-3 , pp. 49-54.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hanns Hubach: Hans Seyfer: Family - Friends - Colleagues. Study of the origins and social environment of a late Gothic sculptor. In: Andreas Pfeiffer, Karl Halbauer (Ed.): Hans Seyfer. Sculptor on the Neckar and Middle Rhine around 1500. Heidelberg 2002, pp. 36–51, p. 42 (PDF, uni-heidelberg.de ).
2. ↑ John Tripp: Hans Syfer and Niklaus Gerhaert van Leyden. A new reconstruction proposal for the Konstanz reredos. In: Journal for Württemberg State History. 51, 1992, p. 120 f.
3. ↑ Jung: Forgotten bell-makers. 2014, p. 50.
4. ↑ Jung: Forgotten bell-makers. 2014, p. 49.
5. ^ ^{A b c} Hanns Hubach: Hans Seyfer: Family - Friends - Colleagues. Study of the origins and social environment of a late Gothic sculptor. In: Andreas Pfeiffer, Karl Halbauer (Ed.): Hans Seyfer. Sculptor on the Neckar and Middle Rhine around 1500. Heidelberg 2002, pp. 36–51, p. 43 (PDF, uni-heidelberg.de ).
6. ↑ Detailed description of the bells from Daudenzell and Aglasterhausen in Jung 2014
7. ↑ Julius Baum : Seyfer (Sefer, Seifer, Seiffer), Lienhart . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 30 : Scheffel – Siemerding . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1936 (here the Aglasterhausen bell is erroneously dated to 1512).
8. ↑ ^{a b c} Jung: Forgotten bell-makers. 2014, p. 51.
9. ^ Hanns Hubach, Hans Seyfer: Family - Friends - Colleagues. Study of the origins and social environment of a late Gothic sculptor. In: Andreas Pfeiffer, Karl Halbauer (Ed.): Hans Seyfer. Sculptor on the Neckar and Middle Rhine around 1500. Heidelberg 2002, pp. 36–51, p. 41, note 28 (PDF, uni-heidelberg.de ).
10. ↑ Heinz Schubert, "Osanna" is 500 years old. Which is why our bell was preserved. In: Freiberger Historische Blätter. 12, 4th volume, August 13, 1992 (PDF, freiberg-an.de ( Memento of the original from July 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link accordingly Instructions and then remove this notice. ). 
11. ↑ Jung: Forgotten bell-makers. 2014, pp. 51–52.
12. ^ Paul Eberhardt: From Alt-Eßlingen , Esslingen 1924, p. 196.
13. ↑ Stadtarchiv Esslingen, holdings Reichsstadt F 150/18.
14. ↑ ^{a b} Hans Rolli: Bell foundry tradition in Heidelberg. In: Badische Heimat. 43, 1963, pp. 75-91, here especially 77 f. ( badische-heimat.de ( Memento of the original from June 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ). 
15. ^ Marie-Luise Hauck: The sculptor Conrad Sifer and his circle in the Upper Rhine late Gothic. In: Annales Universitates Saraviensis. 9, 1960, pp. 243–247 (Conrad Sifer, older relative of Hans Seyfers, often called himself “von Sinsheim”).
16. ↑ ^{a b} Jung: Forgotten bell-makers. 2014, pp. 49–54.
17. ↑ For example the epitaphs Wolf von Dalbergs and Agnes von Sickingens .
18. ↑ So Hubach 2002; similarly also the resolution with Bernhard Peter .
19. ^ Hanns Hubach: Hans Seyfer: Family - Friends - Colleagues. Study of the origins and social environment of a late Gothic sculptor. In: Andreas Pfeiffer, Karl Halbauer (Ed.): Hans Seyfer. Sculptor on the Neckar and Middle Rhine around 1500. Heidelberg 2002, p. 36–51, p. 41 f. ( uni-heidelberg.de ).
20. ↑ Safe copy of the bell inscription by Heinrich Köllenberger: The inscriptions of the districts of Mosbach, Buchen and Miltenberg. Stuttgart 1964, p. 225.
21. ↑ cleared from court
22. ↑ Letter dated December 1, 2006, quoted by Jung: Vergierter Glockengießer. 2014, p. 51, note 211.
23. ↑ Heribert Meurer: Hans Seyfer, his life and work. In: Andreas Pfeiffer, Reinhard Lambert Auer (eds.): The carved altar by Hans Seyfer. Heilbronn 1998, p. 18.