Stefan Lochner: Image Making in 15th Century Cologne

This volume re-evaluates the oeuvre ascribed to Stefan Lochner in the light of an extensive examination of his works with infrared reflectography. Although the results of technical studies form the underpinnings of the book, its concerns are broader. Relatively few drawings can be attributed to northern artists of the fifteenth century, and fewer still can be linked with any degree of certainty to Cologne. It is not until Martin Schongauer, active in Colmar in the last quarter of the century, that we can confidently associate a particular graphic language with a specific locale. In addition to increasing the overall corpus of fifteenth-century drawings, the underdrawings brought to light by the reflectography of Lochner's paintings offer tangible evidence of a graphic style that was practiced in Cologne in the 1430s and 1440s. They reveal Lochner to be a draftsman of the first order who practiced a style quite new at the time: derived from metalwork, it foreshadows Schongauer's achievements by some forty years. Lochner selected his pictorial means to establish

Julien Chapuis is Associate Curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.