{"id":4915,"date":"2017-04-24T09:38:28","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T17:38:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/?p=4915"},"modified":"2017-04-24T09:38:28","modified_gmt":"2017-04-24T17:38:28","slug":"albrecht-altdorfer-forest-scene-with-saint-george-fighting-the-dragon-1510","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/art-and-illustration\/albrecht-altdorfer-forest-scene-with-saint-george-fighting-the-dragon-1510\/","title":{"rendered":"Albrecht Altdorfer, Forest Scene with Saint George Fighting the Dragon, 1510"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Countryside<\/a>

Forest Scene\u00a0with Saint George Fighting the Dragon, 1510, by Albrecht Altdorfer (German, 1480\u20131538). Oil and parchment on linden wood, 8.9 \u00d7 11.1 in. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.<\/p><\/div>\n

Albrecht Altdorfer, a contemporary of Copernicus who worked in\u00a0Regensburg (today a German city of 138,0000 near the Austria and Czechia borders), was a leader\u00a0of the\u00a0Danube school of painting. These painters\u00a0spearheaded a move toward\u00a0landscape painting in its own right, as opposed to using landscape mainly as a background for setting classical and biblical scenes.<\/p>\n

Nowhere is this more evident than in this\u00a0small oil painting. St. George and the dragon are dwarfed by trees in a woodsy setting. In fact, some of the leaves appear nearly as big as the dragon, whose appearance is more that of a hapless toad of the traditional ferocious fire breather. Many critics, such as Linda Murray in The High Renaissance and Mannerism<\/em> (London: Thames & Hudson, 1967), call Altdorfer the first modern landscape painter. A number of his painters contain no figures at all \u2014 Altdorfer\u00a0also worked as an architect, and some depict lonely ruins at twilight.<\/p>\n

Altdorfer cleverly uses lighting effects to bring out the figures from the background and give the scene a sense of mystery. The effect is a strange stillness that is at odds with the traditional dynamism and violence of\u00a0depictions of\u00a0this subject.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Albrecht Altdorfer, a contemporary of Copernicus who worked in\u00a0Regensburg (today a German city of 138,0000 near the Austria and Czechia borders), was a leader\u00a0of the\u00a0Danube school of painting….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[26],"tags":[117,118,119],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4915"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4923,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions\/4923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}