The Resurrection of Christ.

Martin Schongauer is the earliest identifiable engraver from northern Europe. Like Dürer, he was the son of a goldsmith and also primarily a painter, who lived and worked in the Rhine town of Colmar. He produced more than 100 engravings, and it was by these that he was known throughout Europe. Giorgio Vasari, the great biographer of Renaissance artists, tells how the young Michelangelo made a pen and ink copy of Schongauer's early engraving of the Temptation of St Anthony, 1470s.

Engraving appeared in the Rhineland area of northern Europe about 1430. Initially the by-product of goldsmiths' workshops, engravings soon came to be used as cheaper alternatives to devotional illuminated manuscripts and utilitarian objects such as playing cards for the growing urban populace. In the hands of artists such as Schongauer and Dürer, engraving was raised to an entirely new level of refinement within only 50 years of its appearance in European art.

The Resurrection is the last in a series of twelve engravings on the Passion of Christ. Though not directly recounted in the New Testament, the scene of the moment of Christ's resurrection became established in art from the eleventh century. It largely replaced the much earlier tradition of the scene of the woman visiting the tomb on Easter Sunday morning described in the Gospels. Here the dynamic composition is anchored by the symbolic crossed diagonals of the sarcophagus and the lid held by the angel. The serene figure of Christ steps effortlessly out of the tomb. His elegant Gothic composure is contrasted with the frightened demeanour of the soldier who shields his face from the divine radiance of the Saviour.

While Schongauer signed all his engravings with his distinctive monogram, he never dated them. This is a work of his early maturity, made after about 1475 when he modified his monogram so that the 'M' appears with slanted outer strokes rather than the strictly vertical ones of his early monogram. The back of the sheet bears the collector's mark of Siegfried Barden, a Hamburg merchant who collected fine impressions of Schongauer's prints.

Source: David Maskill, 'Martin Schongauer 1453-91 Germany', Art at Te Papa, edited by William McAloon (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2009), 25.

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   August 2018