Notes on an Unpublished Uncial Fragment of the Seventh Century

Abstract

precedent than on his own personality. Every artistic impulse originates within himself, deriving from an inexhaustible reserve of phenomenal inner strength. Even when employing older traditions, he develops them into an individual style which remains remarkably free from all foreign influences, whether of places or people. DUrer seems to have exercised comparatively little influence on him. Ntirnberg, although a bustling center of artistic enterprise, served him rather as a stimulus than as a teacher. Its lively atmosphere was suitable for creative art, but there is no evidence of his contact with the famous masters of his time, who were fellow-townsmen as well as contemporaries. He prefers to remain himself, rooted in his personality rather than in the soil of his native heath, confident of his strength and his superiority. Despite the eminence of Adam Kraft and the progressive spirit of Peter Vischer and his sons, Veit Stoss, the Ntirnberg sculptor who ventured to work in wood, stone, and possibly even bronze, remains the most dominating personality and the most forceful plastic artist of Franconia. Among German sculptors, he resembles Backofen more than Riemenschneider; among German painters he is less like Dtirer than Grtinewald.1 His form and expression in art, always individual and characteristic rather than typical and classic, are personal and German. Like many another German artist compared to an Italian contemporary, Veit Stoss impresses us as naturalistic rather than idealistic, irrational rather than rational. He prefers, on one word, like so many of his countrymen, to become expressionistic in art rather than to remain purely representative.2