Item ref: 5244
Private collection, United States
From the collection of Friedrich August II, King of Saxony (1797-1854), with his collector’s mark, Lugt 971, on the original light blue support sheet. With large margins, 22 mm margins left, right and above, and 65 mm margins below. Below with an apparently 17th century inscription identifying the sitter as “Claus Stortenbecher der Berühmte Seerauber von den Hambürgern...” and further notations with the Bartsch reference, Friedrich August’s catalogue references in black and red ink and the identification of the subject as Kunz von der Rosen, Emperor Maximilian I’s court jester.
Daniel Hopfer began his artistic career as an armourer, an Augsburg specialty, but sometime before 1513 he began to experiment with making etching plates on iron, probably armor sheets, for printing images. Hopfer was a very considerable draftsman and was broad-ranging in his subject-matter. He made versions of other graphic works of the period, including works by Albrecht Dürer, Jan Swart van Groeningen, Nicoletto da Modena and Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, among others, but the etchings of his own designs constitute his most important works. The etching of Kunz von der Rosen is his undoubted masterpiece; it must have created a sensation, as it was copied very frequently[3]. It stands as one of the early masterpieces of the medium, indeed of 16th century graphic portraiture by any artist.
Kunz von der Rosen (c. 1470-1519) was the ‘Court Jester’ and an extremely close confidant of the Emperor. This portrait shows von der Rosen as a soldier, dressed in a fashionable landsknecht tunic, holding a massive sword. The frequent reference to him as a court jester, should not in this case refer to a clown-like persona, but rather to von der Rosen as a plain-spoken military man.
Hopfer’s characterization is masterful. Not only the physical presence of his penetrating glance – his slanting cap almost covers his right eye, and his bushy beard and mustache emphasizing his firmly set mouth– but a finger of his left hand hooking into his sword-grip declares his military energy even in repose.
While the Hopfer shop certainly printed impressions of all of his plates, Metzger notes that the impressions printed in the Kilian shop in the first decade of the 17th century are finer than those printed earlier in the Hopfer shop.[1] In 1684 the plates, still in very fine condition, were acquired by David Funck (1642-1709) a Nuremberg publisher and art dealer, who then added the so-called Funck numbers and re-published the plates on a characteristic coarsely ribbed, but high quality paper[2]. The plates were then re-published again from the first half of the 18th century and yet again by Carl Wilhelm Silberberg in the 1820s, and again, still later in the 19th and 20th centuries.