Matthias Grunewald

Matthias Grunewald (c1470-1528) is one of the greatest figures in German Renaissance art. The visionary character of his work, with its expressive colour and line, is in stark contrast to Albrecht Durer's.

His real name was Mathis Gothart Niethart. A seventeenth-century writer mistakenly identified him by the name Grunewald, his real name was not discovered till the 1920s. He was born in Wurzburg in the 1470s. He served as court painter and engineer to two successive archbishops of Mainz from about 1510 to 1525. He left this post apparently because of Lutheran sympathies. Grunewald died in Halle in 1528.