Matthias Grünewald was a German Renaissance painter of religious works who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century. His first name is also given as Mathis and his surname as Gothart or Neithardt.
Grünewald's John the Evangelist. This work was long thought to be a self-portrait.
Second state of the Isenheim Altarpiece, Colmar, Unterlinden Museum
Sketch for a lost Saint Dorothy (Berlin). The J. Paul Getty Museum purchased a forged painting based on this drawing.
Grünewald in a 19th-century depiction on the Frankoniabrunnen, by Ferdinand von Miller (1824), now in front of the Würzburg Residence
The German Renaissance, part of the Northern Renaissance, was a cultural and artistic movement that spread among German thinkers in the 15th and 16th centuries, which developed from the Italian Renaissance. Many areas of the arts and sciences were influenced, notably by the spread of Renaissance humanism to the various German states and principalities. There were many advances made in the fields of architecture, the arts, and the sciences. Germany produced two developments that were to dominate the 16th century all over Europe: printing and the Protestant Reformation.
Portrait of Emperor Maximilian I (reigned: 1493–1519), the first Renaissance monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, by Albrecht Dürer, 1519
First page of a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, now in Texas
The Heller altar by Albrecht Dürer
Melencolia I, 1514, engraving by Albrecht Dürer