Hans Baldung Grien, Mercenary Love (detail), Oil and tempera on limewood, 28.4 x 22.6 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Courtesy: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- Städel Museum presents Witches’ Lust and the Fall of Man. The Strange Fantasies of Hans Baldung Grien, on view through May 13, 2007. Hans Baldung, known as Grien (1484/85–1545), was one of the most significant German painters of the 16th century and the most talented contemporary and pupil of Albrecht Dürer. The great Renaissance artist produced numerous paintings, drawings and copper engravings, as well as woodcuts and stained glass, for church and private commissions. His works were not limited to traditional religious subjects, but returned repeatedly throughout his oeuvre to his favourite subject, the female body. Baldung was fascinated, one might even say obsessed, with the naked female body, which he continually interpreted in a multitude of new forms, e.g. as sinful Eve, or as youthful beauty threatened by death. Above all, however, the female nude gave him a subject that stirred the emotions of that time: the representation of witches. Again and again, Baldung presented witches and their mysterious rituals in drawings and prints; on one single occasion he also depicted them in painting. His Frankfurt painting “Die zwei Hexen” (The Two Witches) is at the centre of this exhibition that presents all Hans Baldung Grien’s pictures of witches: delicate chiaroscuro drawings on tinted papers, which collude with the observer as voyeur, as well as woodcuts, which are some of the very first experiments in colour printing. In the nine different stations of the exhibition, a total of more than 40 examples of work by Baldung and other artists, this unique panel is placed in the context of contemporary observations and Baldung’s complete oeuvre. The visitor’s horizon of experience will be enlarged, just as that of a contemporary viewer of the picture in the mid-16th century would have been. (courtesy www.Artdaily.org)

Hans Baldung Grien, Two Witches, Oil and tempera on limewood, 65.3 x 45.6, Städel Museum, Frankfurt amMain, © Photo Ursula Edelman