VEIT STOSS

The training and early career of this sculptor born at Horn on the Neckar, who left Nuremberg in 1477 for Cracow where he stayed nearly twenty years, remain obscure. At all events the teachings of Strasbourg were assimilated and transgressed by the passionate, deeply original temperament of Veit Stoss.
His two chief undertakings at Cracow were the marble tomb of King Casimir IV and the great altarpiece in polychrome wood in the church of St Mary which he and his workshop carved from 1477 to 1489. In the central scene of the Death of the  Virgin the dramatac emphasis and intensity of expressions, heightened by the gesticulation and mamicry of the figures, are admirable. The bodies disappear beneath tumultuous flights of draperies as if buffeted by a violent wind, but an extreme care is lavished on faces and hands, chiselled with the prodigious virtuosity that was the master’s hallmark. The powerful and craggy features of the apostles, the full oval of the Virgin’s dehcate face, the exuberant curls of the voluminous beards and hair were the many characteristic features displayed as well in the works Veit Stoss carried out after returning to Nuremberg in 5496.
There he worked in sandstone to produce the three scenes of the St Sebaldus Passion commissioned by Paul Volckammer (1499), which vied with the anecdotal reliefs of the stone carver Adam Kraft, maker of the celebrated tabernacle in the Nuremberg church of St Lawrence (1493-1496). But Stoss carved mainly in hmewood, which he coated either with an ultra-refined polychromy, as in the Annunciation (5557-1558) hanging in the choir of the St Lorenzkirche, or, preferring to bring out the material itself, with faint coloured highlights. Several figure carvings attesting to the growing preference for this prqcesi in the early sixteenth century rank among the master’s finest creations, namely Tobias and the Archangel Raphael in
• the Nuremberg museum, St Andrew in the Nuremberg church ofSt Sebaldus or St Roch in Florence celebrated by Vasari in the Lives, which in each case exhibit new formal inventions. Thebroken and arbitrary lines of the draperies show with a still more heightened spiritedness in the copperplate engravings made by the scnlptor.
Unlike the Nuremberg bronze-founders, Peter Vischer the Elder (1460—5529) and his sons, Stoss remained a stranger to the Italian novelties introduced by Albrccht Dtircr (Nuremberg, 1471—1528). Stoss’s last work, the altarpiece of the Carmelites (5520—1523), today in Bam— berg, once again affirms his mastery and the force of his personal genius, which had a tremendous impact on many sculptors, whether pupils or followers, such as Master Pave1, active at Levoa in Slovakia.