Jörg the Younger Breu

1510 – 1547

German painter, miniaturist, and draftsman, son of Jörg Breu the Elder. One of the leading figures of Augsburg Renaissance art, Jörg Breu the Elder was also one of the most versatile and productive designers of woodcuts of his day, especially in the field of book illustration. Books like Thucydides' Peloponnesian War (1533) and Barlatius's Scanderbeg (1533), which were illustrated by both Breu and his son Jörg, bear witness to the increasing role Breu the Younger began to play in the workshop of the aged master. A pupil and assistant of his father, the son, who later adopted the workshop sign, accomplished the stylistic shift towards a classicising idiom that can already be observed in the late woodcuts of the elder Breu. Highly esteemed for his sumptuously illuminated manuscripts, Breu the Younger was also very successful in designing woodcuts. Apart from book illustrations, his graphic work is dominated by lavish, large-scale woodcuts of allegorical, religious and secular subjects. Some of them, like The Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus (c. 1545), belong to the most spectacular prints of the late German Renaissance. He also designed heraldic woodcuts, and contributed to a series of Foot-Soldiers published by David de Negker.

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