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Beginning in the late fifteenth century, draftsmen, painters, carvers, copperplate and wood block engravers increasingly emerged from anonymity and signed their works. They gained a new self-conception as artists. The self-portrait of the young Hans Baldung Grien, made around 1502, is an exemplary illustration of this turn. Unlike his contemporaries Ambrosius and Hans Holbein the Younger, Baldung did not come out of the tradition of a painter’s studio, but rather, from a family of humanistically educated doctors and attorneys. Drawing now experienced a valorization–it could appear alongside painting in its ambition to create an autonomous work. Not coincidentally, chiaroscuro drawing, the technique Baldung used to execute his self-portrait, experienced a heyday at this time. The fact that a goldsmith such as Urs Graf left an independent body of drawings, which show little connection to his proper craft, should also be mentioned in this context. One could easily speak of special cases such as Hans Holbein the Younger, who, with his complex works in traditional genres such as portraits, as well as in facade painting, which at that time was very popular on the Upper Rhine, repeatedly opened the doors to Mannerism and Baroque. After the mid-sixteenth century, only one Upper Rhine artist was able to achieve comparable significance: Tobias Stimmer, who worked in Schaffhausen and Strasbourg.
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