Medallion Portrait of Willibald Pirckheimer

This portrait medallion belongs to a series of eight so-called humanist or reformer medallions, made by Nuremberg sculptor and medallion artist Georg Schweigger in 1638. Besides the example shown here, the artist created portraits of Paracelsus, Philipp Melanchton (both also in the Berlin Sculpture Collection), Emperor Maximilian I, Emperor Charles V, Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam. The only artist among the eight portrayed was Albrecht Dürer. For the portraits of Willibald Pirckheimer and Philipp Melanchton, Schweigger took as his model Dürer’s celebrated engravings, dating from 1524 and 1526 respectively. In this respect, the medallions are an expression of the Dürer Renaissance of the second half of the sixteenth century. The Berlin portraits are among the few works Schweigger made with his own hand. They are notable not only for their gilding but also for their lifelike modelling and exquisite chasing.