Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2007)
SZILVIA BODNÁR: On the Draughtsmanship of Caspar Freisinger
At the bottom of the page —with slightly different orthography —is repeated the shorter poem of the Budapest Self-portrait referring to the importance of learning. In this composition the treatment of the landscape and foliage with sketchy outlines and hatching, being dense in the foreground and looser in the background, is typical of the artist's Bavarian contemporaries such as Georg Pecham, while the figurai type of Geometria is similar to the female figures of the artists of Rudolphine Mannerism. The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, also preserves a fourth work by Freisinger showing the Adoration of the Magi, which was attributed to the Ingolstadt master by Heinrich Geissler (fig. 5). 12 He recognized that the composition is a preparatory drawing for Freisinger's fresco at the Spitalkirche, Ingolstadt." The artist arranged the figures of the scene taking place before a ruinous church in an animated, concentric composition. The Virgin holds before her the infant Christ, who raises his hand in a gesture of blessing before the awed Wise Men. In the middle the manger's two inhabitants are shown: the ox, and the donkey recognizable only by its pointed ears. In the narrow vista opening up in the right background, the winding multitude of the kings' retinue is sketchily drawn. The impetuously curving assembly of Joseph, the Virgin, Jesus, and the king kneeling before him also has echoes of Titian: the Venetian master similarly arranged the members of the Holy Family with the kneeling king in his Adoration of the Magi, another work which has survived in workshop replicas as w r ell. 14 The Budapest drawing, partly due to its figures modelled w r ith grey wash, wide parallel and zigzag hatching and white heightening, and partly for its facial types characterized by deep eyes and small lips, is close to the artist's Rising of Lazarus in New York, to the Virgin and Child in Munich, as well as to the Birth of the Virgin Mary in Brunswick." Among these only the Brunswick composition is dated (1594), but on grounds of style all of the above mentioned drawings can be dated to the early 1590s. The Adoration of the Magi is also related to a drawing by Caspar Freisinger, which has been regarded lost and has now been identified. In the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Musée de Grenoble, among the unknown German sheets, is preserved a Presentation of the Virgin, signed and dated December 1592 (fig. 6). 16 The high priest stands in a colonnade before a church gate to the left. He receives with outstretched arms the Virgin who climbs the stairs with her right hand covering her heart and her left hand gathering her garment up. Behind the Virgin, her mother, Anne, expresses respect with her crossed arms and inclined head. The presence of the Virgin's father, Joachim, is only indicated by the fragmentary head at the right edge. Behind the high priest stand two other priests, while in the foreground the upper body of a vehemently gesturing, bearded male figure and a woman's head covered with a kerchief appear as repoussoirs. The background is blocked by a townscape whose buildings feature a high tower
