16th century art Scandinavian sculpture of the 16th century

1. Scandinavian Sculpture Development

We cannot return here to the carved wooden altars of Denmark and Sweden, traced right up to the beginning of the Reformation, with which they disappear. It must be said, however, that the Danes with some right call the Danish master carver Klaus Berg, who worked almost exclusively in Denmark, whose sharp style, affecting women's heads with curvaceous curls. As early as 1530–1535 he made a large altar for the church of Our Lady of Orgus, which is only partly able to pass for his autographic work.

After the reformation in the Scandinavian north, decorative plastic plates and more or less monumental gravestone sculpture were spread. Large artistic gravestones, the only interesting ones, were made exclusively by foreign, mostly Dutch artists. It is known that the luxurious, caryatid tomb of King Frederick I in Schleswig Cathedral belongs to the best works of the famous Antwerp Cornelis Floris. From the workshop of this artist come, of course, spectacular gravestone monuments of Gerluf Trolle and Brigitte Gyöe in the church in Gerlufsgolm, whose recumbent images do not represent, however, true portraits, and then appeared between 1569 and 1579 a luxurious monument of Christian III in the cathedral of Röskilde, with a canopy on six Corinthian columns of wavy marble with white alabaster capitals. Swedish tombstones of the same time in Uppsalmsky Cathedral compete in luxury with Danish ones. The tombstone of Gustav Vaza, quietly with his long beard lying between his two spouses on the sarcophagus slab, was made between 1560 and 1576. Willem Boy from Antwerp. The tombstone in the wall niche of Catherina Jagellonica, the first wife of John III, richly decorated with bronze trim (after 1583) was less successfully executed by the same master. The tombstone of John III himself, which arose between 1592 and 1596. in Danzig, is a long-bearded king, lying leaning under a richly decorated canopy in the Renaissance style. If all these tombstones of the Danish and Swedish sovereigns do not relate to the history of Scandinavian art in the proper sense, they still show how the international artistic style spread in the north.