Heinrich Vogtherr

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Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder (1490–1556) was a versatile artist, printer, poet and medical writer of the Reformation era. He was born in Dillingen an der Donau; his father Conrad was an eye doctor and surgeon. His brothers were Georg, a reform-minded priest, and Bartholomew, who became Bishop of Augsburg and wrote medical books. His son Heinrich Vogtherr the Younger became a painter.

Vogtherr trained as an artist in Augsburg and is thought to have studied with Hans Burgkmair around 1506–1509. He traveled to Erfurt and Leipzig before returning to Augsburg in 1518, where he helped create works connected to Martin Luther’s ideas and criticized abuses like the sale of indulgences.

From 1522 to 1525 he lived in Bad Wimpfen, painting frescoes for the parish church at the request of the reform-minded Hans Dietrich von Gemmingen. He published many writings and pamphlets in support of the Reformation, including The Deified Man and The Tree of Faith. He also published a well-known spiritual song, Out of the depths I cry to you, in 1524.

In Wimpfen he joined peasant leader Wendel Hipler and met Götz von Berlichingen, taking part in the German Peasants’ War as a leader of Hegau farmers. After the failed siege near Radolfzell on Lake Constance, he escaped and settled in Strasbourg in 1526.

The religious climate in Strasbourg reduced demand for his works, so he turned mainly to book illustration. He worked for almost all Strasbourg printers and even volunteered to defend Vienna during the Ottoman siege of 1529. Because painting jobs were scarce, Vogtherr focused on book illustrations.

In 1536 he started his own printing business, publishing mostly his own works—Christian Losbuch, two Anatomies, and the popular Art Booklet, a type specimen book for artisans. From 1538 he lived for a while in Basel. He visited Strasbourg less after 1542, and traveled to Speyer, Basel, Augsburg and finally Zurich, where he worked in Christoph Froschauer’s printing shop from 1544 to 1546. There he produced more than 400 woodcuts for the Swiss Chronicle (1547/48) by Johannes Stumpf.

Strasbourg runs out of illustration work, so he moved on. In 1550 he was invited to Vienna by Emperor Ferdinand I. The emperor’s brother, Charles V, abdicated in 1556, the year Vogtherr died in Vienna. He was married three times and had seven sons and three daughters. He sometimes used the pseudonym Henricus Satrapitanus or signed works with H.P.