Hans Baldung, called Hans Baldung Grien,, was a painter, printer, engraver, draftsman, and stained glass artist, who was considered the most gifted student of Albrecht Dürer and whose art belongs to both German Renaissance and Mannerism. Throughout his lifetime, he developed a distinctive style, full of colour, expression and imagination. His talents were varied, and he produced a great and extensive variety of work including portraits, woodcuts, drawings, tapestries, altarpieces, and stained glass, often relying on allegories and mythological motifs.
Sebastian Münster was a German cartographer and cosmographer. He also was a Christian Hebraist scholar who taught as a professor at the University of Basel. His well-known work, the highly accurate world map, Cosmographia, sold well and went through 24 editions. Its influence was widely spread by a production of woodcuts created of it by a variety of artists.
Ambrosius Holbein was a German and later a Swiss artist in painting, drawing, and printmaking. He was the elder brother, by about three years, of Hans Holbein the Younger, but he appears to have died in his mid-twenties, leaving behind only a small body of work.
Hans Holbein the Younger was a German-Swiss painter and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style, and is considered one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century. He also produced religious art, satire, and Reformation propaganda, and he made a significant contribution to the history of book design. He is called "the Younger" to distinguish him from his father Hans Holbein the Elder, an accomplished painter of the Late Gothic school.
Johannes Oporinus was a humanist printer in Basel.
Hans Lützelburger, also known as Hans Franck, was a German blockcutter ("formschneider") for woodcuts, regarded as one of the finest of his day. He cut the blocks but as far as is known was not an artist himself. He is best known for his virtuoso work on 41 of the "superbly cut" series of tiny woodcuts of the Dance of Death, designed by Hans Holbein the Younger, which Lützelburger left unfinished when he died.
Johann Froben, in Latin: Johannes Frobenius, was a famous printer, publisher and learned Renaissance humanist in Basel. He was a close friend of Erasmus and cooperated closely with Hans Holbein the Younger. He made Basel one of the world's leading centres of the book trade. He passed his printing business on to his son, Hieronymus, and grandson, Ambrosius Frobenius.
Hieronymus Froben (1501–1563) was a famous pioneering printer in Basel and the eldest son of Johann Froben. He was educated at the University of Basel and traveled widely in Europe.
The German Renaissance, part of the Northern Renaissance, was a cultural and artistic movement that spread among German thinkers in the 15th and 16th centuries, which developed from the Italian Renaissance. Many areas of the arts and sciences were influenced, notably by the spread of Renaissance humanism to the various German states and principalities. There were many advances made in the fields of architecture, the arts, and the sciences. Germany produced two developments that were to dominate the 16th century all over Europe: printing and the Protestant Reformation.
Jacob Faber or Jakob Faber, also known as the "Master IF" from the monogram on his prints, was a formschneider ("block-cutter") of woodcuts and metalcuts, engraver, designer of decorative prints and publisher. Faber was active in the period 1516–1550, in Basel in Switzerland and subsequently in France.
Hieronymus Andreae, or Andreä, or Hieronymus Formschneider, was a German woodblock cutter ("formschneider"), printer, publisher and typographer closely associated with Albrecht Dürer. Andreae's best known achievements include the enormous, 192-block Triumphal Arch woodcut, designed by Dürer for Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, and his design of the characteristic German "blackletter" Fraktur typeface, on which German typefaces were based for several centuries. He was also significant as a printer of music.
Adam Petri was a printer, publisher and bookseller.
Heinrich Vogtherr was an artist, printer, poet and medical author of the Reformation period.
Jakob Meyer zum Hasen was the bürgermeister of the city of Basel from 1516 to 1521. A money changer by profession, he was the first bürgermeister of Basel to be a tradesman, belonging to a guild rather than a member of the aristocracy or a wealthy family. He is known as a patron of the painter Hans Holbein the Younger, having commissioned the Darmstadt Madonna and a double portrait from him.
Wolfgang Lachner was a bookseller and publisher in Basel. He had extensive contacts in Europe and supplied, among others, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Ulrich Zwingli.
Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten or Michel Hillenius, was a Flemish printer, publisher, bookseller and bookbinder. His printing press put out publications in a wide range of genres, including imperial ordinances, almanacs, devotional literature, anthologies of customs, textbooks, etc. He also printed humanistic writings by Erasmus, Adrianus Barlandus and Jacobus Latomus as well as the first Dutch-language version of the story of Till Eulenspiegel. His multiple editions of the Bible in Dutch translation were among the first to be published. Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten is regarded as the most important publisher active in Antwerp in the first half of the sixteenth century.
Bonifacius Amerbach was a jurist, scholar, an influential humanist and the rector of the University of Basel for several terms.
Portrait of the Artist's Family is a portrait of the family of the painter Hans Holbein the Younger by the artist himself. It depicts Holbein's wife Elsbeth Binzenstock, their son Philipp and their daughter Katharina. Holbein painted it during his stay in Basel after his return from England. It was painted, between 1528 and 1529, on paper and glued on wood.
Peter Schöffer the Younger was a German printer, the son of Peter Schöffer, a former apprentice of Johannes Gutenberg, and a grandson of Gutenberg's financier Johann Fust. He first worked in Mainz, where he set up his first workshop. He was an expert type caster, and his specialty was printing music. Schöffer moved to Worms in 1518, where he printed among other works the Tyndale Bible, which was the first mass-produced English edition of the New Testament, and the first complete German Protestant translation of the Bible. Later in life, he also worked in Straßburg, Venice and Basel.
