Biography

Information about Bernt Notke’s life is scant. The future artist was born around 1440 in Lassan, a small town in Pomerania. Nothing is known about his childhood and schooling, but in 1467 he appeared on the scene in Lübeck, where he was accepted into the guild of glaziers and painters. By this time, Notke was already a master with several apprentices in his workshop. In the same year, Notke and his wife Agnes became property owners in Lübeck, and a decade later the workshop was doing well enough to allow the family to buy a house on Breite Strasse.

From the 1460s to 1491, various works were created in Notke’s workshop for customers locally and further afield: the rood for Lübeck Cathedral (1477), the altarpiece of the high altar for Aarhus Cathedral (1479) and the altarpiece of the high altar for Tallinn Church of the Holy Spirit (1483) are known to have been completed during this period. Notke also had personal ties to Tallinn: his relative Diderick Notken was a priest here.
From 1491, Notke worked in Stockholm as a mint master of the Kingdom of Sweden. He had worked in Sweden before – St George’s sculpture group in Stockholm Storkyrkan comes from his workshop.
From the turn of the century, Notke was back in Lübeck. Notke’s will of 1501 has also survived; in it, his daughter Anneke is indicated as the principal heir.

From 1505, Notke oversaw the works in St Peter’s Church in Lübeck, but four years later, the churchwardens there hired a new man to replace him. Notke died in May 1509 at the latest.

“Bernt Notke lived and worked in the transition period between the medieval and the early modern eras, between the Gothic and the Renaissance. On the one hand, he still observed canons of medieval art; on the other hand, he applied several novel artistic and technical solutions. The production of his workshop is characterized by monumentality, vigorous expressiveness, and the novel use of additional materials. For instance, strips of leather were glued to carved figures to create the effect of veins on a human body, and pieces of cloth, parchment or glass were added to figures’ sculpted clothes to imitate ‘reality’. Notke was, above all, a talented painter and an efficient manager of a workshop. Different opinions exist about whether he was also a woodcarver or not.”

Anu Mänd, Bernt Notke: Between Innovation and Tradition. Tallinn, Art Museum of Estonia, 2010)