German, probably Augsburg, circa 1600

This very fine and homogeneous limestone, quarried in the Solnhofen and Mörnsheim basin of the Altmühl Valley (between Augsburg and Nuremberg), allows carvingof remarkable precision and yields, once polished, a smooth and lustrous surface comparable to alabaster or marble. Owing to its plastic qualities and the ready availability of the material, it was regularly employed in Germany from the 16th century and throughout the 17th century.

Often of small dimensions, Solnhofen reliefs are generally carved after widely circulated prints, such as Albrecht Dürer’s Passion cycles, or after paintings by German and Netherlandish Renaissance masters, notably Maarten de Vos, Cornelis Cort, and Hendrick Goltzius. The subject and overall composition of the present relief may thus be compared to The Last Judgment (c. 1570) by Maarten de Vos (1532–1603), now in the Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville. In an engraving by Adriaen Collaert, after another composition on the same theme by de Vos (c. 1600), one finds a nude male figure seen from behind, with an elongated anatomy and a typically Mannerist pose, closely related to the figure on the right of the present relief (British Museum, inv. Nn,7.4.26).