LOCHNER, STEPHAN. - German painter, b. at Meersburg on Lake Constance, he lived and worked in Cologne, where he is documented as active from 1442 until his death, which occurred in 1451, it seems, at the city's almshouse for the poor. From 1447 to 1450 he was elected to the council of the painters' confraternity. Dürer, as is known from one of his pupils, admired enormously the altarpiece of the Cathedral, considered by his fellow citizens the masterpiece of local painting. This report made it possible to identify the painter with the Master Stephan of Cologne.
His only dated work is the Presentation in the Temple in the Picture Gallery of Darmstadt, of 1447: his activity seems to increase in the last decade of his life and can be reconstructed through various panels, preserved in German museums, such as the Madonna of the Violet, earlier than 1443, the Nativity in the Diocesan Museum and the Last Judgment in St. Lawrence's in Cologne, later than 1446 (part of which is also in the Museums of Munich and Frankfurt). Less late, on the other hand, would be the Crucifixion and the Madonna of the Rose Garden, in the Picture Gallery of Munich. L., although considered one of the greatest representatives of the Cologne school, stands markedly apart from his contemporaries, through a more immediate and more composed sense of nature, favored by the contacts he had with Flemish and French painting, through a poetic use of light and color and through a clear and effective compositional clarity.
Bibliography2 works
Eugenio Battisti