Bernt Notke
The Lübeck master behind St George.
Bernt Notke was a sculptor and painter in Lübeck, then the hub of Baltic trade. His works are found in Tallinn, Lübeck and Stockholm, where St George and the Dragon stands in Storkyrkan.
Bernt Notke was born around 1435–40 in Lassan in Pomerania and worked mainly in Lübeck, the capital of the Hanseatic League and the centre of trade around the Baltic. Where he trained is not known for certain, but he was both a sculptor and a painter and ran a large workshop. He took commissions from churches and princes all around the Baltic.
One of his early works was a Dance of Death for St Mary’s Church in Lübeck from 1463. It was a long painting in which people from every social class, from pope to peasant, dance with Death. It was destroyed in an air raid in 1942, but a fragment of a similar Dance of Death survives in St Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn. Lübeck Cathedral houses his great triumphal cross of 1477, and he also made the high altar of Aarhus Cathedral.
In Sweden he is known for the sculptural group St George and the Dragon in Storkyrkan in Stockholm, unveiled in 1489. It was commissioned by the regent Sten Sture the Elder to commemorate the Battle of Brunkeberg in 1471, when he defeated the Danish king. The knight on horseback can be read as Sten Sture himself, the dragon as the enemy and the rescued princess as Sweden. The dragon has spikes of real elk antler, and Notke also used other real materials to make the work more lifelike. For a period in the 1480s and 1490s he lived in Stockholm and also served as master of the mint for the realm.
His style is late Gothic, full of detail and drama. The figures are expressive and their bodies often have movement and tension. Notke died in Lübeck in 1509. He is regarded as the most important artist of the Baltic region in the late Middle Ages, and his works link Germany, the Baltic states and the Nordic countries.