Maximilian, the Danube School and the Kunstkammer
Emperor Maximilian used art to build his posthumous fame, the painters of the Danube School discovered landscape, and the Habsburgs began to collect the treasures that now fill the museums of Vienna.
Maximilian I, king from 1486 and emperor from 1508, was a prince who thought in images. He commissioned the Golden Roof in Innsbruck, a gigantic woodcut in the form of a triumphal arch by Albrecht Dürer and a tomb monument surrounded by larger-than-life bronze ancestors. The books Theuerdank and Weisskunig told his life as a chivalric romance, and printing spread the images throughout the empire.
Along the Danube, between Regensburg, Passau and Vienna, a group of artists around 1500–1530 painted forests, mountains and rivers with a new feeling for nature. They are called the Danube School. Lucas Cranach the Elder painted dramatic crucifixions and portraits in Vienna around 1502, Albrecht Altdorfer made the St Sebastian Altarpiece for the monastery of St Florian, and Wolf Huber of Feldkirch drew landscapes that are among the first in European art.
In the second half of the century art was shaped by the court and the Kunstkammer. Ferdinand I had the Hofburg rebuilt in the Renaissance style, and his son Archduke Ferdinand II gathered armour, portraits, natural specimens and works of art at Ambras Castle in Tyrol. Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted heads made of fruit and flowers for the emperors, and Rudolf II turned Prague into one of the art capitals of Europe.