Tobias Stimmer

Four of Tobias Stimmer’s ten siblings were independent artists: Abel (1542–1606) painter and etcher, Gideon (1545–1578) painter and designer for glass painting, Hans Christoffel (1549–1578) formschneider (english = letter-cutter or Printmaker?) and Josias (1544–after 1574) painter . Tobias is the most important of them and one of the outstanding representatives of Mannerism in southern Germany. Trained probably with the Zurich painter Hans Asper. From 1568, illustrations commissioned by Basel and Strasbourg publishers, in the same year facade paintings on the «zum Ritter» house in Schaffhausen (for Hans von Waldkirch). 1570 in Strassburg, where he also illustrated for Johann Fischart and Bernhard Jobin on a large scale. In 1576 the Basel publisher Thomas Guarin published a Bible illustrated by Stimmer. Commissioned by the mathematician and astronomer Conrad Dasypodius, Tobias Stimmer designed the case of the astronomical clock in Strasbourg Cathedral between 1571 and 1574, for which he also designed the figures. From 1576 to 1578, Stimmer painted thirteen allegorical figures on a hall ceiling in the New Castle in Baden-Baden for Margrave Philipp II, as well as various ancestor portraits.