Lot and his daughters

Albrecht Altdorfer's Lot and His Daughters, completed in 1537 and held by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, draws on the Book of Genesis account of Lot's escape from Sodom and his incestuous relations with his daughters after his wife's transformation into a pillar of salt. Altdorfer was one of the founders of the Danube School of landscape painting, a movement that treated the wild Alpine and Danubian landscape as an expressive protagonist in its own right. By 1537 he was approaching the end of his career — he died the following year — and the work shows the full maturity of his style: figures integrated into a densely painted landscape that presses with vegetal energy around them. The biblical narrative becomes an occasion for painting a night scene, the burning of Sodom on the horizon creating a dramatic backlit sky that would have been considered a technical tour de force. Altdorfer served as mayor of Regensburg during the 1530s while continuing to paint.

Panel support with remarkably detailed landscape handling — individual tree species identifiable by their leaf forms. The distant fire of Sodom is rendered in warm orange tones that contrast with cooler blues of the nocturnal sky. Figures are relatively small against the landscape, consistent with Altdorfer's tendency to subordinate human narrative to natural setting.