Mary and Joseph

Hans Pleydenwurff's Mary and Joseph belongs to his production of devotional panels for Nuremberg and Bavarian patrons in the period before Wolgemut and then Dürer transformed Nuremberg painting. Pleydenwurff was among the most important painters in Nuremberg in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, developing a figure style that combined Franco-Flemish refinement with German expressive intensity. His devotional works represent an important transitional moment in German painting, when the Gothic tradition's flat patterning was giving way to more three-dimensional figure modeling influenced by Flemish realism.

Pleydenwurff's combination of Netherlandish precision in rendering surface textures with the more angular, expressive figure style of the Franconian tradition is characteristic of his pivotal role in German painting.