Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was German and worked during both the High and Late Northern Renaissances, but stuck like cyanoacrylate glue to the Late Gothic style.
• A highly lucrative and prestigious career was flushed down the drain when our artist backed the wrong side in the German Peasants' War of 1524-26. In the aftermath, personal property including a plush house, vineyards, and a 40-employee workshop was confiscated. The artist, too, was confiscated for a bit: arrested, imprisoned, and as the story goes, tortured by having the bones of both hands thoroughly broken.
• This piece is alabaster, which is fairly easily worked but extremely easily "bruised" (struck by a tool with too much force, leaving an ugly mark). Our mystery artist was clearly Master enough to pay this delicate medium the respect it demands. However, alabaster -- or even those equally perfect marble, or regular and Solnhofen limestone -- sculptures are not why we remember the artist's name. In the art history canon, a towering limewood carving holds pride of place.

And


• The subject here is a Doctor of the Church, shown during a time in his life that he supposedly lived in a biblically-significant town presently governed by the Palestinian National Authority. His animal companion is not now and never has been native to this town, so there tends to be doubt that the subject ever laid eyes on it. It is impossible to believe our artist ever laid eyes on the animal, either. This looks like a clear-cut case of attempting to work from a written description and, as Strother Martin once drawled in Cool Hand Luke, "What we've got here is failure to communicate."

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

The clues last week posed no problem to Sean. He knew that our artist was Henrietta Mary Ada Ward (English, 1832-1924), who became -- pay attention here -- Henrietta Mary Ada Ward Ward upon her marriage to the painter Edward Matthew Ward (English, 1816-1879). Her painting The Princes in the Tower (1861) was charming, wasn't it? Well ... except, of course, for the fact that it reminds us the boys mysteriously disappeared. Congratulations to you, Sean, and thanks to all who participated!