[2] German art historian Friedrich Wilhelm Hollstein ascribes 834 woodcuts to Burgkmair, the majority of which were intended for book illustrations.

His work shows a talent for striking compositions which blend Italian Renaissance forms with the established German style.

Burgkmair's time was a period of development for ethnography and the new Humanist science of chorography (promoted by Conrad Celtes at the University of Vienna).

[9][10] Using commercial ventures of the Welsers in Augsburg as a pretext, the humanist Konrad Peutinger goaded Emperor Maximilian into backing his ethnographical interests in the Indians and supporting the 1505–1506 voyage of Balthasar Springer around Africa to India.

[11][12] Based on an instruction dictated by Maximilian in 1512 regarding Indians in the Triumphal Procession, Jörg Kölderer executed a series of (now lost) drawings, which served as the guideline for Altdorfer's miniatures in 1513–1515, which in turn became the model for woodcuts (half of them based on now lost 1516–1518 drawings by Burgkmair) showing "the people of Calicut.