Hans Weiditz

[3] He is best known today for his very lively scenes and caricatures of working life and people, many created to illustrate the abstract philosophical maxims of Cicero and Petrarch.

Weiditz was unfortunate in that his publishers went bankrupt part way through the production of his two longest series of woodcuts, and the cutting was later completed by cutters of lower skill.

Parish records show a 1510 payment to him for carved wooden rosettes on the keystones in the chancel, working with Hans Baldung, the gifted student of Albrecht Dürer.

[6] He produced the German chiaroscuro woodcut with the most different colour blocks, a seven-block coat of arms of a cardinal, for a book frontispiece of 1520, probably cut by Jost de Negker.

The text was compiled by Otto Brunfels from earlier writings, but the illustrations by Weiditz represented a novel approach and set a high standard of realism in the portrayal of plants.