Johan Gregor van der Schardt

Johan (or Jan) Gregor van der Schardt (c. 1530/31 in Nijmegen, Netherlands – after 1581 in Denmark) was a sculptor from the Northern Renaissance.

[1] From 1569 to 1576 he was in the service of Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, and subsequently took commissions in Nuremberg, where he specialised in painted terracotta busts.

[2][3] From c. 1576 to c. 1580, he worked on the construction of the Uraniborg observatory of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe on the island of Hven.

[4] After 1576 he moved to the royal court of Denmark (with a return to Nuremberg in 1579) where he is presumed to have worked during the 1580s and died in the early 1590s,[2] perhaps at Uraniborg on 30 November 1591.

Unusually for a non-Italian artist, his work was praised by Giorgio Vasari.