German Design Drawings explored at the Ashmolean Museum

Discover how a group of stunning German drawings were used as designs for the production of artworks in metal, glass, and wood, as well as other artworks on paper, such as prints and book illustrations.

Created against the backdrop of the Holy Roman Empire and the turbulent Reformation, these fascinating drawings reveal the creative process of German-speaking artists, as they invented and designed on paper. They also provide clues as to how these designs were transformed into three-dimensional items by other artists.

The Ashmolean Museum 's collections hold exceptional examples of design drawings by some of the most famous German artists, including Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger. Explore some of the most remarkable of these drawings and associated discoveries through this film.

The content presented here is the outcome of a research project based at the Ashmolean Museum within the Western Art department (2022–23) led by An Van Camp and Mailena Mallach. More than 300 German drawings dating from the 1480s to 1800, were catalogued in collaboration with experts worldwide, including art historians, academics, material specialists and even an inventor. This collaboration has generated many new discoveries and revelations. The project has been generously funded by the Getty Foundation’s The Paper Project: Prints and Drawings Curatorship in the 21st Century and additionally sponsored by the University of Oxford’s Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership.

You can read more about the German design drawings discoveries on Storymaps:

00:00 New Discoveries in the Collection
01:32 German Design Drawings
09:49 The Ashmolean's German Collections

- - Image Credits - -
01:44 Hotel in Bad Schinznach, stained-glass panel:
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, about 1530/40, anonymous Swiss (probably Bern), stained glass. Kurhotel, Bad Schinznach, Switzerland
06:44 Metropolitan Museum, stained-glass roundel:
07:51 Nuremberg, stained-glass panel:
The Coronation of the Virgin, 1476, anonymous German, stained glass. St Lorenz Church, Nuremberg (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, F21173, Photo: Andrea Goessel)
08:11 Hannover, Holbein’s lid of a box: