active: 1513 - 1553
draftsman; painter
Swiss

A painter's son, Christoph Bocksdorfer was in Lucerne, Switzerland, from 1512 to 1513. Tax records in his hometown of Konstanz, Germany, show that, like many artists, he saw his livelihood diminish under the Protestant Reformation's renunciation of religious art. In 1523 he paid taxes on an annual income of three hundred Pfund, but by 1530 he was living on only thirty. Six years after he completed his most important painting, a large altarpiece for an abbey church, it was destroyed by Protestant zealots. In 1544 he left for Colmar, France, and eight years later he was decorating the town hall at Mulhouse.

Long described as an influential painter in an Italianate Augsburg style, Bocksdorfer is now the center of scholarly controversy. A recent scholar has challenged some key attributions by earlier academics. Judging only from works most certainly by him, Bocksdorfer's figures featured broad faces and stocky bodies with short limbs and distortedly draped garments.