David Kandel (1520–1592) was a

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

artist and one of the pioneers of botanical and natural history illustration. Very little is known of his personal life.

Biography

He was probably born in

Strasbourg Strasbourg ( , ; ; ) is the Prefectures in France, prefecture and largest city of the Grand Est Regions of France, region of Geography of France, eastern France, in the historic region of Alsace. It is the prefecture of the Bas-Rhin Departmen ...

, in 1520. He married in 1554 and 33 years later, in 1587, was recorded as "owner of a house". He died in 1592. His works and woodcuts are diverse in subject, from botanical illustrations to biblical events. The ''Kreuterbuch'' (or “The Book of the Herbs”), by

Hieronymus Bock Hieronymus Bock ( Latinised Hieronymus Tragus; c. 1498 – 21 February 1554) was a German botanist, physician, and Lutheran minister who began the transition from medieval botany to the modern scientific worldview by arranging plants by their re ...

, used woodcuts of a quality far ahead of the time. Commissioned by Bock, Kandel contributed some 550 woodcuts to the second edition published in 1546. The woodcut “

Rhinoceros A rhinoceros ( ; ; ; : rhinoceros or rhinoceroses), commonly abbreviated to rhino, is a member of any of the five extant taxon, extant species (or numerous extinct species) of odd-toed ungulates (perissodactyls) in the family (biology), famil ...

”, for the work ''Cosmographia'' (or “

Cosmography The term cosmography has two distinct meanings: traditionally it has been the protoscience of mapping the general features of the cosmos, heaven and Earth; more recently, it has been used to describe the ongoing effort to determine the large-sca ...

”) by Sebastian Munster, is based on the Dürer sketch.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kandel, David 1520 births 1592 deaths Renaissance artists 16th-century artists from the Holy Roman Empire German botanical illustrators