( fl 1523–30). German engraver. One of the most important of the Nuremberg Little Masters, he produced engravings, monogrammed I.B., that show close familiarity with the graphic works of Dürer and the Behams. He is distinct from the Lombard painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Palumba, known as Master I.B. with the Bird from his signature on eleven woodcuts of the 1500s (see WOODCUT, §II, 3). There are dated works between 1523 and 1530 around which the German artist’s surviving oeuvre fits reasonably. Friedländer identified him as the youthful GEORG PENCZ, from the undoubted fact that his activity ceased at the time Pencz’s first engravings appeared, c. 1530, from their evident common training in the ‘school’ of Dürer and from stylistic and thematic links between Master I.B.’s last works and Pencz’s earliest. However, Landau, demonstrating the stylistic and expressive distance between Master I.B.’s highly assured and precise handling of the burin c. 1530 and Pencz’s relatively clumsy and tentative productions of the same period, refuted this theory. Other attempts to identify the artist—with Jakob Binck, with the sculptor Hans Peisser, who modelled several of his works after engravings by Master I.B., notably the latter’s print of the Forge of the Heart (1529; B. 30), and with Giovanni Britto—have been equally inconclusive. The best working hypothesis remains that Master I.B. was a discrete and as yet anonymous artist.

Part of the Masters, anonymous, and monogrammists family

• I.B., Master
  • Little Masters
  • Peisser, Hans