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Refinger [Reffinger], Ludwig
(b c. 1515; d Munich, 1549). German painter. He was apprenticed to Wolfgang Mielich ( fl 1506–41) in Munich in 1528, after which he apparently attached himself to Barthel Beham, who worked for Duke William IV (reg 1508–50) of Bavaria from 1530 and with whose assistance he obtained court commissions. In 1537 and 1540 he contributed three pictures to Duke William’s famous history cycle. Beham died in 1540, and Refinger subsequently married his widow. In 1542 he was summoned to Landshut to paint several ceilings in the new Stadtresidenz (1537–43) of Duke Ludwig X (reg 1516–45) and to produce designs for 24 glass panels. His historical pictures Horatius Cocles Stopping Porsenna’s Army before Rome, or Defending the Bridge over the Tiber (1537), Sacrificial Death of Marcus Curtius (1540; both Munich, Alte Pin.) and Combat between Manlius Torquatus and a Gaul (c. 1540; Stockholm, Nmus.) fit in with the style of the other paintings in the cycle, particularly those of Beham and Hans Schöpfer I. Marcus Curtius is the most successful as regards composition, showing a town thronged with a mass of active people; Refinger must have based it on Italian models painted c. 1500. His surviving paintings at the Residenz in Landshut, mainly ceiling paintings in the ‘Italienischer Bau’, depict scenes from the Old Testament and from Greek and Roman history in a succinct and anecdotal way, with an astrological series in the ‘Sternzimmer’. Portraits of members of the Wittelsbach dynasty are also attributed to Refinger (Munich, Bayer. Nmus. and Alte Pin.).
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