German architect. In 1488 he was town architect in Sulzbach, Waldsassen, Neumarkt, and Windsheim. From 1499 he worked in Nuremberg, where he was first appointed inspector of buildings to the city. He constructed large utilitarian buildings (granary, weigh-house, toll-house). His public buildings were conspicuous for their size and functional style. Adam Kraft provided stone detail such as coats of arms and other reliefs for many of Beheim's buildings.
In 1503 Beheim was appointed Master of the Works to the city of Nuremberg for life. He advised on fortifications and renovated and extended public buildings, taking part in 1504 in renovations to the town hall.
Beheim frequently acted as consultant to other cities, visiting Torgau, Coburg and Bamberg in 1494,Forchheim in 1500, and Ansbach (1504, 1510, and 1521-23). In 1518 he was succeeded as architect to the city of Nuremberg by his nephew, Hans Beheim the Younger (died 1535).
Beheim occupies a significant position in the years when styles were shifting from GothicGLOSSARYGothic, which may well have originated with Alberti as a derogatory term and which certainly corresponds to Vasari's 'maniera tedesca' ('German style'), is properly the descriptive term for an artistic style which achieved its first full flowering in the Ile de France and the surrounding areas in the period between c. 1200 and c. 1270, and which then spread throughout northern Europe. It is characterized by the hitherto unprecedented integration of the arts of sculpture, painting, stained glass and architecture which is epitomized in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims or in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In all the arts the predominantly planar forms of the Romanesque are replaced by an emphasis on line. There is a transcendental quality, whether in the soaring forms of the pointed arches or in the new stress on the humanity of Christ, which similarly distinguishes it from the preceding Romanesque style. In thinking of Nicola (d. c. 1284) or Giovanni Pisano (d. after 1314) there is same danger of forgetting what had happened in French sculpture half a century or more earlier, and likewise it is hard to remember that the spectacular achievements of early Renaissance art are a singularly localized eddy in the continuing stream of late gothic European art. By northern European standards few Italian works of art can be called gothic without qualification, and the story of 13th and 14th century Italian architecture is as much one of resistance to the new style as of its reception, whether directly from France or through German or central European intermediaries. In sculpture and in painting, the Italian reluctance to distort the human figure, conditioned by a never wholly submerged awareness of the omnipresent antique heritage, gives a special quality to the work of even those artists such as Giovanni Pisano or Simone Martini who most closely approached a pure gothic style. Nevertheless, the vitalizing role of Northern gothic art throughout the early Renaissance and the period leading up to it should never be underestimated. The artistic, like the cultural and commercial, interaction was continuous and much of the Italian achievement is incomprehensible if seen in isolation. It is not merely at the level of direct exchanges between one artist and another, or the influence of one building; painting, manuscript or piece of sculpture upon another, that the effects are to be felt. The streaming quality of line which is so characteristic of Brunelleschi's early Renaissance architecture surely reflects a sensitivity to the gothic contribution which is entirely independent of, and lies much deeper than, the superficial particularities of form. The counterflow of influence and inspiration from South to North must likewise not be underrated. In particular, the contribution of Italian painters from Duccio and Simone Martini onwards is central to the evolution of the so-called International Gothic style developing in Burgundy, Bohemia and north Italy in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. to renaissance and the focus of architectural activity was moving towards secular buildings.
