including many erotic subjects. The outstanding achievements of the first half of the 16th century were followed by several decades with a remarkable absence of noteworthy German art, other than accomplished portraits that never rival the achievement of Holbein or Dürer. The next significant German artists worked in the rather artificial style of Northern Mannerism, which they had to learn in Italy or Flanders. Hans von Aachen and the Netherlandish Bartholomeus Spranger were the leading painters at the Imperial courts in Vienna and Prague, and the productive Netherlandish Sadeler family of engravers spread out across Germany, among other counties. This style was continued for another generation by Bartholomeus Strobel, an example of an essentially German artist born and working in Silesia, in today's Poland, until he emigrated to escape the Thirty Years War and become painter at the Polish court. Adam Elsheimer, the most influential German artist in the 17th century, spent his whole mature career in Italy, where he began by working for another émigré Hans Rottenhammer. Both produced highly finished cabinet paintings, mostly on copper, with classical themes and landscape backgrounds. Sculpture In Catholic parts of South Germany the Gothic tradition of wood carving continued to flourish until the end of the 18th century, adapting to changes in style through the centuries. Veit Stoss (d. 1533), Tilman Riemenschneider (d.1531) and Peter Vischer the Elder (d. 1529) were Dürer's contemporaries, and their long careers covered the transition between the Gothic and Renaissance periods, although their ornament often remained Gothic even after their compositions began to reflect Renaissance principles. Two and a half centuries later, Johann Joseph Christian and Ignaz Günther were leading masters in the late Baroque period, both dying in the late 1770s, barely a decade before the French Revolution. A vital element in the effect of German Baroque interiors was the work of the Wessobrunner School, a later term for the stuccoists of the late 17th and 18th centuries. Another manifestation of German sculptural skill was in porcelain; the most famous modeller is Johann Joachim Kaendler of the Meissen factory in Dresden, but the best work of Franz Anton Bustelli for the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory in Munich is often considered the greatest achievement of 18th-century porcelain. 17th to 19th-century painting Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassicism Baroque painting was slow to arrive in Germany, with very little before about 1650, but once established seems to have suited German taste