Benjamin Block

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Benjamin Block (1631 Lübeck- 1690 in Regensburg was a seventeenth century German - Hungarian painter known for his portrait paintings.

Block was born into an artistic family in Lübeck; both his father and brothers were painters. In 1655 he travelled to Italy, and through his brother, a canon in Vienna at the time, he met Ferenc Nádasdy who invited him to produce art in Hungary. Of his paintings made there. the portraits of Nádasdy and his wife as well as that of Pál Esterházy have survived.

At Loretto and Győr he painted altarpieces and was commissioned to paint the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in the mid 1650s, who later served as intermediary in a deal resulting in an order for a portrait of Pope Alexander VII.

After working as a portrait painter in Siena, Florence and Venice, in 1664 Block returned to his native Germany where he married and lived in Nuremberg with his wife, the painter Anna Catharina Fischer, until 1670. There he made portraits for the margraves of Ansbach and the Vienna court.

He died in Regensburg in 1690