_Hans Baldung_ (German-Swabian: 1476-1545).
This portrait is dated 1514, and signed with the monogram
of Albert Dürer, to whom it was formerly ascribed. But the
monogram is now said to be a forgery, and the picture is
identified as the work of Dürer's friend Baldung. On the death
of Dürer (in 1528) Baldung received a lock of his hair (now
preserved in the Library of the Academy of Arts at Vienna), and
Dürer, in his Journal in the Low Countries, records having sold
several of Baldung's engravings. Baldung, painter, engraver,
and designer, was a native of Gmünd in Swabia, and his earliest
works show the influence of Martin Schongauer (see 658). He
lived at Freiburg-in-the-Breisgau (in the monastery at which
place is his greatest work, a "Coronation of the Virgin"),
and also at Strassburg, of which latter city he became a
senator shortly before his death. Baldung's portraits, says
the Official Catalogue, "are highly individual and full of
character. When unsigned they have sometimes passed for the
work of Dürer, but they want his searching modelling." Baldung
acquired and adopted the name of Green or Grün, either from his
habit of dressing in that colour or from his fondness for a
peculiarly brilliant tint of green often found in his pictures.
The influence of Dürer was strong on Hans Baldung, and a similar spirit
is discernible in the works of both painters. This old man, strong and
yet melancholy, is precisely true to Dürer's favourite type of human
strength founded on labour and sorrow. And the choice of this type is
characteristic of his mind. With the Reformation came, says Mr. Ruskin,
"the Resurrection of Death. Never, since man first saw him face to
face, had his terror been so great." Nothing shows the character of men
of that time so clearly as the way in which they severally meet the
King of Terror. "It haunted Dürer long; and the answer he gave to the
question of the grave was that of patient hope; and twofold, consisting
of one design in praise of Fortitude, and another in praise of
Labour.... The plate of 'Melancholia' is the history of the sorrowful
toil of the earth, as the 'Knight and Death' is of its sorrowful
patience under temptation" (_Modern Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv.).