idea, so various are they in beauty and feeling, have been attributed to
many illustrious masters, Giovanni Bellini and Raphael among others; but
perhaps the conjecture which assigns them to Benedetto Montagna is the
most probable. They show what remarkable artistic taste there was even
in the inferior masters of Italy. “They are,” says Professor Sydney
Colvin,[38] “without their like in the history of wood-cutting; they
breathe the spirit of that delightful moment when the utmost of
imaginative _naïveté_ is combined with all that is needed of artistic
accomplishment, and in their simplicity are in the best instances of a
noble composition, a masculine firmness, a delicate vigor and graceful
tenderness in the midst of luxurious or even licentious fancy, which
cannot be too much admired. They have that union of force and energy
with a sober sweetness, beneath a last vestige of the primitive, which
in the northern schools of Italy betokens the concurrent influence of
the school of Mantegna and the school of Bellini.” Italy never afterward
produced so noble a monument of the art as this work of its early days.
[Illustration: FIG. 30.--Poliphilo meets Polia. From the
“Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” Venice, 1499.]
[Illustration: FIG. 31.--Nero Fiddling. From the Ovid of 1510. Venice.]
[Illustration: FIG. 32.--The Physician. From the “Fasciculus Medicinæ.”
Venice, 1500.]
[Illustration: FIG. 33.--Hero and Leander. From the Ovid of 1515.
Venice.]
The art did not, however, fall into decline immediately. It is true that
wood-engraving never won for itself in Italy a place in the popular
esteem like that which it held in the North; the Italians were too fond
of color, and possessed too many master-pieces of the nobler arts, to
set a very high value on such simple effects; but, nevertheless, in the
first quarter of the sixteenth century there appeared in Venice, the
chief seat of the art, many volumes which were illustrated by woodcuts
of excellent design, such as this of Nero (Fig. 31), from an Ovid of
1510, the representation of the physician attending a patient stricken
with the plague (Fig. 32), from the _Fasciculus Medicinæ_, by Johannes
de Ketham, published in 1500, and that of Hero and Leander (Fig. 33),
from an Ovid of 1515. Of Venetian work of lesser merit, the
representation of Dante and Beatrice (Fig. 34), from a Dante of 1520,
and the cuts (Figs. 35, 36, 37, 38), from the Catalogue of the Saints,
by Petrus de Natalis, published in 1506, may serve as examples. The
whole Italian series, even as illustrated by the cuts here given,
exhibits a greater variety of interest, knowledge, and feeling than does
the work of any other nation, and affords a lively notion of the
manifold elements that went to make up the Renaissance; it reflects
fable, superstition, learning, the symbolism of mediæval theology,
ancient myth and legend, the rise of the modern feeling for nature, the
passion for beauty and art; and, ranging from the life of the scholar
and the nunnery to that of the beggar and the plague, it pictures
vividly contemporary times, while it adds to the interest of history and
humanity the interest of beauty. Its prime, however, was of brief
duration. Venetian engraving, and that of the other Italian cities also,
continued to be marked by this simplicity and skill in design until
1530, when cross-hatching was introduced from the North; after that date
wood-engraving shared in the rapid decline into which all the arts of
Italy fell in consequence of the internal troubles of the country,
which, from the time of the sack of Rome, in 1527, became the common
battlefield of Europe for generations. But, in the short space during
which the Italians practised the art with such success, they showed that
they had mastered it, and had come to an understanding of its
capacities, both as a mode of drawing in black line and as a mode of
relief in white line, such as appears in their arabesques and initial
letters, examples of which are scattered through this volume. They came
to this mastery and understanding before any other nation, because of
their artistic instinct; for the same reason, they did not surpass the
rudeness of German workmen in skill more than they excelled in simple
beauty of design the best of early French work, which was characterized
by such confused exuberance of fancy and such profusion of detail. They
breathed into the art the Italian spirit, and its presence made their
works beautiful.
[Illustration: FIG. 34.--Dante and Beatrice. From the Dante of 1520.
Venice.]
[Illustration: FIG. 35.--St. Jerome Commending the Hermit’s Life. From
“Epistole di San Hieronymo.” Ferrara, 1497.]
[Illustration: FIG. 36.--St. Francis and the Beggar. From the “Catalogus
Sanctorum.” Venice, 1506.]
[Illustration: FIG. 37.--The Translation of St. Nicolas. From the
“Catalogus Sanctorum.” Venice, 1506.]
To the Italian love of color is due the development of what is known as
engraving in chiaroscuro, a process which, although it had been
practised in Germany since 1506, was claimed as a new invention by Ugo
da Carpi (1460-1523), at Venice, in 1516, and was carried by the
Italians to the highest point of perfection which it reached in the
sixteenth century. It was an attempt to imitate the results of
painting; two, and sometimes several, blocks were used in the process;
on the first the outlines and heavy shadows of the design were engraved,
and a proof was taken off; on the second block the lighter parts of the
design were engraved, and an impression was taken off from this on the
same print in a different color, or, at least, in a color of different
intensity; thus the original proof was overlaid with different tints by
successive impressions from different blocks, and a variety of shades
was obtained in the finished engraving, analogous to those which the
painter gets by laying flat tints over each other with the brush. Great
care had to be taken in laying the original proof down on the second
block, so that the lines of the design should fall in exactly the same
position as in the first block; it is owing to a lack of exactness in
this superposition of the proof on the later blocks that some of these
engravings are so displeasing. There was considerable variety in the
detail of the process. Sometimes the impression from the outline block
was taken last; sometimes the different impressions were taken off in
different colors, but usually in the same color of different
intensities; sometimes the impressions were taken off on colored paper.
The Italians used four blocks at an early time, and were able to imitate
water-colors with some success. All of their prints in this kind are
marked by more artistic feeling and skill than those of the Germans,
even when the latter are by masters. This application of the art,
however, is not a true development, and really lies outside its
province.
[Illustration: FIG. 38--Romoaldus, the Abbot. From the “Catalogus
Sanctorum.” Venice, 1506.]
V.
_ALBERT DÜRER AND HIS SUCCESSORS._
[Illustration: A FIG. 39.--From an Italian Alphabet of the 16th
Century.]
Already, before the Dream of Poliphilo had been published in Venice,
wood-engraving in the North had passed into the hands of the great
German master who was to transform it; in the studio of Albert Dürer
(1471-1528) it had entered upon its great period. The earlier German
engravers, whose woodcuts in simple outline, shadowed by courses of
short parallel lines, showed a naïve spirit almost too simple for modern
taste, a force ignorant of the channels of expression and feeling
inexpert in utterance, did not know the full resources of their art. It
was not until the very close of the fifteenth century, when they
discarded the aid of the colorists, and sought all their effects from
simple contrast of black and white, that they conceived of
wood-engraving as an independent art; even then their sense of beauty
was so insignificant, and their power of thought was so feeble, that
their works have only an historical value. Dürer was the first to
discover the full capacities of wood-engraving as a mode of artistic
expression; it had begun to imitate the methods of copperplate-engraving
before his day, but he saw immediately that it could not equal the rival
art in that delicacy of line and harmony of tone on which
copperplate-engraving depends for its excellence; the materials and
processes of wood-engraving required different methods, and Dürer
prescribed them. He increased the size of the cuts, gave breadth and
boldness to the lines, and obtained new and pleasing effects from strong
contrasts of black and white. He thus showed the true method of
wood-engraving; but the art owes to him much more than this: he brought
to the practice of it the hand and brain of a great master, lifted it, a
mechanic’s trade, into the service of high imagination and vigorous
intellect, and placed it among the fine arts--a deed of far more
importance than any improvements in processes or methods, even though
they have such brilliant consequences as followed Bewick’s later
innovations. He taught the art a language, put meaning into its words,
and made it capable of conveying the ideas which art can express, and of
spreading them and the appreciation of them among the people.
The application of Dürer’s genius to wood-engraving could not fail of
great results. He recorded in it the German Renaissance. Civilization
had gained much in freedom of thought, independence of action, and
community of knowledge, as well as in a respect for nature; but it was
still ruled by the devout and romantic spirit of the Middle Ages. Dürer
shared in all the intellectual life of his time, alike in its study of
antiquity and its revolt against Rome; he was interested in all the
higher subjects for which his contemporaries cared, and his versatile
genius enabled him often to work with them in preparing the modern age,
but he was not touched by the modern spirit; in thought and feeling he
remained deeply religious, fantastic, picturesque, mystical--in a word,
mediæval. He did not possess the modern sense of limitation, the power
to restrict himself to realizing a definite conception, the power to
disregard and refuse what cannot be clearly seen and expressed, which
the modern age, when it came, gave to the perfect artist; he was not
content to embody his idea simply, directly, and forcibly; he
supplemented it with secondary thought and subordinate suggestion in
unmeasured profusion; he did not know when his work was done, but kept
on adding to it in the true wandering, Gothic spirit, which never
finishes its task, because its main purpose does not control it; he
allowed his fancy to encumber the noble work of his imagination, and
allegory to obscure the truth he uttered; he was not master of himself,
but was hurried on by the fire and speed of his own genius along paths
which led only to the obscure and the inaccessible. His imagination was
deeply suggestive, straightforward, and marvellously fertile in
invention; but he interpreted the imaginative world in terms of daily
and often homely life; he represented ideal characters, not under ideal
forms, but realistically under forms such as he saw about him; he knew
beauty only as German beauty, and life and its material surroundings
only as German life and German civilization; and thus his works are
characterized by an uncouthness which offends minds not habituated to
German taste. But there is no need to be irritated at this realism, this
content with gross forms, or to wish with Vasari that he had been born
in Italy and had studied antiquity at Florence, whereby he would have
missed that national endowment which individualized him and gave him a
peculiar charm. The grotesqueness disappears as the eye becomes
acquainted with the unfamiliar, and the mind is occupied with the
emotion, the intellectual idea, and imaginative truth, expressed in
these sometimes ugly modes, for they are of that rare value which wins
forgiveness for far greater defects of formal beauty than are apparent
in Dürer’s work. Although his spirit was romantic and uncontrolled, and
his imagination dealt with forms not in themselves beautiful, he
possessed the greatest energy of genius of all the masters who have
intrusted their works to wood-engraving, and with him it was a favorite
art.
[Illustration: FIG. 40.--St. John and the Virgin. Vignette to Dürer’s
“Apocalypse.”]
[Illustration: FIG. 41.--Christ Suffering. Vignette to Dürer’s “Larger
Passion.”]
The first of the four famous series of designs by which his skill in
wood-engraving is best known was published in 1498, but it was probably
finished before that time. It consisted of fifteen large cuts in
illustration of the Apocalypse of St. John, to which a vignette (Fig.
40) of wonderful nobility and simplicity was prefixed. The theme must
have been peculiarly attractive to him, because of the opportunities it
afforded for grandeur of conception and for the symbolism in which his
genius delighted; it was supernatural and religious; it dealt with
images and thoughts on which the laws of this world imposed no
restraint, and revealed visionary scenes through types of awe, terror,
and mystery, the impressiveness of which had almost no human relation.
In attempting to bring such a theme within the compass of the powers of
expression which art possesses, he strove to give speech to the
unutterable, and to imprison the unsubstantial, so that it is no wonder
if, although the fertility of invention and power of drawing which he
displayed, and the variety and richness of effect which he obtained,
made his work a masterpiece of art, yet much of what he intended to
express is not readily comprehended.
[Illustration: FIG. 42.--Christ Mocked. Vignette to Dürer’s “Smaller
Passion.”]
This series was succeeded by three others, in which the human interest
is far greater, although they are not unmarked by fantastic invention;
they were the Larger Passion of our Lord, a series of twelve cuts,
including this impressive vignette (Fig. 41), Christ Suffering; the Life
of the Virgin, a series of twenty cuts; and the Smaller Passion of our
Lord (Figs. 42, 43), a series of thirty-six cuts, the vignette to which
(Christ Mocked) is a design marvellous for its intensity, for its
seizure of the malignant, mocking spirit in devilish possession of every
lineament of the face and every muscle working in that sinuous gesture,
for the ideal endurance in the Saviour’s attitude, which needs not those
symbols of his sufferings beside him for pity, though Dürer’s genius
must crowd every corner with thought and suggestion. These three great
series were published about 1511, and were probably the work of the
previous six years; they are full of force, and are characterized by
tenderness of sympathy and fervor of devotion, as well as by the
imaginative insight and power of thought which distinguish all his
works. They quickly became popular; several editions were issued, and
they were copied by more than one engraver, especially by the famous
Italian, Marc Antonio Raimondi, who reproduced the Smaller Passion on
copperplate. They marked an epoch in the history of wood-engraving. It
is not possible to over-estimate the debt which the art owes Dürer, who
thus suddenly and by his own artistic insight revealed the power and
dignity which wood-engraving might attain, opened to it a great career,
and was its first master in the era of its most splendid accomplishment.
[Illustration: FIG. 43.--The Descent into Hell. From Dürer’s “Smaller
Passion.”]
Besides these connected series of woodcuts, many others, making in all
three hundred and forty-seven, are attributed to Dürer; and of these one
hundred and seventy are undoubtedly from his hand. They represent nearly
all aspects of German life in the early sixteenth century, and, taken
all together, afford a nearly complete picture of his time, not only in
its general characteristics, but in detail. They show for the first time
the power of wood-engraving to produce works of real artistic value, and
its power to record faithfully the vast variety of contemporary life.
Dürer was himself the highest product of the new freedom of individual
development in the North, but his individuality gathered the age within
itself, and became universal in knowledge and interest; so that he was
not only the Reformer of German art and the greatest master in it, but
was in a true sense the historian of the German Renaissance; it is to
his works, and not least to his wood-engraving, that the student of that
age must have recourse for the truest record of its thought and feeling
at their best.
In his later years he designed two other works which rank among the
chief monuments of wood-engraving; they were the Car and Gate of
Triumph, executed for the Emperor Maximilian, who was then the great
patron of the art, and employed it to perpetuate the glory of his reign
and realm. The Emperor, although the Italians made a jest of him, was
one of the most interesting characters in German history. He
illustrates in practical life, as Dürer in artistic and intellectual
life, the age that was passing away, and he foreshadows more than Dürer
the age that was coming on. He was romantic by nature, a lover of the
chivalric and picturesque elements of mediæval life; he was skilful in
all the manly sports which belonged to a princely education--a daring
hunter, and brave in the lists of the tourney; in affairs of more moment
he had always some great adventure in hand, the humbling of France, or
the destruction of Venice, or the protection of Luther; at home he was
devoted to reform, to internal improvements, to establishing permanently
the orderly methods of civilization, to the spread of commerce, and to
increasing the safety and facility of communication. He left his empire
more civilized than he found it; and if he was unsuccessful in war, he
was, in the epigram of the time, fortunate in love, and won by marriage
what the sword could not conquer, so that he prepared by the craft of
his diplomacy that union of the vast possessions of the House of Austria
which made his grandson, Charles V., almost the master of Europe. He was
a lover of art and books; and, being puffed up with imperial vanity, he
employed the engravers and printers to record his career and picture his
magnificence. The great works which by his order were prepared for this
purpose were upon a scale unthought of before that time, and never
attempted in later days. The Triumphal Car, which he employed Dürer to
design, was a richly decorated chariot drawn by six pair of horses; the
Emperor is seated in it under a canopy amid female figures, representing
Justice, Truth, and other virtues, who offer him triumphal wreaths; the
driver symbolizes Reason, and guides the horses by the reins of Nobility
and Power; the wheels are inscribed with the words Magnificentia and
Dignitas, and the horses are attended by allegoric figures of swiftness,
foresight, prudence, boldness, and similar virtues. The whole design was
seven feet four inches in length, and about eighteen inches high. The
Gate of Triumph was similarly allegoric in conception; it was an arch
with three entrances, the central one being the gate of Honor and Power,
and those upon the right and left the gates of Nobility and Fame; the
body of the arch was ornamented with portraits of the Roman Emperors
from the time of Cæsar, shields of arms which indicated the Emperor’s
descent and alliances, portraits of his relatives and friends, and
representations of his famous exploits. The size of the cut, which was
made up of ninety-two separate pieces, was about ten and a half feet by
nine and a half feet. In both of these works Dürer was limited by the
directions which were given him, and neither of them are equal to his
original creations.
[Illustration: FIG. 44.--The Herald. From “The Triumph of Maximilian.”]
[Illustration: FIG. 45.--Tablet. From “The Triumph of Maximilian.”]
The chief of the great works of Maximilian was the Triumphal
Procession,[39] which was designed by Hans Burgkmaier, of Augsburg
(1473-1531), whose secular and picturesque genius found its most
congenial occupation in inventing the figures of this splendid train of
nobles, warriors, and commons, on horse, foot, and in chariots, winding
along in symbolical representation of the Emperor’s victories and
conquests, and in magnificent display of the wealth, power, and
resources of all the imperial dominions. The herald of the Triumph (Fig.
44), mounted upon a winged griffin, leads the march; behind him go two
led horses supporting a tablet (Fig. 45), on which is written: “This
Triumph has been made for the praise and everlasting memory of the
noble pleasures and glorious victories of the most serene and
illustrious prince and lord, Maximilian, Roman Emperor elect, and Head
of Christendom, King and Heir of Seven Christian Kingdoms, Archduke of
Austria, Duke of Burgundy and of other grand principalities and
provinces of Europe;” his fifer Anthony, with his attendants, his
falconers, led by Teuschel, their hawks pursuing prey, his hunters of
the chamois, the stag, the boar, and the bear, habited for the chase,
follow on; behind them richly caparisoned animals, elk, buffalo, and
camels, draw finely decorated chariots, in which are seated the
Emperor’s favorite musicians (Fig. 46), playing diverse instruments; the
jesters (among them that famous Conrad von der Rosen whom Heine tenderly
remembered), the fools, the maskers, the fencers, knights of the tourney
and the joust, armed foot-soldiers of every service, continue the
procession, which lengthens out with cuirassed horsemen (Fig. 47)
carrying banners emblazoned with the arms of the Austrian provinces in
which the Emperor had waged war, and other horsemen (Fig. 48) in the
garb of peace, with standards of the faithful provinces, lasquenets
whose pennants are inscribed with the names of the great battles which
the Emperor had fought, trophy-cars filled with the armorial shields of
the conquered peoples, representations of the Emperor’s marriage and
coronation, of the German Empire and the great wars--Flanders,
Burgundy, Hungary, Guelders, Naples, Milan, Venice, an unending
list--the symbols of military power, artillery, treasure, the statues of
the great rulers who were allied by blood to Maximilian or had ruled his
dominions before him, prisoners of war in chains, the Imperial Standard,
the Sword of the Empire, the counts, lords, and knights who owned the
Emperor’s sovereignty--a splendid display of the pomp and pride of
mediæval life. Maximilian himself is the central thought of the whole;
he is never lost sight of in any smaller figure; his servants are there,
as their devices relate, because they served him; his provinces, because
he ruled them; his victories, because he won them; his ancestors,
because they were of his line. His personality groups the variety of
the procession round itself alone; but the real interest of the work
does not lie in him or his praise, but in the revelation there made of
the secular side of the Middle Ages, the outward aspect of life, the
ideal of worldly power and splendor, the spirit of pleasure and
festival, shown forth in this marvellously varied march of laurelled
horses and horsemen whose trappings and armor have the beauty and
glitter of peaceful parade. There is nowhere else a work which so
presents at once the feudal spirit and feudal delights in such
exuberance of picturesque and truthful display.
[Illustration: FIG. 46.--The Car of the Musicians. From “The Triumph of
Maximilian.”]
[Illustration: FIG. 47.--Three Horsemen. From “The Triumph of
Maximilian.”]