afterward reproduced by engraving in wood; but the reproduction varied
from the originals in important particulars. The series was far from
completion at the time of Maximilian’s death, and was left unfinished;
it was never published until 1796, when the first edition appeared at
Vienna, whither the lost wood-blocks had found their way in 1779. In its
present shape the series consists of one hundred and thirty-five large
cuts, extending for a linear distance of over one hundred and
seventy-five feet; all but sixteen of these are reproductions of the
designs on vellum, which numbered two hundred and eighteen in all, and
these sixteen are so different in style from the others as to suggest a
doubt whether they belong to the Triumph or to some other unknown work.
Hans Burgkmaier is believed to be the designer of all except the few
that are ascribed to Dürer; but, owing to their being engraved by
different hands, they vary considerably in merit.
Maximilian also ordered two curious books to be prepared and adorned
with woodcuts in his own honor, a prose work entitled The Wise King, and
a poem entitled The Adventures of Sir Tewrdannckh. In these volumes the
example of his own life is offered for the instruction of princes, and
the history of his deeds, amours, courtship, perils, and temptations is
written, once for the edification, but now for the amusement, of the
world. The woodcuts in The Adventures of Sir Tewrdannckh are one hundred
and eighteen in number, and are principally, if not entirely, the work
of Hans Schäuffelin (1490?-1540); they show how Sir Tewrdannckh,
attended by his squire, started out upon his travels, and what moving
dangers he encountered in his hunting, voyaging, tilting, and fighting,
under the guidance and instigation of his three great enemies, Envy,
Daring, and Curiosity, who at last, when he is happily at the end of his
troubles, are represented as meeting their own fate by the gallows, the
block, and the moat. The engravings are marked by spirit, and due
attention is given to landscape; but they are not infrequently too near
caricature to be pleasing, and cannot pretend to rank beside the other
works of Maximilian. This volume was printed during the Emperor’s
lifetime, and was the only one of his works of which he saw the
completion. The Wise King was illustrated by two hundred and
thirty-seven cuts, of which several bear Burgkmaier’s mark, one the mark
of Schäuffelin and one that of Hans Springinklee (1470?-1540). They
picture the journey of the Emperor’s father to Rome, the youth and
education of the young prince, his gradual acquirement of the liberal
arts--kingcraft, the black-art, medicine, the languages, painting,
architecture, music, cookery, dancing, shooting, falconry, angling,
fencing, tilting, gunnery, the art of fortification, and the like;
and they represent, in conclusion, his political career by means of
obscure allegory. They are similar to the illustrations in Sir
Tewrdannckh in general character, and, like them, are inferior to the
other works of Maximilian. In the composition of this volume Maximilian
is supposed to have had a considerable share; it was not printed entire
until 1775.
[Illustration: FIG. 48.--Horseman. From “The Triumph of Maximilian.”]
These five great works, apart from their value as artistic productions
and their interest as historic records, have a farther importance
because of their influence upon the art, both in the way of
encouragement and of instruction. Although there has been much dispute
about the matter, it must now be acknowledged that the artists
themselves did not ordinarily engrave their designs, but left the actual
cutting of the block to the professional workmen; at most they only
occasionally corrected the lines after the engraver had cut them. The
works of Maximilian employed a number of these engravers, who practised
the art only as a craft; the experience these workmen gained in such
labor as they were now called upon to do, under the superintendence of
artists like Dürer and Burgkmaier, who knew what engraving ought to be,
and who held up a high standard of excellence, was most valuable to
them, and made itself felt in a general improvement of the technical
part of the art everywhere. The standard of the engraver’s craft was
permanently raised. The engravers’ names now became known; and sometimes
the engraver received hardly less admiration for his skill in technique
than the artist for his power of design.
Other distinguished artists united with Dürer and the designers of
Maximilian’s works in making this period of wood-engraving the most
illustrious in the German practice of the art. Lukas van Leyden
(1494-1533), whose youthful works in copperplate were wonderful, left
some woodcuts in Dürer’s bold, broad manner, which illustrate the
attempt of German art to acquire classical taste, and show so much the
more clearly the incapacity of the Germans in the perception of beauty.
The Cranachs, father (1472-1553) and son (1515-1586), who are
interesting because of the share they had in the Reformation, produced
some very striking works, such as the charming scene of the Repose in
Egypt, and were the first to practise chiaro-scuro engraving in the
North. Hans Baldung (1470-1552?), although his designs are sometimes
characterized by exaggeration and too great violence of action, ranks
with the best of the secondary artists of the time; and Hans
Springinklee, who has been already mentioned, reached a high degree of
excellence in his illustrations to the Hortulus Animæ, which are still
valued.
The works of these men, however, were only the most important and the
best of a vast number of woodcuts which, during the first half of the
sixteenth century, appeared in Germany during this period of the
greatest popularity of the art. Under the personal influence of Dürer,
or under the influence of the numerous and widely-spread prints by
himself and his associates, many other artists of merit acquired skill
in engraving, both on metal and in wood, and employed it upon a great
variety of subjects. The devotion of mediæval art wholly to church
decoration and to the representation of religious scenes had passed away
in all quarters of the world; in Italy the artists had come to treat the
subjects of pagan imagination, the beings and scenes of classical
mythology; in Germany the people had homelier tasks, and religious art
there yielded to the interest which men felt in the incidents and
objects of common life; in both countries wealth took the place of
religion as the patron of art; and, although art still dealt with the
story of the Scriptures and the martyrs, because these filled so
important a place in the imagination of the people, still it had become
secularized. This change was naturally shown in the arts of engraving
more than in painting, because engraving in copper and on wood had a far
greater sphere of influence, and came into more intimate relations with
the popular life, and because the illustration of books offered a
greater variety of subject. In German engraving, from this time, the
actual life of the town and the peasantry was represented almost as
often as the history of the Saviour and the saints; the village
festival, the procession of the wedding-guests, the fêtes of the town,
the employments and costumes of the citizens, recur with the same
frequency as the passion of the Lord and the Old Testament stories; the
joy and sorrow of ordinary life, the objects of ordinary observation and
thought, the humorous, the humble, and the satirical, sometimes
strangely mingled with ill-understood mythology and badly-caricatured
classicism, are the constant theme of the engravers.
Chief among the successors of Dürer who shared in this vast production
were the group of artists known as the Little Masters, although the name
is one of ill-defined and incomplete application; they were so called
because they chiefly engraved small designs; but they also engraved
large designs, and their number, which is usually limited to seven,
excludes some whose works are on the same small scale. The first of them
was Albrecht Altdorfer (1488-1538), said to have been the pupil of
Dürer and the inventor of engraving in this manner; in his day he was
more celebrated as an architect and painter than as an engraver, but his
fame now rests on his works on copper and in wood. The best known of his
sixty-five woodcuts is the series of forty designs, scarcely three
inches by two in size, entitled the Fall and Redemption of Man, in
depicting which he had the Smaller Passion of Dürer to guide him. In
these he attempted to obtain effects by the use of fine and close lines,
such as were employed in copperplate-engraving; but, although his
success was certainly remarkable, considering the rude mechanical
processes of the time, yet his method clearly produced results of
inferior artistic value in comparison with the works in the bold, broad
manner of Dürer. All of his woodcuts, excepting four, are
representations of religious subjects; they are marked, like his other
works, by an attention to landscape, that truly modern object of art, of
which he probably learned the value from Dürer, who was the first to
treat landscape with real appreciation. In Hans Sebald Behaim
(1500-1550?) the spirit of the age is revealed with great clearness and
variety (Fig. 49); both his life and his art were inspired by it. In his
early manhood he was banished from Nuremberg for denying the doctrines
of transubstantiation and the efficacy of baptism, and for entertaining
some vague socialistic and communistic opinions; but it is not clear to
what extent he held them, if he held them at all. He seems to have been
one of the most advanced of the religious Reformers, and he employed his
art in their service, as, for example, in a book entitled The Papacy,
which he illustrated with a series of seventy-four figures of the
different orders of monks in their peculiar costumes, beneath each of
which satirical lines were written. He is best known by his eighty-one
Bible-cuts, which were the most popular, perhaps, of the many series
published in that century, not excepting the impressive Bible figures of
Holbein; they passed through many editions, and were widely copied. The
first English Bible was illustrated by them. Besides these two series,
and one other in illustration of the Apocalypse, he designed many
separate prints, both in the small manner of the Little Masters and in
imitation of the large works of Maximilian, such as his Military Fête,
in honor of Charles V., his Fountain of Youth, and the prints of the
Marauding Soldiers, which measured four or five feet in length. His
representations of peasant life are peculiarly attractive, because of
the force of realism displayed in them, whether he depicted the marriage
festival, or mere jollity or drunken brawl. In the breadth of his
interests, in the variety of his subjects, and in his sympathy with the
special movements of his age, he was as an engraver more characteristic
of the civilization in which he lived than any other of the Little
Masters who gave their attention to wood-engraving. Of the rest of this
group none, excepting Hans Brosamer (1506-1552), left works in
wood-engraving of any consequence; he designed in a free and bold
manner, and his engravings are to be found in books of the third quarter
of the century.
[Illustration: FIG. 49.--Virgin and Child. From a print by Hans Sebald
Behaim.]
Other artists of this period devoted their attention to wood-engraving;
but as they did not mark any new progress in the art, or reflect any
aspect of German civilization which has not already been illustrated,
they need not be treated in any detail. Virgil Solis (1514-1562), a very
productive designer, who was employed by the Nuremberg printers to
illustrate the books by which they attempted to rival the productions of
the Lyonese press; Jobst Amman (1539-1591), whose excellent engravings
of costumes and trades are well known; Erhard Schön (d. 1550), Melchior
Lorch (1527-1586), whose works were of little merit; and Tobias Stimmer
(1539-1582), a popular designer for book illustration, are all who
deserve mention. Their engravings are inferior to the productions of
previous artists, and after their death the art in Germany fell into
speedy and irretrievable decay.
The work of the wood-engravers who were imbued with the German spirit
exhibits the same excellences and defects as other German work in art.
It is characterized by vigor principally, and in its higher range it has
great value, because of the imaginative and reflective spirit by which
it was animated; in its lower range, as a portrayal of life and manners,
it derives from its realism an extraordinary interest. Its great
deficiency is its lack of beauty, and is due to the inborn feebleness of
the sense of beauty in the German race; but, notwithstanding this
deformity, German wood-engraving was invaluably useful in its day in the
cities where it became so popular, because it was so widely and
variously practised, and entered into the life of the people in so many
ways with an effective influence of which it is difficult to form an
adequate conception. It facilitated the spread of literature and helped
on the progress of the Reformation to a degree which is little
recognized; it disseminated ideas and standards of art, and made them
common property; and, finally, it prepared the way for the great master
who was to embody in wood-engraving the highest excellence of art and
thought.
VI.
HANS HOLBEIN.
[Illustration: G FIG. 50.--From the “Epistole di San Hieronymo.”
Ferrara, 1497.]
Germany produced one artist who freed himself from the limitations of
taste and interest which the place of his birth imposed upon him, and
took rank with the great masters who seem to belong rather to the race
than to their native country. Hans Holbein was neither German nor
Italian, neither classical nor mediæval. The ideal of his art was not
determined by the culture of any single school, at home or abroad; far
less was it a jarring compromise between the aims and methods of
different schools; it grew out of a faithful study of all, and in it
were rationally blended the elements which were right in each. In style,
theme, and spirit he advanced so far beyond his contemporaries that he
became the first modern artist--the first to clear his vision from the
deceptions of religious enthusiasm, and to subdue in himself the
lawlessness of the romantic spirit; the first to perceive that only the
purely human interest gives lasting significance to any artistic work,
and to depict humanity simply for its own sake; the first to express
his meaning in a way which seems truthful and beautiful universally to
all cultivated men. In this lies the peculiar and profound value of his
works.
Holbein was born at Augsburg, in 1495 or 1496, into a family of artists.
In that city, then the centre of German culture, he grew up amid the
stir of curiosity and thought which attended the discovery of the
Western World and the first movements of the Reformation. He handled the
pencil and the brush from boyhood, and produced works as wonderful for
their precocious excellence as the early efforts of Mantegna; he was
deeply impressed by the secular and picturesque genius of Burgkmaier,
the great artist of Augsburg, who may have first opened to him the value
of beauty of detail, and inculcated in him that carefulness in respect
to it which afterward distinguished him; he seems, too, even at this
early period, to have been touched by some Italian influence which may
have reached Augsburg in consequence of the close commercial relations
between that city and Venice. Holbein, however, did not arrive at any
mature development until after he left Augsburg and removed to Bâsle,
whither he went in 1515, in order to earn his bread by making designs
for books--a trade which was then flourishing and lucrative in that
city. Bâsle offered conditions of life more favorable, in some respects,
to the development of energetic individuality than did Augsburg; it was
already the seat of humanistic literature, at the head of which was
Erasmus, and it soon became the safest refuge of the persecuted
Reformers. In such a city there was necessarily a vigorous intellectual
life and a free and liberal spirit, which must have exerted great
influence upon the young artist, who by his profession was brought into
intimate relations with the most learned and advanced thinkers about
him. Holbein was at once profoundly affected by the literary and reform
movements which he was called upon to aid by his designs, and he threw
himself into their service with energy and sympathy. His art, too, under
the influence of Italy, and under the rational direction of his own
thought, grew steadily more refined in ideal and more finished in
execution. He soon learned the value of formal beauty, and gave evidence
that the work of the last great German painter was not to be marred by
German tastelessness. Hitherto the masters of German art, led by a
realistic spirit which did not discriminate regularly and with certainty
between the different values of the lovely and the unlovely, had
expressed their thought and feeling in familiar forms, and,
consequently, often in forms which shared in the grotesqueness,
bordering on caricature, and in the homeliness, bordering on ugliness,
that characterized much of actual German life. Holbein, whose realism
was governed by cultivated taste, expressed his thought and feeling in
beautiful forms. His predecessors had used a dialect of art, as it were,
which could never seem perfectly natural or be immediately intelligible
to any but their own countrymen; Holbein acquired the true language of
art, and was as directly and completely intelligible to the refined
Englishman or Italian as to the citizen of Augsburg or Bâsle. Holbein
came, also, to an understanding of the true law of art; as he freed
himself from the Gothic dulness of sight in respect to beauty, he freed
himself from the Gothic license of reverie, fancy, and thought. He
limited himself to the clear and forcible expression of the idea he had
in mind; he admitted no details which interfered with his main purpose,
and which asserted a claim to be there for their own sake; he made every
accessary enforce or illustrate his principal design, and subordinated
each minor portion of his picture to the leading conception; he had one
purpose in view, and he preserved its unity. How different this was from
the practice of Dürer, who introduced into his work whatever came into
his mind, however remotely it might be associated with his subject, who
repeated almost wearisomely the same idea in varying symbolism, and
dissipated the intensity of the thought by distracting suggestion
crowded into any available space, need not be pointed out; in just the
proportion in which Dürer lost by his practice directness, simplicity,
and force, Holbein gained these by his own method, which was, indeed,
the method of great art, of the art which obeys reason, in distinction
from the art which yields to the wandering sentiment. Holbein differed
from Dürer in another respect: he thoroughly understood what he meant to
express; he would have nothing to do with vague dreaming or mystical
contemplation; he thought that whatever could not be definitely
conceived in the brain, and clearly expressed by line and color, lay
outside the domain of his art; he gave up the phantoms of the enthusiast
and the puzzle of the theologian to those who cared for them, and fixed
his attention on human life as he saw it and understood it. He often
treated religious subjects, but in no different spirit from that in
which he treated secular subjects; in all it is the human interest which
attracts him--the life of man as it exists within the bounds of
mortality. Thus he arrived not only at the true language and the true
law of art, but also at its true object. This development of his genius
did not take place suddenly and at once; it was a gradual growth, and
reached full maturity only in his closing years; but, while he still
worked at Bâsle, the essential lines of his development were clearly
marked, and he had advanced so far along them as to be even then the
most perfect artist whom the North had produced.
Holbein began to practise wood-engraving as soon as he settled in Bâsle,
and designed many titlepages, initial letters, and cuts for the
publishers of that city. The titlepages, which are numerous, were
usually in the form of an architectural frame, in which groups of
figures were introduced; they show how early his taste for the forms of
Italian architecture became pronounced, and how bold and free was his
power of drawing, and how highly developed was his sense of style, even
in his first efforts. He illustrated the books of the humanists,
especially the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, then a new and popular work;
and he designed the cuts for the biblical translations of Luther, and
for other publications of the Reformers. He served the Reformation, too,
in a humorous as well as in a serious way, for he was as much a master
of satire as of beauty. Two cuts in ridicule of the papal party are
particularly noticeable, one in which he satirizes the sale of
indulgences, contrasting it with true repentance; and one in which he
represents Christ as the Light of the World, with a group of sinners
approaching upon one side, and a group of papal dignitaries led by
Aristotle turning away on the other side. The illustrations in which he
depicts ordinary humble life, particularly the life of peasants and
children, make another great department of his lesser work in
wood-engraving; these scenes are sometimes separate cuts, and sometimes
introduced as backgrounds of initial letters, twenty alphabets of which
are ascribed to him; they represent the pastimes and sports of the
country, just as Holbein may have seen them at any time upon the
way-side, and are full of heartiness, humor, and reality. The sketches
from the life of boys and children are especially graceful and charming,
and reveal an ease and power in delineation which has seldom been
rivalled. This species of _genre_ art, which had first made its
appearance in wood-engraving, because it was considered beneath the
dignity of the higher arts, was very popular; by his work of this sort
Holbein contributed to the pleasure of the people, just as by his
co-operation with the Humanists and the Reformers he served them in more
important ways. Finally he produced at Bâsle his two great works in
wood-engraving, the Dance of Death and the Figures of the Bible, which
are the highest achievements of the art at any time.