GERMAN ART--ALBRECHT DÜRER, 1471-1528.
Albrecht Dürer carries us to a different country and a different race.
And he who has been called the father of German painting is thoroughly
German, not only in his Saxon honesty, sedateness, and strength, but in
the curious mixture of simplicity, subtlety, homeliness, and
fantasticalness, which are still found side by side in German genius.
Albrecht Dürer was born at that fittest birth-place for the great German
painter, quaint old Nuremberg, in 1471. He was the son of a goldsmith,
and one of a family of eighteen children; a home school in which he may
have learnt early the noble, manly lessons of self-denial and endurance,
which he practised long and well. He was trained to his father's trade
until the lad's bent became so unmistakable that he was wisely
transferred to the studio of a painter to serve his apprenticeship to
art.
When the Nuremberg apprenticeship was completed, Albrecht followed the
German custom, very valuable to him, of serving another and a 'wandering
apprenticeship,' which carried him betimes through Germany, the
Netherlands, and Italy, painting and studying as he went. He painted his
own portrait about this time, showing himself a comely, pleasant, and
pleased young fellow, in a curious holiday suit of plaited low-bodied
shirt, jerkin, and mantle across the shoulder, with a profusion of long
fair curls, of which he was said to have been vain, arranged elaborately
on each side, the blue eyes looking with frank confidence out of the
blonde face. He painted himself a little later with the brave kindly
face grown mature, and the wisdom of the spirit shining in the eyes, and
weighing on the brows.
On his return from his travels, Albrecht Dürer's father arranged his
son's marriage with the daughter of a musician in Nuremberg. The
inducement to the marriage seems to have been, on the father's part, the
dowry, and on the son's the beauty of the bride. How unhappy the union
proved, without any fault of Albrecht's, has been the theme of so many
stories, that I am half inclined to think that some of us must be more
familiar with Albrecht Dürer's wedded life than with any other part of
his history. It seems to me, that there is considerable exaggeration in
these stories, for granted that Agnes Dürer was a shrew and a miser, was
Albrecht Dürer the man to be entirely, or greatly, at such a woman's
mercy? Taking matters at their worst, dishonour and disgrace did not
come near the great painter. He was esteemed, as he deserved to be; he
had a true friend in his comrade Pirkheimer; he had his art; he had the
peace of a good conscience; he had the highest of all consolations in
his faith in Heaven. Certainly it is not from Albrecht himself that the
tale of his domestic wretchedness has come. He was as manfully patient
and silent as one might have expected in a man upright, firm, and
self-reliant as he was tender. I do not think it is good for men, and
especially for women, to indulge in egotistical sentimentality, and to
believe that such a woman as Agnes Dürer could utterly thwart and wreck
the life of a man like Albrecht. It is not true to life, in the first
place; and it is dishonouring to the man, in the second; for although,
doubtless, there are men who are driven to destruction or heart-broken
by even the follies of women, these men have not the stout hearts, the
loyal spirits, the manly mould of Albrecht Dürer.
But making every allowance for the high colours with which a tale that
has grown stale is apt to be daubed, I am forced to admit the inference
that a mean, sordid, contentious woman probably did as much as was in
her power to harass and fret one of the best men in Germany, or in the
world. Luckily for himself, Albrecht was a severe student, had much
engrossing work which carried him abroad, and travelled once at least
far away from the harassing and galling home discipline. For anything
further, I believe that Albrecht loved his greedy, scolding wife, whose
fair face he painted frequently in his pictures, and whom he left at
last well and carefully provided for, as he bore with her to the end.
In 1506 Albrecht Dürer re-visited Italy alone, making a stay of eight
months in Venice, where he formed his friendship with the old Gian
Bellini, and where Albrecht had the misfortune to show the proofs and
plans of his engravings to the Italian engraver, Raimondi, who engraved
Raphael's paintings, and who proved himself base enough to steal and
make use of Albrecht Dürer's designs to the German's serious loss and
inconvenience.
A little later Albrecht Dürer, accompanied by his wife, visited the
Netherlands. The Emperor Maximilian treated the painter with great
favour, and a legend survives of their relations:--Dürer was painting so
large a subject that he required steps to reach it. The Emperor, who was
present, required a nobleman of his suite to steady the steps for the
painter, an employment which the nobleman declined as unworthy of his
rank, when the Emperor himself stepped forward and supplied the
necessary aid, remarking, 'Sir, understand that I can make Albrecht a
noble like and above you' (Maximilian had just raised Albrecht Dürer to
the rank of noble of the empire), 'but neither I nor any one else can
make an artist like him.' We may compare this story with a similar and
later story of Holbein and Henry VIII., and with another earlier story,
having a slight variation, of Titian and Charles V. The universality of
the story shakes one's belief in its individual application, but at
least the legend, with different names, remains as an indication of
popular homage to genius.
While executing a large amount of work for the great towns and sovereign
princes of Germany, some of whom were said to consult the painter on
their military operations, relying on his knowledge of mathematics, and
his being able to apply it to military engineering and fortification,
Albrecht Dürer was constantly improving and advancing in his art, laying
down his prejudices, and acquiring fresh ideas, as well as fresh
information, according to the slow but sure process of the true German
mind, till his last work was incomparably his best.
Germany was then in the terrible throes of the Reformation, and Albrecht
Dürer, who has left us the portraits of several of the great Reformers,
is believed to have been no uninterested spectator of the struggle, and
to have held, like his fellow-painter, Lucas Cranach--though in Albrecht
Dürer's case the change was never openly professed--the doctrines of the
Reformation.
There is a portrait of Albrecht Dürer, painted by himself, in his later
years. (By the way, Albrecht was not averse to painting his own portrait
as well as that of his friend Pirkheimer, and of making the fullest
claim to his work by introducing into his religious and historical
pictures his own figure holding a flag or tablet, inscribed with his
name in the quiet self-assertion of a man who was neither ashamed of
himself, nor of anything he did.) In that last portrait, Albrecht is a
thoughtful, care-worn man, with his fair locks shorn. Some will
attribute the change to Agnes Dürer, but I imagine it proceeds simply
from the noble scars of work and time; and that when Albrecht Dürer died
in his fifty-seventh year, if it were in sourness and bitterness of
spirit, as some of his biographers have stated, that sourness and
bitterness were quite as much owing to the grievous troubles of his time
and country, which so large-minded a man was sure to lay to heart, as to
any domestic trouble. Albrecht Dürer was greatly beloved by his own city
of Nuremberg, where his memory continues to be cherished. His quaint
house still stands, and his tomb bears the motto 'Emigravit,'
'For the great painter never dies.'
Albrecht Dürer's name ranks with the names of the first painters of any
time or country, though his work as a painter was, as in the case of
William Hogarth, subservient to his work as an engraver. With the
knowledge of a later generation to that of the earliest Italian and
Flemish painters, Albrecht Dürer had much of their singleness of
purpose, assiduity of application, and profound feeling. He had to
labour against a tendency to uncouthness in stiff lines and angular
figures; to petty elaboration of details; and to that grotesqueness
which, while it suited in some respects his allegorical engravings,
marred his historical paintings, so that he was known to regret the
wasted fantastic crowding and confusion of his earlier work. From the
Italians and Flemings he learnt simplicity, and a more correct sense of
material beauty. The purity, truth, and depth of the man's spirit, from
which ideal beauty proceeds, no man could add to.
Among Albrecht Dürer's greatest paintings are his 'Adoration of the
Trinity' at Vienna, his 'Adam and Eve' at Florence, and that last
picture of 'The Apostles,' presented by Albrecht Dürer to his native
city, 'in remembrance of his career as an artist, and at the same time
as conveying to his fellow-citizens an earnest and lasting exhortation
suited to that stormy period.' The prominence given to the Bible in the
picture, points to it as the last appeal in the great spiritual
struggle. With regard to this noble masterly picture, Kugler has
written, 'Well might the artist now close his eyes. He had in this
picture attained the summit of art; here he stands side by side with the
greatest masters known in history.'
But I prefer to say something of Albrecht Dürer's engravings, which are
more characteristic of him and far more widely known than his paintings;
and to speak first of those two wonderful and beautiful allegories,
'Knight, Death, and the Devil,' and 'Melancolia.' In the first, which is
an embodiment of weird German romance as well as of high Christian
faith, the solitary Knight, with his furrowed face and battered armour,
rides steadfastly on through the dark glen, unmoved by his grisly
companions, skeleton Death on the lame horse, and the foul Fiend in
person. Contrast this sketch and its thoughtful touching meaning with
the hollow ghastliness of Holbein's 'Dance of Death.'
In 'Melancolia' a grand winged woman sits absorbed in sorrowful thought,
while surrounded by all the appliances of philosophy, science, art,
mechanics, all the discoveries made before and in Albrecht Dürer's day,
in the book, the chart, the lever, the crystal, the crucible, the plane,
the hammer. The intention of this picture has been disputed, but the
best explanation of it is that which regards the woman as pondering on
the humanly unsolved and insoluble mystery of the sin and sorrow of
life.
In three large series of woodcuts, known as the Greater and the Lesser
Passion of the Lord, and the Life of the Virgin, and taken partly from
sacred history and partly from tradition, Albrecht Dürer exceeded
himself in true beauty, simple majesty, and pathos. Photographs have
spread widely these fine woodcuts, and there is, at least, one which I
think my readers may have seen, 'The Bearing of the Cross,' in which the
blessed Saviour sinks under his burden. In the series of the Life of the
Virgin there is a 'Repose in Egypt,' which has a naïve homeliness in its
grace and serenity. The woodcut represents a courtyard with a dwelling
built in the ruins of an ancient palace. The Virgin sits spinning with
a distaff and spindle beside the Holy Child's cradle, by which beautiful
angels worship. Joseph is busy at his carpenter's work, and a number of
little angels, in merry sport, assist him with his labours.[17]
I shall mention only one more work of Albrecht Dürer's, that which is
known as the Emperor Maximilian's Prayer Book. This is pen-and-ink
sketches for the borders of a book (as the old missals were
illuminated), which are now preserved in the Royal Library, Munich. In
these little drawings the fancy of the great artist held high revel, by
no means confining itself to serious subjects, such as apostles, monks,
or even men in armour, but indulging in the most whimsical vagaries,
with regard to little German old women, imps, piping squirrels, with
cocks and hens hurrying to listen to the melody.