DURER AND SALVATOR.
"EMIGRAVIT."
§ 1. BY referring to the first analysis of our subject, it will be seen
we have next to examine the art which cannot conquer the evil, but
remains at war with, or in captivity to it.
Up to the time of the Reformation it was possible for men even of the
highest powers of intellect to obtain a tranquillity of faith, in the
highest degree favorable to the pursuit of any particular art. Possible,
at least, we see it to have been; there is no need--nor, so far as I
see, any ground, for argument about it. I am myself unable to understand
how it was so; but the fact is unquestionable. It is not that I wonder
at men's trust in the Pope's infallibility, or in his virtue; nor at
their surrendering their private judgment; nor at their being easily
cheated by imitations of miracles; nor at their thinking indulgences
could be purchased with money. But I wonder at this one thing only; the
acceptance of the doctrine of eternal punishment as dependent on
accident of birth, or momentary excitement of devotional feeling. I
marvel at the acceptance of the system (as stated in its fulness by
Dante) which condemned guiltless persons to the loss of heaven because
they had lived before Christ, and which made the obtaining of Paradise
turn frequently on a passing thought or a momentary invocation. How this
came to pass, it is no part of our work here to determine. That in this
faith, it was possible to attain entire peace of mind; to live calmly,
and die hopefully, is indisputable.
§ 2. But this possibility ceased at the Reformation. Thenceforward human
life became a school of debate, troubled and fearful. Fifteen hundred
years of spiritual teaching were called into fearful question, whether
indeed it had been teaching by angels or devils? Whatever it had been,
there was no longer any way of trusting it peacefully.
A dark time for all men. We cannot now conceive it. The great horror of
it lay in this:--that, as in the trial-hour of the Greek, the heavens
themselves seemed to have deceived those who had trusted in them.
"We had prayed with tears; we had loved with our hearts. There was no
choice of way open to us. No guidance from God or man, other than this,
and behold, it was a lie. 'When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He
shall guide you into all truth.' And He has guided us into _no_ truth.
There can be no such Spirit. There is no Advocate, no Comforter. Has
there been no Resurrection?"
§ 3. Then came the Resurrection of Death. Never since man first saw him,
face to face, had his terror been so great. "Swallowed up in victory:"
alas! no; but king over all the earth. All faith, hope, and fond belief
were betrayed. Nothing of futurity was now sure but the grave.
For the Pan-Athenaic Triumph and the Feast of Jubilee, there came up,
through fields of spring, the dance of Death.
The brood of weak men fled from the face of him. A new Bacchus and his
crew this, with worm for snake and gall for wine. They recoiled to such
pleasure as yet remained possible to them--feeble infidelities, and
luxurious sciences, and so went their way.
§ 4. At least, of the men with whom we are concerned--the artists--this
was almost the universal fate. They gave themselves to the following of
pleasure only; and as a religious school, after a few pale rays of
fading sanctity from Guido, and brown gleams of gipsy Madonnahood from
Murillo, came utterly to an end.
Three men only stood firm, facing the new Dionysiac revel, to see what
would come of it.
Two in the north, Holbein and Durer, and, later, one in the south,
Salvator.
But the ground on which they stood differed strangely; Durer and
Holbein, amidst the formal delights, the tender religions, and practical
science, of domestic life and honest commerce. Salvator, amidst the
pride of lascivious wealth, and the outlawed distress of impious
poverty.
§ 5. It would be impossible to imagine any two phases of scenery or
society more contrary in character, more opposite in teaching, than
those surrounding Nuremberg and Naples, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. What they were then, both districts still to all general
intents remain. The cities have in each case lost their splendor and
power, but not their character. The surrounding scenery remains wholly
unchanged. It is still in our power, from the actual aspect of the
places, to conceive their effect on the youth of the two painters.
[Illustration: 76. The Moat of Nuremberg.]
§ 6. Nuremberg is gathered at the base of a sandstone rock, rising in
the midst of a dry but fertile plain. The rock forms a prolonged and
curved ridge, of which the concave side, at the highest point, is
precipitous; the other slopes gradually to the plain. Fortified with
wall and tower along its whole crest, and crowned with a stately castle,
it defends the city--not with its precipitous side--but with its slope.
The precipice is turned to the town. It wears no aspect of hostility
towards the surrounding fields; the roads lead down into them by gentle
descents from the gates. To the south and east the walls are on the
level of the plain; within them, the city itself stands on two swells of
hill, divided by a winding river. Its architecture has, however, been
much overrated. The effect of the streets, so delightful to the eye of
the passing traveller, depends chiefly on one appendage of the roof,
namely, its warehouse windows. Every house, almost without exception,
has at least one boldly opening dormer window, the roof of which
sustains a pulley for raising goods; and the underpart of this strong
overhanging roof is always carved with a rich pattern, not of refined
design, but effective.[1] Among these comparatively modern structures
are mingled, however, not unfrequently, others, turreted at the angles,
which are true Gothic of the fifteenth, some of the fourteenth, century;
and the principal churches remain nearly as in Durer's time. Their
Gothic is none of it good, nor even rich (though the façades have their
ornament so distributed as to give them a sufficiently elaborate
effect at a distance); their size is diminutive; their interiors mean,
rude, and ill-proportioned, wholly dependent for their interest on
ingenious stone cutting in corners, and finely-twisted ironwork; of
these the mason's exercises are in the worst possible taste, possessing
not even the merit of delicate execution; but the designs in metal are
usually meritorious, and Fischer's shrine of St. Sebald is good, and may
rank with Italian work.[2]
§ 7. Though, however, not comparable for an instant to any great Italian
or French city, Nuremberg possesses one character peculiar to itself,
that of a self-restrained, contented, quaint domesticity. It would be
vain to expect any first-rate painting, sculpture, or poetry, from the
well-regulated community of merchants of small ware. But it is evident
they were affectionate and trustworthy--that they had playful fancy, and
honorable pride. There is no exalted grandeur in their city, nor any
deep beauty; but an imaginative homeliness, mingled with some elements
of melancholy and power, and a few even of grace.
This homeliness, among many other causes, arises out of one in chief.
The richness of the houses depends, as I just said, on the dormer
windows: but their deeper character on the pitch and space of roofs. I
had to notice long ago how much our English cottage depended for
expression on its steep roof. The German house does so in far greater
degree. Plate 76 is engraved[3] from a slight pen-and-ink sketch of mine
on the ramparts of Nuremberg, showing a piece of its moat and wall, and
a little corner of the city beneath the castle; of which the tower on
the extreme right rises just in front of Durer's house. The character
of this scene approaches more nearly that which Durer would see in his
daily walks, than most of the modernized inner streets. In Durer's own
engraving, "The Cannon," the distance (of which the most important
passage is facsimiled in my Elements of Drawing, p. 111) is an actual
portrait of part of the landscape seen from those castle ramparts,
looking towards Franconian Switzerland.
§ 8. If the reader will be at the pains to turn to it, he will see at a
glance the elements of the Nuremberg country, as they still exist.
Wooden cottages, thickly grouped, enormously high in the roofs; the
sharp church spire, small and slightly grotesque, surmounting them;
beyond, a richly cultivated, healthy plain bounded by woody hills. By a
strange coincidence the very plant which constitutes the staple produce
of those fields, is in almost ludicrous harmony with the grotesqueness
and neatness of the architecture around; and one may almost fancy that
the builders of the little knotted spires and turrets of the town, and
workers of its dark iron flowers, are in spiritual presence, watching
and guiding the produce of the field,--when one finds the footpaths
bordered everywhere, by the bossy spires and lustrous jetty flowers of
the black hollyhock.
§ 9. Lastly, when Durer penetrated among those hills of Franconia he
would find himself in a pastoral country, much resembling the Gruyère
districts of Switzerland, but less thickly inhabited, and giving in its
steep, though not lofty, rocks,--its scattered pines,--and its
fortresses and chapels, the motives of all the wilder landscape
introduced by the painter in such pieces as his St. Jerome, or St.
Hubert. His continual and forced introduction of sea in almost every
scene, much as it seems to me to be regretted, is possibly owing to his
happy recollections of the sea-city where he received the rarest of all
rewards granted to a good workman; and, for once in his life, was
understood.
§ 10. Among this pastoral simplicity and formal sweetness of domestic
peace, Durer had to work out his question concerning the grave. It
haunted him long; he learned to engrave death's heads well before he had
done with it; looked deeper than any other man into those strange rings,
their jewels lost; and gave answer at last conclusively in his great
Knight and Death--of which more presently. But while the Nuremberg
landscape is still fresh in our minds, we had better turn south quickly
and compare the elements of education which formed, and of creation
which companioned, Salvator.
§ 11. Born with a wild and coarse nature (how coarse I will show you
soon), but nevertheless an honest one, he set himself in youth hotly to
the war, and cast himself carelessly on the current of life. No
rectitude of ledger-lines stood in his way; no tender precision of
household customs; no calm successions of rural labor. But past his
half-starved lips rolled profusion of pitiless wealth; before him glared
and swept the troops of shameless pleasure. Above him muttered Vesuvius;
beneath his feet shook the Solfatara.
In heart disdainful, in temper adventurous; conscious of power,
impatient of labor, and yet more of the pride of the patrons of his
youth, he fled to the Calabrian hills, seeking, not knowledge, but
freedom. If he was to be surrounded by cruelty and deceit, let them at
least be those of brave men or savage beasts, not of the timorous and
the contemptible. Better the wrath of the robber, than enmity of the
priest; and the cunning of the wolf than of the hypocrite.
§ 12. We are accustomed to hear the south of Italy spoken of as a
beautiful country. Its mountain forms are graceful above others, its
sea-bays exquisite in outline and hue; but it is only beautiful in
superficial aspect. In closer detail it is wild and melancholy. Its
forests are sombre-leafed, labyrinth-stemmed; the carubbe, the olive,
laurel, and ilex, are alike in that strange feverish twisting of their
branches, as if in spasms of half human pain:--Avernus forests; one
fears to break their boughs, lest they should cry to us from their
rents; the rocks they shade are of ashes, or thrice-molten lava; iron
sponge, whose every pore has been filled with fire. Silent villages,
earthquake-shaken, without commerce, without industry, without
knowledge, without hope, gleam in white ruin from hill-side to
hill-side; far-winding wrecks of immemorial walls surround the dust of
cities long forsaken: the mountain streams moan through the cold arches
of their foundations, green with weed, and rage over the heaps of their
fallen towers. Far above, in thunder-blue serration, stand the eternal
edges of the angry Apennine, dark with rolling impendence of volcanic
cloud.
§ 13. Yet even among such scenes as these, Salvator might have been
calmed and exalted, had he been, indeed, capable of exaltation. But he
was not of high temper enough to perceive beauty. He had not the sacred
sense--the sense of color; all the loveliest hues of the Calabrian air
were invisible to him; the sorrowful desolation of the Calabrian
villages unfelt. He saw only what was gross and terrible,--the jagged
peak, the splintered tree, the flowerless bank of grass, and wandering
weed, prickly and pale. His temper confirmed itself in evil, and became
more and more fierce and morose; though not, I believe, cruel,
ungenerous, or lascivious. I should not suspect Salvator of wantonly
inflicting pain. His constantly painting it does not prove he delighted
in it; he felt the horror of it, and in that horror, fascination. Also,
he desired fame, and saw that here was an untried field rich enough in
morbid excitement to catch the humor of his indolent patrons. But the
gloom gained upon him, and grasped him. He could jest, indeed, as men
jest in prison-yards (he became afterwards a renowned mime in Florence);
his satires are full of good mocking, but his own doom to sadness is
never repealed.
§ 14. Of all men whose work I have ever studied, he gives me most
distinctly the idea of a lost spirit. Michelet calls him "Ce damné
Salvator," perhaps in a sense merely harsh and violent; the epithet to
me seems true in a more literal, more merciful sense,--"That condemned
Salvator." I see in him, notwithstanding all his baseness, the last
traces of spiritual life in the art of Europe. He was the last man to
whom the thought of a spiritual existence presented itself as a
conceivable reality. All succeeding men, however powerful--Rembrandt,
Rubens, Vandyke, Reynolds--would have mocked at the idea of a spirit.
They were men of the world; they are never in earnest, and they are
never appalled. But Salvator was capable of pensiveness, of faith, and
of fear. The misery of the earth is a marvel to him; he cannot leave off
gazing at it. The religion of the earth is a horror to him. He gnashes
his teeth at it, rages at it, mocks and gibes at it. He would have
acknowledged religion, had he seen any that was true. Anything rather
than that baseness which he did see. "If there is no other religion
than this of pope and cardinals, let us to the robber's ambush and the
dragon's den." He was capable of fear also. The gray spectre,
horse-headed, striding across the sky--(in the Pitti Palace)--its bat
wings spread, green bars of the twilight seen between its bones; it was
no play to him--the painting of it. Helpless Salvator! A little early
sympathy, a word of true guidance, perhaps, had saved him. What says he
of himself? "Despiser of wealth and of death." Two grand scorns; but,
oh, condemned Salvator! the question is not for man what he can scorn,
but what he can love.
§ 15. I do not care to trace the various hold which Hades takes on this
fallen soul. It is no part of my work here to analyze his art, nor even
that of Durer; all that we need to note is the opposite answer they gave
to the question about death.
To Salvator it came in narrow terms. Desolation, without hope,
throughout the fields of nature he had to explore; hypocrisy and
sensuality, triumphant and shameless, in the cities from which he
derived his support. His life, so far as any nobility remained in it,
could only pass in horror, disdain, or despair. It is difficult to say
which of the three prevails most in his common work; but his answer to
the great question was of despair only. He represents "Umana Fragilita"
by the type of a skeleton with plumy wings, leaning over a woman and
child; the earth covered with ruin round them--a thistle, casting its
seed, the only fruit of it. "Thorns, also, and thistles shall it bring
forth to thee." The same tone of thought marks all Salvator's more
earnest work.
§ 16. On the contrary, in the sight of Durer, things were for the most
part as they ought to be. Men did their work in his city and in the
fields round it. The clergy were sincere. Great social questions
unagitated; great social evils either non-existent, or seemingly a part
of the nature of things, and inevitable. His answer was that of patient
hope; and twofold, consisting of one design in praise of Fortitude, and
another in praise of Labor. The Fortitude, commonly known as the "Knight
and Death," represents a knight riding through a dark valley overhung by
leafless trees, and with a great castle on a hill beyond. Beside him,
but a little in advance, rides Death on a pale horse. Death is
gray-haired and crowned;--serpents wreathed about his crown; (the sting
of death involved in the kingly power). He holds up the hour-glass, and
looks earnestly into the knight's face. Behind him follows Sin; but Sin
powerless; he has been conquered and passed by, but follows yet,
watching if any way of assault remains. On his forehead are two horns--I
think, of sea-shell--to indicate his insatiableness and instability. He
has also the twisted horns of the ram, for stubbornness, the ears of an
ass, the snout of a swine, the hoofs of a goat. Torn wings hang useless
from his shoulders, and he carries a spear with two hooks, for catching
as well as wounding. The knight does not heed him, nor even Death,
though he is conscious of the presence of the last.
He rides quietly, his bridle firm in his hand, and his lips set close in
a slight sorrowful smile, for he hears what Death is saying; and hears
it as the word of a messenger who brings pleasant tidings, thinking to
bring evil ones. A little branch of delicate heath is twisted round his
helmet. His horse trots proudly and straight; its head high, and with a
cluster of oak on the brow where on the fiend's brow is the sea-shell
horn. But the horse of Death stoops its head; and its rein catches the
little bell which hangs from the knight's horse-bridle, making it toll,
as a passing bell.[4]
§ 17. Durer's second answer is the plate of "Melencholia," which is the
history of the sorrowful toil of the earth, as the "Knight and Death" is
of its sorrowful patience under temptation.
Salvator's answer, remember, is in both respects that of despair. Death
as he reads, lord of temptation, is victor over the spirit of man; and
lord of ruin, is victor over the work of man. Durer declares the sad,
but unsullied conquest over Death the tempter; and the sad, but
enduring conquest over Death the destroyer.
§ 18. Though the general intent of the Melencholia is clear, and to be
felt at a glance, I am in some doubt respecting its special symbolism. I
do not know how far Durer intended to show that labor, in many of its
most earnest forms, is closely connected with the morbid sadness, or
"dark anger," of the northern nations. Truly some of the best work ever
done for man, has been in that dark anger;[5] but I have not yet been
able to determine for myself how far this is necessary, or how far great
work may also be done with cheerfulness. If I knew what the truth was, I
should be able to interpret Durer better; meantime the design seems to
me his answer to the complaint, "Yet is his strength labor and sorrow."
"Yes," he replies, "but labor and sorrow are his strength."
§ 19. The labor indicated is in the daily work of men. Not the inspired
or gifted labor of the few (it is labor connected with the sciences, not
with the arts), shown in its four chief functions: thoughtful, faithful,
calculating and executing.
Thoughtful, first; all true power coming of that resolved, resistless
calm of melancholy thought. This is the first and last message of the
whole design. Faithful, the right arm of the spirit resting on the book.
Calculating (chiefly in the sense of self-command), the compasses in her
right hand. Executive--roughest instruments of labor at her feet: a
crucible, and geometrical solids, indicating her work in the sciences.
Over her head the hour-glass and the bell, for their continual words,
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do." Beside her, childish labor
(lesson-learning?) sitting on an old millstone, with a tablet on its
knees. I do not know what instrument it has in its hand. At her knees, a
wolf-hound asleep. In the distance, a comet (the disorder and
threatening of the universe) setting, the rainbow dominant over it. Her
strong body is close girded for work; at her waist hang the keys of
wealth; but the coin is cast aside contemptuously under her feet. She
has eagles' wings, and is crowned with fair leafage of spring.
Yes, Albert of Nuremberg, it was a noble answer, yet an imperfect one.
This is indeed the labor which is crowned with laurel and has the wings
of the eagle. It was reserved for another country to prove, for another
hand to portray, the labor which is crowned with fire, and has the wings
of the bat.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] To obtain room for the goods, the roofs slope steeply, and their
other dormer windows are richly carved--but all are of wood; and, for
the most part, I think, some hundred years later than Durer's time. A
large number of the oriel and bow windows on the façades are wooden
also, and of recent date.
[2] His piece in the cathedral of Magdeburg is strangely inferior,
wanting both the grace of composition and bold handling of the St.
Sebald's. The bronze fountains at Nuremberg (three, of fame, in as
many squares) are highly wrought, and have considerable merit; the
ordinary ironwork of the houses, with less pretension, is, perhaps,
more truly artistic. In Plate 52, the right-hand figure is a
characteristic example of the bell-handle at the door of a private
house, composed of a wreath of flowers and leafage twisted in a
spiral round an upright rod, the spiral terminating below in a
delicate tendril; the whole of wrought iron. It is longer than
represented, some of the leaf-links of the chain being omitted in the
dotted spaces, as well as the handle, which, though often itself of
leafage, is always convenient for the hand.
[3] By Mr. Le Keux, very admirably.
[4] This was first pointed out to me by a friend--Mr. Robin Allen. It
is a beautiful thought; yet, possibly, an after-thought, I have some
suspicion that there is an alteration in the plate at that place, and
that the rope to which the bell hangs was originally the line of the
chest of the nearer horse, as the grass-blades about the lifted hind
leg conceal the lines which could not, in Durer's way of work, be
effaced, indicating its first intended position. What a proof of his
general decision of handling is involved in this "repentir"!
[5] "Yet withal, you see that the Monarch is a great, valiant,
cautious, melancholy, commanding man"--Friends in Council, last
volume, p. 269; Milverton giving an account of Titian's picture of
Charles the Fifth. (Compare Ellesmere's description of Milverton
himself, p. 140.) Read carefully also what is said further on
respecting Titian's freedom, and fearless with holding of flattery;
comparing it with the note on Giorgione and Titian.