From the steps of Kaiser Wilhelm II.’s throne we must hasten through the ages to Kaiser Maximilian’s city, Nuremberg — to the days when Wilhelm’s ancestors were but Margraves of Brandenburg, scarcely much more than the Burggraves of Nuremberg they had originally been.
From the days of the Maxim gun and the Lee-Metford to the days of the howitzer and the blunderbuss. When York was farther away from London than New York is to-day.
When the receipt of a written letter was fact but few could boast of; and a secret billet-doux might cause the sender to be flung in gaol. When the morning’s milk was unaccompanied by the morning news; for the printer’s press was in its infancy.
When the stranding of a whale was an event of European interest, and the form of a rhinoceros the subject of wild conjecture and childish imagination.
When this patient earth of ours was to our ancestors merely a vast pancake toasted daily by a circling sun.
PLATE II. — PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN
(From the Oil-painting in the Berlin Museum)
This beautiful portrait represents, artistically, the zenith of Dürer’s art. It shows Venetian influence so strongly, and is painted with so much serenity of manner, that one is almost inclined to doubt its ascription.
When the woods were full of hobgoblins, and scaly Beelzebubs were busily engaged in pitching the souls of the damned down a yawning hell-mouth, and the angels of the Lord in crimson and brocade carried the blessed heavenward. In those days scholars filled their books with a curious jumble of theology, philosophy, and old women’s talk. Dr. Faustus practised black magic, and the besom-steeds carried witches from the Brocken far and wide into all lands.
Then no one ventured far from home unaccompanied, and the merchants were bold adventurers, and Kings of Scotland might envy Nuremberg burgesses — so Æneas Sylvius said.
And that a touch of humour be not lacking, I bid you remember that my lady dipped her dainty fingers into the stew, and, after, threw the bare bones to the dogs below the table; and I also bid you remember that satins and fine linen oft clothed an unwashed body.
Cruel plagues, smallpox, and all manner of disease and malformations inflicted a far greater number than nowadays, and the sad ignorance of doctors brewed horrid draughts amongst the skulls, skeletons, stuffed birds, and crocodiles of their fearsome-looking “surgeries.”
In short, it was a “poetic” age; when all the world was full of mysteries and possibilities, and the sanest and most level-headed were outrageously fantastic.
There are people who will tell you that the world is very much the same to-day as it was yesterday, and that, after all, human nature is human nature in all ages all the world over. But, beyond the fact that we all are born and we all must die, there is little in common between you and me — between us of to-day and those of yesterday — and we resemble each other most nearly in things that do not matter.
Frankly, therefore, Albrecht Dürer, who was born on May 21, 1471, is a human being from another world, and unless you realise that too, I doubt you can understand him, much less admire him.
For his Art is not beautiful.
Germans have never been able to create anything beautiful in Art: their sense of beauty soars into Song.
But even whilst I am writing these words it occurs to me that they are no longer true, for the German of to-day is no longer the German of yesterday, “standing peaceful on his scientific watch-tower; and to the raging, struggling multitude here and elsewhere solemnly, from hour to hour, with preparatory blast of cow-horn emit his ‘Höret ihr Herren und lasst’s euch sagen’ ...” as Carlyle pictures him; he is most certainly not like the Lutheran German with a child’s heart and a boy’s rash courage.
Frankly I say you cannot admire Dürer if you be honestly ignorant or ignorantly honest.
We of to-day are too level-headed; our brains cannot encompass the world that crowded Dürer’s dreams.
For the German’s brain was always crowded; he had not that nice sense of space and emptiness that makes Italian Art so pleasant to look upon, and which the Japanese employ with astonishing subtlety. You remember Wagner’s words in Goethe’s “Faust” —
“Zwar weiss ich viel; doch möcht ich Alles wissen.”
(I know a lot, yet wish that I knew All.)
It is not only his eagerness to show you all he knows, but also his ravenous desire to know all that is to be known. Hence we speak of German thoroughness, at once his boast and his modesty.
Here again I have to pull up. Generalisations are so easy, appear so justified, and are more often than not misleading.
Dürer was not a pure-blooded Teuton; his father came from Eytas in Hungary.
Eytas translated into German is Thür (Door), and a man from Thür a Thürer or Dürer.
That German music owes a debt of gratitude to Hungary is acknowledged. Does Dürer owe his greatness to the strain of foreign blood?
Possibly; but it does not matter. He was a man, and a profound man, therefore akin to all the world, as Dante and Michelangelo, as Shakespeare and Millet. Born into German circumstances he appears in German habit — that is all.
His father Albrecht was a goldsmith, and Albrecht the son having shown himself worthy of a better education than his numerous brothers, was, after finishing school, apprenticed to and would have remained a goldsmith, had his artistic nature not drawn him to Art; at least so his biographer, i.e. the painter himself, tells us. It was not the artist alone who longed for freer play, for freer expression of his faculties. It was to a great extent, I feel sure, the thinker.
Dürer took himself tremendously seriously; were it not for some letters that he has left us, and some episodes in his graphic art, one might be led to imagine that Dürer knew not laughter, scarcely even a smile. He consequently thought it of importance to acquaint the world with all the details of his life and work, recording even the moods which prompted him to do this or that. In Dürer the desire to live was entirely absorbed in the desire to think. He was not a man of action, and the records of his life are filled by accounts of what he saw, what he thought, and what others thought of him; coupled with frequent complaints of jealousies and lack of appreciation. Dürer was deep but narrow, and in that again he reflects the religious spirit of Protestantism, not the wider culture of Humanism. His ego looms large in his consciousness, and it is the salvation of the soul rather than the expansion of the mind which concerns him; but withal he is like Luther — a Man.
His idea then of Art was, that it “should be employed,” as he himself explained, “in the service of the Church to set forth the sufferings of Christ and such like subjects, and it should also be employed to preserve the features of men after their death.” A narrow interpretation of a world-embracing realm.
The scope of this little volume will not admit of a detailed account of Dürer’s life.
We may not linger on the years of his apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut, where he suffered much from his fellow-’prentices. We must not accompany him on his wanderjahre, these being the three years of peregrination which always followed the years of apprenticeship.
Neither may we record details, as of his marriage with Agnes Frey— “mein Agnes,” upon his return home in 1494. “His Agnes” was apparently a good housewife and a shrewd business woman, to whom he afterwards largely entrusted the sale of his prints.
He had a great struggle for a living. And here an amusing analogy occurs to me. Painting does not pay, he complains at one time, and therefore he devotes himself to “black and white.”
Was it ever thus? Would that some of our own struggling artists remembered Dürer, and even when they find themselves compelled to do something to keep the pot aboiling, at any rate do their best.
PLATE III. — PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
(From the Oil-painting in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich)
This picture bears the date 1500 and a Latin inscription, “I, Albert Dürer, of Nuremberg, painted my own portrait here in the proper colours
, at the age of twenty-eight.”
According to Thausing, this picture had a curious fate. The panel on which it was painted was sawn in two by an engraver to whom it was lent, and who affixed the back to his own poor copy of the picture — thus using the seal of the Nuremberg magistrates, which was placed upon it, to authenticate his copy as a genuine work of the master.
We have it on Dürer’s own authority that he took up etching and wood-engraving because it paid better. And strange — into this bread-and-butter work he put his best.
It is not his painting that made his fame and name, though in that branch of Art he was admired by a Raphael and a Bellini.
Agnes Frey bore him no children; this fact, I think, is worthy of note. Even a cursory glance at Dürer’s etchings and woodcuts will reveal the fact that he was fond of children— “kinderlieb,” as the Germans say. I do not doubt that he would have given us even more joy and sunshine in his Art had he but called a child his own.
Instead, we have too often the gloomy reflection of death throughout his work. The gambols and frolics of angelic cupids are too often obscured by the symbols of suffering, sin, and death.
Again, we must not allow a logical conclusion to be accepted as an absolute truth.
Dürer was certainly more familiar with death and suffering than we are.
Unless the grey lady and the dark angel visit our own homes, most of us — of my readers, at any rate — have to seek deliberately the faces of sorrow in the slums and the grimaces of death in the Coroner’s Court. But in Dürer’s days death lurked beyond the city walls; the sight of the slain or swinging victims of knightly valour, and peasant’s revenge, blanched the cheeks of many maidens, and queer plagues and pestilences mowed the most upright to the ground. The Dance of Death was a favourite subject with the old painters, not because their disposition was morbid, but because the times were more out of joint than they are now.
All these points have to be realised before one can hope to understand Dürer even faintly. Again, when we examine more closely the apparently quaint and fantastic form his mode of visualising takes, we must make allowances for the habits and customs and costumes of the times — as indeed one has to, in the case of all old masters, and for which reason I humbly submit that the study of old masters properly belongs to the few, not the many. A great deal of erroneous opinions are held simply because it is difficult to disentangle the individual from the typical.
Dürer, whose wanderjahre had taken him to Strasburg and Bâle and Venice, returned home again apparently uninfluenced.
Critics from Raphael’s age down to the last few years have lamented this fact; have thought that “knowledge of classic antiquity” might have made a better artist of him.
Now, Dürer was not an artist in its wider sense; he was a craftsman certainly, but above all a thinker. Dürer uses his eyes for the purposes of thought; he could close them without disturbing the pageants of his vision. But whereas we have no hint that his dreams were of beauty, we have every indication that they were literal transcriptions of literary thoughts. When he came to put these materialisations into the form of pictures or prints, the craftsman side, the practical side of his nature, resolved them into scientific problems, with the remarkable result that these visions are hung on purely materialistic facts. From our modern point of view Dürer was decidedly lacking in artistic imagination, which even such men as Goya and Blake, or “si parva licet comparere magnis” John Martin and Gustave Doré, and the delightful Arthur Rackham of our own times possess.
His importance was his craftsmanship, whilst the subject-matter of his pictures — the portraits excepted — and particularly of his prints, are merely of historic interest— “von kulturhistorischer Bedeutung,” the German would say.
In 1506 and 1507 he visited Venice, as already stated, gracefully received by the nobles and Giovanni Bellini, but disliked by the other painters.
He returned home apparently uninfluenced by the great Venetians, Titian, remember, amongst them. Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio were then the only painters at Venice who saw the realistic side of Nature; but they were prosaic, whilst our Dürer imbued a wooden bench or a tree trunk with a personal and human interest. Those of my readers who can afford the time to linger on this aspect of Dürer’s activity should compare Carpaccio’s rendering of St. Jerome in his study with Dürer’s engraving of the same subject.
Dürer the craftsman referred in everything he painted or engraved to Nature. But of course it was Nature as he and his times saw it; neither Hals, Rembrandt, neither Ribera, Velazquez, neither Chardin nor Constable, neither Monet nor Whistler had as yet begun to ascend the rungs of progress towards truthful — that is, “optical sight.”
Dürer’s reference to Nature means an intricate study of theoretical considerations, coupled with the desire to record everything he knew about the things he wished to reproduce.
His was an analytical mind, and every piece of work he produced is a careful dovetailing of isolated facts. Consequently his pictures must not be looked at, but looked into — must be read.
Again an obvious truth may here mislead us. The analytical juxtaposition of facts was a characteristic of the age. Dürer’s Art was a step forward; he — like Raphael, like Titian — dovetailed, where earlier men scarcely joined. Dürer has as yet not the power that even the next generation began to acquire — he never suggests anything; he works everything out, down to the minutest details. There are no slight sketches of his but such as suggest great travail of sight, encumbranced by an over-thoughtful mind.
To understand Dürer you require time; each print of the “Passions,” “The Life of Mary,” the “Apokalypse,” should be read like a page printed in smallest type, with thought and some eye-strain. That of course goes very much against the grain of our own age; we demand large type and short stories.
The study of his work entails considerable self-sacrifice. Your own likes and dislikes you have to suppress, and try to see with eyes that belong to an age long since gone. Do not despise the less self-sacrificing, who refuse the study of old Art; and distrust profoundly those others who laud it beyond measure. The green tree is the tree to water; the dead tree — be its black branches and sere leaves never so picturesque — is beyond the need of your attentions.
The Scylla and Charybdis of æsthetic reformers is praise of the old, and poor appraising of the new.
PLATE IV. — PORTRAIT OF THE PAINTER’S FATHER
(From the Oil-painting in the National Gallery. Painted in 1497)
An interesting picture, which has unfortunately suffered by retouching. It is the only portrait by Dürer the nation possesses. Other works of his may be seen at South Kensington and at Hampton Court.
Now the old Italians thought Dürer a most admirable artist, blamed what they called the defects of his Art on the ungainliness of his models, and felt convinced that he might have easily been the first among the Italians had he lived there, instead of the first among the “Flemings.” They were of course wrong, for it is the individual reflex-action of Dürer’s brain which caused his Art to be what it is; in Italy it would still have been an individual reflex-action, and Dürer had been in Venice without the desired effect. Dürer might, however, himself seem to confirm the Italians’ opinion: he strayed into the barren fields of theoretical speculations — barren because some of his best work was done before he had elaborated his system, barren because speculation saps the strength of natural perception. Dürer sought a “Canon of Beauty,” and the history of Art has proved over and over again that beauty canonised is damned.
One more remark: his contemporaries and critics praised the extraordinary technical skill with which he could draw straight lines without the aid of a ruler, or the astounding legerdemain with which he reproduced every single hair in a curl — the “Paganini” worship which runs through all the ages; which in itself is fruitless; touches the fiddle-strings at best or cerebral cords, not heart-strings.
Out of all the
foregoing, out of all the mortal and mouldering coverings we have now to shell the real, the immortal Dürer — the Dürer whose mind was longing for truth, whose soul was longing for harmony, and who out of his longings fashioned his Art, as all great men have done and will do until the last.
On the title-page of the “Small Passion” is a woodcut — the “Man of Sorrows.”
There, reader, you have, in my opinion, the greatness of Dürer; he never surpassed it. It is the consciousness of man’s impotence; it is the saddest sight mortal eyes can behold — that of a man who has lost faith in himself.
If Dürer were here now I am sure he would lay his hand upon my shoulder, and, his deep true eyes searching mine, his soft and human lips would say: —
You are right, my friend; this is my best, for it is the spirit of my age that spoke in me then.
In front of the Pantheon at Paris is a statue called The Thinker. A seated man, unconscious of his bodily strength, for all his consciousness is in the iron grip of thought. He looks not up, not down — he looks before him; and methinks, reader, I can hear an unborn voice proclaim:
This too was once the Spirit of an Age. Two milestones on the path of human progress; an idle fancy if you will — no more.
Of the Man of Sorrows then we spoke: It is a small thing, but done exceeding well, for in the simplicity of form it embraces a world of meaning; and whilst you cannot spare one iota from the words of the Passion, on account of this picture, yet all the words of Christ’s suffering seem alive in this plain print. Could there be a better frontispiece?
In judging, not enjoying, a work of art, one should first make sure that one understands the methods of the artist; one should next endeavour to discover his evident purpose or aim, or “motif,” and forming one’s judgment, ask: Has the artist succeeded in welding aim and result into one organic whole?
Neither the “motif” nor its form are in themselves of value, but the harmony of both — hence we may place Dürer’s “Man of Sorrows” by the side of Michelangelo’s “Moses,” as of equal importance, of equal greatness. This “Man of Sorrows” we must praise as immortal Art, and the reason is evident; Dürer, who designed it during an illness, had himself suffered and knew sorrow — felt what he visualised.
Masters of Art - Albrecht Dürer Page 14
