Masters of Art - Albrecht Dürer

by Dürer, Albrecht

  PLATE V. — PORTRAIT OF OSWALT KREL

  (From the Oil-painting in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Painted in 1499)

  A striking portrait; somewhat cramped in expression, but full of interest. The trees in the background stamp it at once as a work of German origin. Dürer’s attempt to portray more than the flesh is particularly noticeable here, because not quite successful.

  If we compare another woodcut, viz. the one from “Die heimliche Offenbarung Johannis,” illustrating Revelations i. 12-17, we will have to draw a different conclusion. Let us listen to the passage Dürer set himself to illustrate:

  12. And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks;

  13. And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.

  14. His head and hairs white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes as a flame of fire;

  15. And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.

  16. And he had in his right hand many stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.

  17. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.

  Assuming that a passage such as this can be illustrated, and that without the use of colour, is his a good illustration? Does it reproduce the spirit and meaning of St. John, or only the words? Look at the two-edged sword glued to the mouth, look at the eyes “as a flame of fire”; can you admit more than that it pretends to be a literal translation? But it is not even literal; verse 17 says distinctly, “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.” But St. John is here represented as one praying. Then what is the inference? That Dürer was unimaginative in the higher sense of the word; that he, like the Spirit of the Reformation, sought salvation in the WORD. Throughout Dürer’s Art we feel that it was constrained, hampered by his inordinate love of literal truthfulness; not one of his works ever rises even to the level of Raphael’s “Madonna della Seggiola.” Like German philosophy, his works are so carefully elaborated in detail that the glorious whole is lost in more or less warring details. His Art suffers from insubordination — all facts are co-ordinated. He himself knew it, and towards the end of this life hated its complexity, caused by the desire to represent in one picture the successive development of the spoken or written word; a desire which even in our days has not completely disappeared.

  Dürer therefore appeals to us of to-day more through such conceptions as the wings of the Paumgaertner altar-piece, or the four Temperaments (St. Peter, St. John, St. Mark, and St. Paul), than through the crowded centre panels of his altar-pieces; and the strong appeal of his engravings, such as the “Knight of the Reformation” (1513) or the “Melancholia” (1514), is mainly owing to the predominant big note of the principal figures, whilst in the beautiful St. Jerome (“Hieronymus im Gehäus”) it is the effect of sunshine and its concomitant feeling of well-being — Gemüthlichkeit, to use an untranslatable German word — which makes us linger and dwell with growing delight on every detail of this wonderful print.

  In spite of appearances to the contrary, Dürer was, as I have said, unimaginative. He needed the written word or another’s idea as a guide; he never dreamt of an Art that could be beautiful without a “mission” — he never “created.” Try to realise for a moment that throughout his work — in accordance with the conception of his age — he mixes purely modern dress with biblical and classical representation, as if our Leightons, Tademas, Poynters, were to introduce crinolines, bustles, or “empire” gowns amongst Venuses and Apollos. In the pathetic “Deposition from the Cross” the Magdalen is just a “modern” Nuremberg damsel, and the Virgin’s headwrap is slung as the northern housewife wore it, and not like an Oriental woman’s; Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are clad as Nuremberg burghers, and only in the figure of John does he make concession to the traditional “classic” garment. Such an anachronistic medley could only appear logical so long as the religious spirit and the convictions of the majority were at one. I dare scarcely hint at, much less describe, the feelings that would be stirred in you if a modern painter represented the Crucifixion with Nicodemus and the man from Arimathea in frock-coats, Mary and the Magdalen in “walking costume,” and a company of Horse-guards in attendance. The abyss of over four centuries divides us from Dürer; my suggestion sounds blasphemous almost, yet it is a thought based on fact and worthy of most careful note.

  Owing to a convention — then active, now defunct — Dürer grasped the hands of all the living, bade them stop and think. Not one of those who beheld his work could pass by without feeling a call of sympathy and understanding. “Everyman” Dürer! — that is his grandeur. To this the artists added their appreciation; what he did was not only truly done, but on the testimony of all his brothers in Art well done. So with graver, pen, and brush he gave his world the outlines of Belief. In his pictures the illiterate saw, as by revelation, that which they could not read, and the literate, the literati — Erasmus, Pirkheimer, Melanchthon amongst the most prominent — saw the excellence of the manner of his revelations.

  I cannot think of any better way of explaining the effect of Dürer’s Art as an illustrator upon his time, than to beg you to imagine the delight a short-sighted man experiences when he is given his first pair of spectacles. Everything remains where it is; he has not lost his sense of orientation, but on a sudden he sees everything more clearly, more defined, more in detail: and where he previously had only recognised vague effects he begins to see their causes. Such was the effect of Dürer’s Art: features, arms, hands, bodies, legs, feet, draperies, accessories, tree-trunks and foliage, vistas, radiance and light, not suggested but present, truly realised. When I say Dürer was not imaginative I mean to convey that imagination was characteristic of the age, not of him alone, but the materialisation, the realisation of fancy, that is his strength.

  All these considerations can find, unfortunately, no room for discussion in these pages, for it were tedious to refer the reader to examples which are not illustrated.

  We must perforce accept the limitations of our programme, and devote our attention to his paintings — far the least significant part of his activity.

  Dürer was the great master of line — he thinks in line. This line is firstly the outline or contour in its everyday meaning; secondly, it is the massed army of lines that go to make shadow; thirdly, it is line in its psychical aspect, as denoting direction, aim, tendency, such as we have it in the print of the “Melancholia.” No one before him had ever performed such wonderful feats with “line,” not even Mantegna with his vigorous but repellent parallels.

  This line was the greatest obstacle to his becoming a successful painter. For his line was not the great sweep, not the graceful flow, not the spontaneous dash, not the slight touch, but the heavy, determined, reasoned move, as of a master-hand in a game of chess.

  To him, consequently, the world and his Art were problems, not joys.

  Consider one of his early works — the portrait of his father, the honest, God-fearing, struggling goldsmith. The colour of this work is monotonous, a sort of gold-russet. It might almost be a monochrome, for the interest is centred in the wrinkles and lines of care and old age with which Father Time had furrowed the skin of the old man, and which Dürer has imitated with the determination of a ploughshare cleaving the glebe.

  PLATE VI. — THE MADONNA WITH THE SISKIN

  (From the Oil-painting in the Berlin Museum. Painted about 1506)

  Although this picture shows that it was painted under Venetian influence, it betrays the unrest of Dürer’s mind, which makes nearly all his work pleasanter to look into than to look at. Dürer’s works generally should be read.

  When we come to his subject pictures, we will have to notice at once that they have been constructed, not felt. It has been remarked that Dürer did for nor
thern Art, or at least attempted, what Leonardo did for Italian Art, viz., converted empirical Art into a theoretical science. Whether such conversion was not in reality a perversion, is a question that cannot be discussed here. We have, at any rate, in Dürer a curious example of an artist referring to Nature in order to discard it; the idealist become realist in order to further his idealism. Most of his pictures contain statements of pictorial facts which are in themselves most true, but taken in conjunction with the whole picture quite untrue. Dürer lacked the courage to trust his sense of sight, his optic organ: beauty with him is a thing which must be thought out, not seen. Dürer had come into direct contact with Italian Art, had felt himself a gentleman in Venice, and only a “parasite” in Nuremberg. From Italy he imported a conception of beauty which really was quite foreign to him. Italy sowed dissension in his mind, for he was ever after bent on finding a formula of beauty, which he could have dispensed with had he remained the simple painter as we know him in his early self-portrait of 1493. There can be no doubt that Dürer was principally looking towards Italy for approval, as indeed he had little reason to cherish the opinions of the painters in his own country, who were so greatly his inferiors both in mind as in their Art.

  Much has been made of the fact that painting was a “free” Art, not a “Guild” in Nuremberg. Now carpentering was also a “free” Art at Nuremberg, and painting was not “free” in Italy, so the glory of freedom is somewhat discounted; but whatever Art was, Dürer, at any rate, was not an artist in Raphael’s, Bellini’s, or Titian’s sense. He was pre-eminently a thinker, a moralist, a scientist, a searcher after absolute truth, seeking expression in Art. Once this is realised his pictures make wonderfully good reading.

  The “Deposition,” for example, is full of interest. The dead Christ, whose still open lips have not long since uttered “Into Thy hands, O Lord,” is being gently laid on the ground, His poor pierced feet rigid, the muscles of His legs stiff as in a cramp. The Magdalen holds the right hand of the beloved body, and the stricken mother of Christ is represented in a manner almost worthy of the classic Niobe. Wonderfully expressive, too, are all the hands in this picture. Dürer found never-ending interest in the expressiveness of the hand. But if we were to seek in his colour any beauty other than intensity, we should be disappointed, as we should for the matter of that in any picture painted before the advent of Titian.

  Again that monster Ignorance stirs. For as I speak of colour, as I dogmatise on Titian, I am aware that colour may mean so many different things, and any one who wished to contradict me would be justified in doing so, not because I am wrong and he is right, but because of my difficulty in explaining colour, and his natural wish to aim at my vulnerable spot. Because I am well-nigh daily breaking bread with painters who unconsciously reveal the workings of their mind to me, I know that all the glibly used technical terms of their Art are as fixed as the colour of a chameleon. Different temperaments take on different hues. There is colour in Van Eyck and Crivelli, in Bellini and Botticelli, but deliberate colour harmonies, though arbitrary in choice, belong to Titian.

  Dürer is no colourist, because, as we have already said, painting was the problem, not the joy of expression — in that he is Mantegna’s equal, and Beato Angelico’s inferior.

  Thus looking on the “Madonna mit dem Zeisig” at Berlin, we may realise its beauty with difficulty. For whatever it may have been to his contemporaries, to us it means little, by the side of the splendid Madonnas from Italy, or even compared with his own engraved work.

  This “Madonna with the Siskin” is a typical Dürer. In midst of the attempted Italian repose and “beauty” of the principal figures, we have the vacillating, oscillating profusion of Gothic detail. The fair hair of the Madonna drawn tightly round the head reappears in a gothic mass of crimped curls spread over her right shoulder. On her left hangs a piece of ribbon knotted and twisted. The cushion on which the infant Saviour sits is slashed, laced, and tassled. The Infant holds a prosaic “schnuller” or baby-soother in His right hand, whilst the siskin is perched on the top of His raised forearm. Of the wreath-bearing angels, one displays an almost bald head, and the background is full of unrest. Even the little label bearing the artist’s name, by which old masters were wont to mark their pictures, and which in Bellini’s case, for instance, appears plain and flatly fixed, bends up, like the little films of gelatine, which by their movements are thought to betray the holder’s temperament.

  One of the tests of great Art is its appearance of inevitableness: in that the artist vies with the creator:

  “The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,

  Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a line.”

  There are a good many “lines” in the “Siskin” Madonna which bear cancelling: not one in the Madonna of the title-page of the “Marieenleben,” which for that reason is a work of greater Art.

  The fact is, that whilst his engraved and black and white work reaches at times monumental height, great in saecula saeculorum, there are too few of his painted pictures that have the power to arrest the attention of the student of Art, who must not be confounded with the student of Art-history.

  As a painter he is essentially a primitive; as a graver he overshadows all ages.

  Thus we see his great pictures one after the other: his Paumgaertner altar-piece, his “Deposition” — both in Munich; “The Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi; the much damaged but probably justly famed “Rosenkranz fest” in Prague, with his own portrait and that of his friend Pirckheimer in the background, and Emperor Max and Pope Julius II. in the foreground; the Dresden altar-piece, or the “Crucifixion,” with the soft body of the crucified Christ and the weirdly fluttering loin-cloth; the strangely grotesque “Christ as a Boy in the Temple” in the Barberini Palace; the “Adam and Eve”; the “Martyrdom of the 10,000 Christians” — thus, I say, we see them one after the other pass before us, and are almost unmoved.

  PLATE VII. — SS. JOHN AND PETER

  (From an Oil-painting in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Finished in 1526)

  This, with the “SS. Paul and Mark,” originally formed one picture, and was painted for the Council of his beloved city, Nuremberg, as a gift, two years before his death. Dürer had inscribed lengthy quotations from the Bible below the picture; these quotations, proving the militant fervour of his Protestant faith, were subsequently removed on that account. Dürer’s works were always more than works of Art.

  True, the Paumgaertner altar-piece has stirred us on account of the wing-pictures, but there is good reason for that, and we will revert to this reason later. The “Adoration of the Magi” seems reminiscent of Venetian influence. Not until we reach the year 1511 do we encounter a work that must arrest the attention of even the most indolent: it is the “Adoration of the Holy Trinity,” or the All Saints altar-piece, painted for Matthew Landauer, whom we recognise, having seen Dürer’s drawing of his features, in the man with the long nose on the left of the picture. This picture is without a doubt the finest, the greatest altar picture ever painted by any German. It is not by any means a large picture, measuring only 4 ft. 3 in. × 3 ft. 10-3/4 in., but it is so large in conception that it might well have been designed to cover a whole wall. Dürer has here surpassed himself; he has for once conceived with the exuberance of a Michelangelo, for it is more serious than a Raphael, it is less poetic than a Fra Angelico: but personally I state my conviction, that if ever all the Saints shall unite in adoration of the Trinity, this is the true and only possibility, this is instinct with verisimilitude, this might be taken for “documentary evidence.” This communion of saints was beholden by man. If ever a man was a believer irrespective of Church, Creed, or sect — Dürer was he. I confess to a sense of awe in beholding this work, akin to Fra Angelico in its sincerity, akin to Michelangelo in its grandeur, and German wholly in the naturalness of its mystery. With more than photographic sharpness and minuteness of detail does Dürer materialise th
e vision: God-Father, an aged King — a Charlemagne; God-Son, the willing sufferer; the Holy Ghost, the dove of Sancgrael; the Heavenly Hosts above; the Saints beside and below — Saints that have lived and suffered, and are now assembled in praise — for the crowd is a living, praying, praising, and jubilant crowd.

  Well might the creator of this masterpiece portray himself, and proudly state on the tablet he is holding:

  Albertus Dürer Noricus faciebat.

  This picture is not a vision — it is the statement of a dogmatic truth; as such it is painted with all the subtlety of doctrinal reasoning; not a romantic vision, nor a human truth, such as we find in Rembrandt’s religious works. It is a ceremonial picture, only the ceremony is full, not empty; full of conviction, reverence, and faith! Such pictures are rare amongst Italians — in spite of all their sense of beauty; more frequent amongst the trans-alpine peoples, but never built in so much harmony. Unfortunately it has suffered, and is no longer in its pristine condition; it were fruitless therefore to discuss the merits of its colour.

  Mindful of my intention only to pick up a jewel here and there, I will not weary the reader with the enumeration of his altar-pieces, Nativities, Entombments, Piétàs and Madonnas. I can do this with an easy mind, because in my opinion (and you, reader, have contracted by purchase to accept my guidance) his religious paintings are of historical rather than Art interest.

  The “Adams and Eves” of the Uffizi and the Prado cannot rouse my enthusiasm either. In these pictures Dürer makes an attempt to create something akin to Dr. Zamenhof’s Esperanto; a universal standard for the language of Art in the one case, of Life in the other: and in either case this language, laboriously and admirably constructed but lacking in vitality, leaves the heart untouched. Dürer’s attempts to paint a classical subject, such as Hercules slaying the Stymphalian birds, are unsatisfying. I cannot see any beauty of conception in a timid and illogical mixture of realism and phantasy — it is not whole-hearted enough. Even Rembrandt’s ridiculous “Rape of Ganymede” has reason and Art on his side. Imagination was not Dürer’s “forte”; it is therefore with all the greater pleasure that we turn to his portraits.