“He reproduces not merely the natural aspect of a thing, but also observes the laws of perfect symmetry and harmony with regard to the position of it.” How one would like to have heard Dürer, as Erasmus may probably have heard him, explain the principles on which he composed! No doubt there is no very radical difference between his sense of composition and that of other great artists. But to hear one so preoccupied with explaining his processes to himself discourse on this difficult subject would be great gain. For though there are doubtless no absolute rules, and the appeal is always to a refined sense for proportion, — yet to hear a creator speak of such things is to have this sense, as it were, washed and rendered delicate once more. We can but regret that Erasmus has not saved us something fuller than this hint. In the same way, how tempting is the criticism that Camerarius gives of Mantegna, — we feel that Dürer’s own is behind it; but as it stands it is disjointed and absurd, like some of the incomplete and confused parables which give us a glimpse of how much more was lost than was preserved by the reporters of the sayings of Jesus. It is the same thing with the reported sayings of Michael Angelo, and indeed of all other great men. It is impossible to accept “his hand was not trained to follow the perception and nimbleness of his mind” as Dürer’s dictum on Mantegna; but how suggestive is the allusion to “broken and scattered statues set up as examples of art,” for artists to form themselves upon! Yet the fact that Dürer missed coming into contact not only with Mantegna but with Titian, Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, is indeed the saddest fact in regard to his life. We can well believe that he felt it in Mantegna’s case. Ah! Why could he not bring himself to accept the overtures made to him, and become a citizen of Venice?
III
The subjects of these engravings are even generally trivial or antiquated, either in themselves or by the way they are approached. Perhaps alone among them the figure of Jesus, as it is drawn in the various series on copper and wood illustrating the Passion, is conceived in a manner which touches us to-day with the directness of a revelation; and even this cannot be compared to the same figure in Rembrandt etchings and drawings, either for essential adequacy, or for various and convincing application. No, we must consent to let the expression “great thoughts” drop out of our appreciation of Dürer’s works, and be replaced by the “great character” latent in them.
However, one among Dürer’s engravings on copper stands out from among the rest, and indeed from all his works. In the Melancholy the composition is not more dignified in its spacing and proportion; the arabesque of line is not richer or sweeter, the variations from black to white are not more handsome, than in some half dozen of his other engravings. No, by its conception alone the Melancholy attains to its unique impressiveness. And it is the impressiveness of an image, not the impressiveness of an idea or situation, as in the case of the Knight, Death, and the Devil, by which almost as much bad literature has been inspired. There is nothing to choose between the workmanship of the two plates; both are absolutely impeccable, and outside the work of Dürer himself, unrivalled. The Melancholy is the only creation by a German which appears to me to invite and sustain comparison with the works of the greatest Italian. In it we have the impressiveness that belongs only to the image, the thing conceived for mental vision, and addressed to the eye exclusively. If there was an allegory, or if the plate formed (as has been imagined) one of a series representative of the four temperaments, the eye and the visual imagination are addressed with such force and felicity that the inquiries which attempt to answer these questions must for ever appear impertinent. They may add some languid interest to the contemplation which is sated with admiring the impeccable mastery of the Knight; for that plate always seems to me the mere illustration of a literary idea, a sheer statement of items which require to be connected by some story, and some of which have the crude obviousness of folk-lore symbols, without their racy and genial naïvety. They have not been fused in the rapture of some unique mood, not focussed by the intensity of an emotion. With the Melancholy all is different; perhaps among all his works only Dürer’s most haunting portrait of himself has an equal or even similar power to bind us in its spell. For this reason I attempt the following comparison between the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel and the Melancholy a comparison which I do not suppose to have any other value or force than that of a stimulant to the imagination which the works themselves address.
[Illustration: MELANCHOLIA Copper engraving, B. 74]
The impetuosity of his Southern blood drives Michael Angelo to betray his intention of impressing in the pose and build of his Sibyls. Large and exceptional women, “limbed” and thewed as gods are, with an habitual command of gesture, they lift down or open their books or unwind their scrolls like those accustomed to be the cynosure of many eyes, who have lived before crowds of inferiors, a spectacle of dignity from their childhood upwards. On the other hand, the pose and build of the Melancholy must have been those of many a matron in Nuremberg. It is not till we come to the face that we find traits that correspond with the obvious symbolism of the wings and wreath, or the serious richness of the black and white effect of the composition; but that face holds our attention as not even the Sibylla Delphica cannot by beauty, not by conscious inspiration, but by the spell of unanswerable thought, by the power to brood, by the patience that can and dare go unresolved for many years. Everything is begun about her; she cannot see unto the end; she is powerful, she is capable in many works, she has borne children, she rests from her labours, and her thought wanders, sleeps or dreams. The spirit of the North, with its industry, its cool-headed calculation, its abundance in contrivance, its elaboration of duty and accumulation of possessions — there she sits, absorbed, unsatisfied. Impetuosity and the frank avowal of intention are themselves an expression of the will to create that which is desirable; they can but form the habit of every artist under happy circumstances. They proceed on the expectation of immediate effectiveness, they belong to power in action; while, if beauty be not impetuous, she is frank, and adds to the avowal of her intention the promise of its fulfilment. The work of art and the artist are essentially open; they promise intimacy, and fulfil that promise with entirety when successful. Nor is anything so impressive as intimacy which implies a perfect sincerity, a complete revelation, a gift without reserve, increase without let. But the circumstances of the artist never are happy: even Michael Angelo’s were not. An intense brooding melancholy arises from the repressed and baffled desire to create; and in some measure this gloom of failure underlying their success is a necessary character of all lovely and spiritual creations in this world. Now Michael Angelo’s works, because of their Southern impetuosity and volubility, are not so instinct with this divine sorrow, this immobility of the soul face to face with evil, as is Dürer’s Melancholy. He inspires and exhilarates us more, but takes us out of ourselves rather than leads us home.
Here is Dürer’s success: let and hindered as it really is, he makes us feel the inalienable constancy of rational desire, watching adverse circumstance as one beast of prey watches another. She keeps hold on the bird she has caught, the ideal that perhaps she will never fully enjoy. Michael Angelo pictures for us freedom from trammels, the freedom that action, thought and ecstasy give, the freedom that is granted to beauty by all who recognise it; Dürer shows us the constancy that bridges the intervals between such free hours, that gives continuity to man’s necessarily spasmodic effort. Thus he typifies for us the Northern genius: as Michael Angelo’s athletes might typify by their naked beauty and the unexplained impressiveness of their gestures, the genius of the sudden South — sudden in action, sudden in thought, suddenly mature, suddenly asleep — as day changes to night and night to day the more rapidly as the tropics are approached.
[Illustraton: Detail enlarged from the “Agony in the Garden.” Etching on Iron, B. 19 Between p & 251]
[Illustration: ANGEL WITH THE SUDARIUM Engraving in Iron, 1516. B. 26 Between p & 251]
Instances of the highest
imaginative power are rare in Dürer’s work. The Melancholy has had a world-wide success. The Knight, Death and the Devil has one almost equal, but which is based on the facility with which it is associated with certain ideas dear to Christian culture, rather than on the creation of the mood in which these ideas arise. It does not move us until we know that it is an illustration of Erasmus’s Christian Knight. Then all its dignity and mastery and the supremacy of the gifts employed on it are brought into touch with the idea, and each admirer operates, according to his imaginativeness, something of the transformation which Dürer had let slip or cool down before realising it.
IV
Among the prints with lesser reputations are several which attain a far higher success. There is the iron plate of the Agony in the Garden, B. 19, already mentioned (), in which the storm-tortured tree and the broken light and shade are full of dramatic power (see illustration), the Angel with the Sudarium, B. 26, where the arabesque of the folds of drapery and cloud unite with the daring invention of the central figure to create a mood entirely consonant with the subject. There is the woman carried off by a man on an unicorn, in which the turbulence of the subject is expressed with unrivalled force by the rich and beautiful arabesque and black and white pattern.
B. Nos. 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, of the Little Passion, on copper, are all of them noteworthy successes of more or less the same kind; and in these, too, we come upon that racy sense for narration which can enhance dramatic import by emphasising some seemingly trivial circumstance, as in the gouty stiffness of one of Christ’s scourgers in the Flagellation, or the abnormal ugliness of the man who with such perfect gravity holds the basin while Pilate washes his hands: while in the Crown of Thorns and Descent into Hades we have peculiarly fine and suitable black and white patterns, and in the Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate and the Ecce Homo figures of monumental dignity in tiny gems of glowing engraver’s work. The repose and serenity of the lovely little St. Antony; the subsidence of commotion in the noonday victory of the little St. George on foot, B. 53 — perhaps the most perfect diamond in the whole brilliant chain of little plates, or the staid naïvety of the enchanting Apollo and Diana, B. 68; who shall prefer among these things? Every time we go through them we choose out another until we return to the most popular and slightly obvious St. George on Horseback, B. 54. Next come the dainty series of little plates in honour of Our Lady the Mother of God, commencing before Dürer made a rule of dating his plates; before 1503 and continuing till after 1520, in which the last are the least worthy. Among these the Virgin embracing her Child at the foot of a tree, B. 34, dated 1513; The Virgin standing on the crescent moon, her baby in one arm, her sceptre in the other hand and the stars of her crown blown sideways as she bows her head, B. 32, dated 1516, and the stately and monumental Virgin seated by a wall, B. 40, dated 1514, are at present my favourites. And to these succeeded the noble army of Apostles and Martyrs of which the more part are dated from 1521 to 1526, though two, B. 48 and 50, fall as early as 1514.
[Illustration: THE SMALL HORSE — Copper Engraving, B. 96]
Then amongst the most perfect larger plates I cannot refrain from mentioning the St. Jerome, B. 60, with its homely seclusion as of Dürer’s own best parlour in summer time which not even the presence of a lion can disturb; the idyllic and captivating St. Hubert, B. 57; the august and tranquil Cannon, B. 99: and lastly, perhaps, in the little Horse, B. 96, we come upon a theme and motive of the kind best suited to Dürer’s peculiar powers, in which he produces an effect really comparable to those of the old Greek masters, about whose lost works he was so eager for scraps of information, and whose fame haunted him even into his slumbers, so that he dreamed of them and of those who should “give a future to their past.” This delightful work may illustrate an allegory now grown dark or some misconception of a Grecian story; but though the relation between the items that compose it should remain for ever unexplained, its beauty, like that of some Greek sculpture that has been admired under many names, continues its spell, and speaks of how the simplicity, austerity and noble proportions of classical art were potent with the spirit of the great Nuremberg artist, and occasionally had free way with him, in spite of all there was in his circumstances and origins to impede or divert them. (See also the spirited drawing, Lip.)
V
It would be idle to attempt to say something about every masterpiece in Dürer’s splendidly copious work on metal plates. There is perhaps not one of these engravings that is not vital upon one side or another, amazingly few that are not vital upon many. One other work, however, which has been much criticised and generally misunderstood, it may be as well to examine at more length, especially as it illustrates what was often Dürer’s practice in regard to his theories about proportion, with which my next Part will deal. I speak of the Great Fortune or Nemesis (B. 77). His practice at other times is illustrated by the splendid Adam and Eve (B. 1), over the production of which the nature of the canon he suggested was perhaps first thoroughly worked out. But before this and afterwards too he no doubt frequently followed the advice he gives in the following passage.
To him that setteth himself to draw figures according to this book, not being well taught beforehand, the matter will at first become hard. Let him then put a man before him, who agreeth, as nearly as may be, with the proportions he desireth; and let him draw him in outline according to his knowledge and power. And a man is held to have done well if he attain accurately to copy a figure according to the life, so that his drawing resembleth the figure and is like unto nature. And in particular if the thing copied as beautiful; then is the copy held to be artistic, and, as it deserveth, it is highly praised.
Dürer himself would seem to have very often followed his own advice in this. The Great Fortune or Nemesis is a case in point. The remarks of critics on this superb engraving are very strange and wide. Professor Thausing said, “Embodied in this powerful female form, the Northern worship of nature here makes its first conscious and triumphant appearance in the history of art.” With the work of the great Jan Van Eyck in one’s mind’s eye, of course this will appear one of those little lapses of memory so convenient to German national sentiment. “Everything that, according to our aesthetic formalism based on the antique, we should consider beautiful, is sacrificed to truth.” (I have already pointed out that this use of the word “truth” in matters of art constitutes a fallacy) “And yet our taste must bow before the imperishable fidelity to nature displayed in these forms, the fulness of life that animates these limbs.” Of course, “imperishable fidelity to nature” and “taste that bows before it” are merely the figures of a clumsy rhetoric. But the idea they imply is one of the most common of vulgar errors in regard to works of art. In the first place one must remind our enthusiastic German that it is an engraving and not a woman that we are discussing; and that this engraving is extremely beautiful in arabesque and black and white pattern, rich, rhythmical and harmonious; and that there is no reason why our taste should be violated in having to bow submissively before such beauties as these, which it is a pleasure to worship. Now we come to the subject as presented to the intelligence, after the quick receptive eye has been satiated with beauty. Our German guide exclaims, “Not misled by cold definite rules of proportion, he gave himself up to unrestrained realism in the presentation of the female form.” Our first remark is, that though the treatment of this female form may perhaps be called realistic, this adjective cannot be made to apply to the figure as a whole. This massively built matron is winged; she stands on a small globe suspended in the heavens, which have opened and are furled up like a garment in a manner entirely conventional. She carries a scarf which behaves as no fabric known to me would behave even under such exceptional and thrilling circumstances.
Dr. Carl Giehlow has recently suggested that this splendid engraving illustrates the following Latin verses by Poliziano:
Est dea, quse vacuo sublimis in aëre pendens
It nimbo succincta latus, sed candid
a pallam,
Sed radiata comam, ac stridentibus insonat alis.
Haec spes immodicas premit, haec infesta superbis
Imminet, huic celsas hominum contundere mentes
Incessusque datum et nimios turbare paratus.
Quam veteres Nemesin genitam de nocte silenti
Oceano discere patri. Stant sidera fronti.
Frena manu pateramque gerit, semperque verendum
Ridet et insanis obstat contraria coeptis.
Improba vota domans ac summis ima revolvens
Miscet et alterna nostros vice temperat actus.
Atque hue atque illuc ventorum turbine fertur.
There is a goddess, who, aloft in the empty air, advances girdled about with a cloud, but with a shining white cloak and a glory in her hair, and makes a rushing with her wings. She it is who crushes extravagant hopes, who threatens the proud, to whom is given to beat down the haughty spirit and the haughty step, and to confound over-great possessions. Her the men of old called Nemesis, born to Ocean from the womb of silent Night. Stars stand upon her forehead. In her hand she bears bridles and a chalice, and smiles for ever with an awful smile, and stands resisting mad designs. Turning to nought the prayers of the wicked and setting the low above the high she puts one in the other’s place and rules the scenes of life with alternation. And she is borne hither and thither on the wings of the whirlwind.
If this suggestion is a good one it shows us that Dürer was no more consistently literal than he was realistic. The most striking features of his illustration are just those to which his text offers no counterpart, i.e., the nudity and physical maturity of his goddess. Neither has he girdled her about with cloud nor stood stars upon her forehead. I must confess that I find it hard to believe that there was any close connection present to his mind between his engraving and these verses.
Masters of Art - Albrecht Dürer Page 46
