Masters of Art - Albrecht Dürer

by Dürer, Albrecht

  In copper-engraving Dürer was at the same time diligently training himself to develop the methods practised by Martin Schongauer and earlier masters into one suitable for his own self-expression. He attempted no subjects at all commensurate with those of his great woodcuts, but contented himself for the most part with Madonnas, single figures of scripture or of the saints, some nude mythologies of a kind wholly new in northern art and founded upon the impressions received in Italy, and groups, sometimes bordering on the satirical, of humble folk and peasants. In the earliest of the Madonnas, the “Virgin with the Dragon-fly” (1495-1496), Dürer has thrown something of his own rugged energy into a design of the traditional Schongauer type. In examples of a few years later, like the “Virgin with the Monkey,” the design of Mother and Child clearly betrays the influence of Italy and specifically of Lorenzo di Credi. The subjects of the “Prodigal Son” and “St Jerome in the Wilderness” he on the other hand treats in an almost purely northern spirit. In the nudes of the next four or five years, which included a “St Sebastian,” the so-called “Four Witches” (1497), the “Dream” or “Temptation,” the “Rape of Amymome,” and the “Jealousy” or “Great Hercules,” Venetian, Paduan and Florentine memories are found, in the treatment of the human form, competing somewhat uncomfortably with his own inherited Gothic and northern instincts. In these early engravings the highly-wrought landscape backgrounds, whenever they occur, are generally the most satisfying feature. This feature reaches a climax of beauty and elaboration in the large print of “St Eustace and the Stag,” while the figures and animals remain still somewhat cramped and immature. In the first three or four years of the 16th century, we find Dürer in his graver-work still contending with the problems of the nude, but now with added power, though by methods which in different subjects contrast curiously with one another. Thus the “Nemesis,” belonging probably to 1503, is a marvellously wrought piece of quite unflinching realism in the rendering of a common type of mature, muscular, unshapely German womanhood. The conception and attributes of the figure are taken, as has lately been recognized, from a description in the “Manto” of Politian: the goddess, to whose shoulders are appended a pair of huge wings, stands like Fortune on a revolving ball, holding the emblems of the cup and bridle, and below her feet is spread a rich landscape of hill and valley. In the “Adam and Eve” of the next year, we find Dürer treating the human form in an entirely opposite manner; constructing it, that is, on principles of abstract geometrical proportion. The Venetian painter-etcher, Jacopo de Barbari, whom Dürer had already, it would seem, met in Venice in 1494-1495, and by the example of whose engravings he had already been much influenced, came to settle for a while in Nuremberg in 1500. He was conversant to some extent with the new sciences of perspective, anatomy and proportion, which had been making their way for years past in Italy, and from him it is likely that Dürer received the impulse to similar studies and speculations. At any rate a whole series of extant drawings enables us to trace the German gradually working out his own ideas of a canon of human proportion in the composition of his famous engraving of “Adam and Eve” (1504); which at first, as a drawing in the British Museum proves, had been intended to be an Apollo and Diana conceived on lines somewhat similar to one of Barbari’s. The drama of the subject has in this instance not interested him at all, but only the forms and designs of the figures, the realization of the quality of flesh surfaces by the subtlest use of the graving-tool known to him, and the rendering, by methods of which he had become the greatest of all masters, of the richness and intricacy of the forest background. Two or three other technical masterpieces of the engraver’s art, the “Coat-of-Arms with the Skull,” the “Nativity,” with its exquisite background of ruined buildings, the “Little Horse” and the “Great Horse,” both of 1505, complete the list of the master’s chief productions in this kind before he started in the last-named year for a second visit to Italy.

  The pictures of this earlier Nuremberg period are not many in number and not very admirable. Dürer’s powers of hand and eye are already extraordinary and in their way almost unparalleled, but they are often applied to the too insistent, too glittering, too emphatic rendering of particular details and individual forms, without due regard to subordination or the harmony of the whole. Among the earliest seem to be two examples of a method practised in Italy especially by the school of Mantegna, but almost without precedent in Germany, that of tempera-painting on linen. One of these is the portrait of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, formerly in the Hamilton collection and now at Berlin; the second, much disfigured by restoration, is the Dresden altarpiece with a Madonna and Child in the middle and St Anthony and Sebastian in the wings. A mythology reminiscent of Italy is the “Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds” in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg, founded directly upon the “Hercules and Centaur Nessus” of Pollaiuolo, now at New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. Of portraits, besides that of his father already mentioned as done in 1497, there is his own of 1498 at Madrid. Two totally dissimilar portraits of young women, both existing in duplicate examples (one pair at Augsburg and Frankfort, the other pair in the collections of M. Hengel in Paris and Baron Speck von Sternburg at Lützschema, for each of which has been claimed the name Fürlegerin, that is, a member of the Fürleger family at Nuremberg), belong to nearly the same time. Other panel portraits of the period are three small ones of members of the Tucher family at Weimar and Cassel, and the striking, restlessly elaborated half-length of Oswald Krell at Munich. In some devotional pictures of the time Dürer seems to have been much helped by pupils, as in the two different compositions of the Maries weeping over the body of Christ preserved respectively at Munich and Nuremberg. In an altarpiece at Ober St Veit and in the scattered wings of the Jabach altarpiece severally preserved at Munich, Frankfort and Cologne, the workmanship seems to be exclusively that of journeymen working from his drawings. The period is closed, so far as paintings are concerned, by two examples of far higher value than those above named, that is to say the Paumgartner altarpiece at Munich, with its romantically attractive composition of the Nativity with angels and donors in the central panel, and the fine armed figures of St George and St Eustace (lately freed from the over-paintings which disfigured them) on the wings; and the happily conceived and harmoniously finished “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi at Florence.

  In the autumn of 1505 Dürer journeyed for a second time to Venice, and stayed there until the spring of 1507. The occasion of this journey has been erroneously stated by Vasari. Dürer’s engravings, both on copper and wood, had by this time attained great popularity both north and south of the Alps, and had begun to be copied by various hands, among others by the celebrated Marcantonio of Bologna, then in his youth. According to Vasari, Marcantonio, in copying Dürer’s series of the Little Passion on wood, had imitated the original monogram, and Dürer, indignant at this fraud, set out for Italy in order to protect his rights, and having lodged a complaint against Marcantonio before the signory of Venice, carried his point so far that Marcantonio was forbidden in future to add the monogram of Dürer to copies taken after his works. This account will not bear examination. Chronological and other proofs show that if such a suit was fought at all, it must have been in connexion with another set of Dürer’s woodcuts, the first seventeen of the Life of the Virgin. Dürer himself, a number of whose familiar letters written from Venice to his friend Pirkheimer at Nuremberg are preserved, makes no mention of anything of the kind. Nevertheless some such grievance may possibly have been among the causes which determined his journey. Other causes, of which we have explicit record, were an outbreak of sickness at Nuremberg; Dürer’s desire, which in fact was realized, of finding a good market for the proceeds of his art; and the prospect, also realized, of a commission for an important picture from the German community settled at Venice, who had lately caused an exchange and warehouse — the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi — to be built on the Grand Canal, and who were now desirous to dedicate a picture in the church of
St Bartholomew. The picture painted by Dürer on this commission was the “Adoration of the Virgin,” better known as the “Feast of Rose Garlands”; it was subsequently acquired by the emperor Rudolf II., and carried as a thing beyond price upon men’s shoulders to Vienna; it now exists in a greatly injured state in the monastery of Strahow at Prague. It shows the pope and emperor, with a lute-playing angel between them, kneeling to right and left of the enthroned Virgin and Child, who crown them with rose garlands, with a multitude of other kneeling saints disposed with free symmetry in the background, and farther in the background portraits of the donor and the painter, and a flutter of wreath-carrying cherubs in the air. Of all Dürer’s works, it is the one in which he most deliberately rivalled the combined splendour and playfulness of certain phases of Italian art. The Venetian painters assured him, he says, that they had never seen finer colours. They were doubtless too courteous to add that fine colours do not make fine colouring. Even in its present ruined state, it is apparent that in spite of the masterly treatment of particular passages, such as the robe of the pope, Dürer still lacked a true sense of harmony and tone-relations, and that the effect of his work must have been restless and garish beside that of a master like the aged Bellini. That veteran showed the German visitor the most generous courtesy, and Dürer still speaks of him as the best in painting (“der pest im gemell”) in spite of his advanced years. A similar festal intention in design and colouring, with similar mastery in passages and even less sense of harmonious relations in the whole, is apparent in a second important picture painted by Dürer at Venice, “The Virgin and Child with the Goldfinch,” formerly in the collection of Lord Lothian and now at Berlin. A “Christ disputing with the Doctors” of the same period, in the Barberini Gallery at Rome, is recorded to have cost the painter only five days’ labour, and is an unsatisfying and ill-composed congeries of heads and hands, both of such strenuous character and individuality as here and there to pass into caricature. The most satisfying of Dürer’s paintings done in Venice are the admirable portrait of a young man at Hampton Court (the same sitter reappears in the “Feast of Rose Garlands”), and two small pieces, one the head of a brown Italian girl modelled and painted with real breadth and simplicity, formerly in the collection of Mr Reginald Cholmondeley and now at Berlin, and the small and very striking little “Christ Crucified” with the figure relieved against the night sky, which is preserved in the Dresden Gallery and has served as model and inspiration to numberless later treatments of the theme. An interesting, rather fantastic, portrait of a blonde girl wearing a wide cap, now in the Berlin museum, is dated 1507 and may have been done in the early months of that year at Venice. It is possible, though not certain, that to this date also belongs the famous portrait of himself at Munich bearing a false signature and date, 1500; in this it has been lately shown that the artist modified his own lineaments according to a preconceived scheme of facial proportion, so that it must be taken as an ideal rather than a literal presentment of himself to posterity as he appeared in the flower of his early middle age. From Venice Dürer kept up a continuous correspondence, which has been published, with his bosom friend Pirkheimer at Nuremberg. He tells of the high position he holds among the Venetians; of the jealousy shown him by some of the meaner sort of native artist; of the honour and wealth in which he might live if he would consent to abandon home for Italy; of the northern winter, and how he knows that after his return it will set him shivering for the south. Yet he resisted all seductions and was in Nuremberg again before the summer of 1507. First, it seems, he had made an excursion to Bologna, having intended to take Mantua on the way, in order to do homage to the old age of that Italian master, Andrea Mantegna, from whose work he had himself in youth learned the most. But the death of Mantegna prevented his purpose.