Albert Dürer
by T. Sturge Moore · English · Gutenberg #9837 · 582,216 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Albert Dürer
Author: T. Sturge Moore
Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9837]
Most recently updated: March 24, 2023
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALBERT DÜRER ***
Produced by Steve Schulze and PG Distributed Proofreaders.
Page images generously provided by the CWRU Preservation
Department Digital Library.
[Transcriber's note: The printing errors of the original have been
retained in this etext.]
ALBERT DÜRER
BY
T. STURGE MOORE
PREFACE
When the late Mr. Arthur Strong asked me to undertake the present
volume, I pointed out to him that, to fulfil the advertised programme of
the Series he was editing, was more than could be hoped from my
attainments. He replied, that in the case of Dürer a book, fulfilling
that programme, was not called for, and that what he wished me to
attempt, was an appreciation of this great artist in relation to general
ideas. I had hoped to benefit very largely by my editor's advice and
supervision, but this his illness and death prevented. His great gifts
and brilliant accomplishments, already darkened and distressed by
disease, were all too soon to be utterly quenched; and I can but here
express, not only my sense of personal loss in the hopes which his
friendly welcome and generous intercourse had created and which have
been so cruelly dashed by the event, but also that of the void which his
disappearance has left in the too thin ranks of those who, filled with
reverence and enthusiasm for the great traditions of the past, seem
nevertheless eager and capable of grappling with the unwieldy present.
Let and restricted had been the recognition of his maturing worth, and
now we must do without both him and the impetus of his so nearly
assured success.
The present volume, then, is not the result of new research; nor is it
an abstract resuming historical and critical discoveries on its subject
up to date. Of this latter there are several already before the British
public; the former, as I said, it was not for me to attempt. Nor do I
feel my book to be altogether even what it was intended to be; but am
conscious that too much space has been given to the enumeration of
Dürer's principal works and the events of his life without either being
made exhaustive. Still, I hope that even these parts may be found
profitable by those who are not already familiar with the subjects with
which they deal. To those for whom these subjects are well known, I
should like to point out that Parts I. and IV. and very much of Part
III. embody my chief intention; that chapter 1 of Part I. finds a
further illustration in division iii. of chapter 4, Part II.; and that
division vi., chapter 1, Part II., should be taken as prefatory to
chapter 1, Part IV.
Should exception be taken to the works chosen as illustrations, I would
explain that the means of reproduction, the degree of reduction
necessitated by the size of the page, and other outside considerations,
have severely limited my choice. It is entirely owing to the extreme
kindness of the Dürer Society--more especially of its courteous and
enthusiastic secretaries, Mr. Campbell Dodgson and Mr. Peartree--that
four copper-plates have so greatly enhanced the adequacy of the volume
in this respect.
I have gratefully to acknowledge Sir Martin Conway's kindness in
permitting me to quote so liberally from his "Literary Remains of
Albrecht Dürer," by far the best book on this great artist known to me.
Mr. Charles Eaton's translation of Thausing's "Life of Dürer," the
"Portfolios of the Dürer Society," and Dr. Lippmanb "Drawings of
Albrecht Dürer," are the only other works on my subject to which I feel
bound to acknowledge my indebtedness. Lastly, I must express deep
gratitude to my learned friend, Mr. Campbell Dodgson, for having so
generously consented, by reading the proofs, to mitigate my defect in
scholarship.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
PART I
CONCERNING GENERAL IDEAS IMPORTANT TO THE
COMPREHENSION OF DÜRER'S LIFE AND ART
I. THE IDEA OF PROPORTION
II THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION ON THE CREATIVE IMPULSE
PART II
DÜRER'S LIFE IN RELATION TO THE TIMES
IN WHICH HE LIVED
I. DÜRER'S ORIGIN, YOUTH, AND EDUCATION
II. THE WORLD IN WHICH HE LIVED
III. DÜRER AT VENICE
IV. HIS PATRONS AND FRIENDS
V. DÜRER, LUTHER, AND THE HUMANISTS
VI. DÜRER'S JOURNEY TO THE NETHERLANDS
VII. DÜRER'S LAST YEARS
PART III
DÜRER AS A CREATOR
I. DÜRER'S PICTURES
II. DÜRER'S PORTRAITS
III. DÜRER'S DRAWINGS
IV. DÜRER'S METAL ENGRAVINGS
V. DÜRER'S WOODCUTS
VI. DÜRER'S INFLUENCES AND VERSES
PART IV
DÜRER'S IDEAS
I. THE IDEA OF A CANON OF PROPORTION FOR THE HUMAN FIGURE
II. THE IMPORTANCE OF DOCILITY
III. THE LAST TRADITION
IV. BEAUTY
V. NATURE
VI. THE CHOICE OF AN ARTIST
VII. TECHNICAL PRECEPTS
VIII. IN CONCLUSION
ILLUSTRATIONS
Apollo and Diana, Metal Engraving
Water-colour drawing of a Hare
Pilate Washing his Hands. Metal Engraving
Agnes Frey
"Mein Angnes"
Wilibald Pirkheimer
Hans Burgkmair
Adoration of the Trinity
St. Christopher
Assumption of the Magdalen
Dürer's Mother
Maximilian
Frederick the Wise
Silver-point Portrait
Erasmus
Drawing of a Lion
Lucas van der Leyden
Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate. Metal Engraving
St. George and St. Eustache
Martyrdom of Ten Thousand Saints
Road to Calvary
Portrait of Dürer
Portrait of Dürer
Albert Dürer the Elder
Gswolt Krel
Portrait at Hampton Court
Portrait of a Lady
Michel Wolgemuth
Hans Imhof
"Jakob Muffel"
Study of a Hound
Memento Mei
Silver-point Portrait
Portrait in Black Chalk
Cherub for a Crucifixion
Apollo and Diana
An Old Castle
Melancholia
Detail from "The Agony in the Garden"
Angel with Sudarium
The Small Horse
The Great Fortune, or Nemesis
Silver-point Drawing
St. Michael and the Dragon
Detail from "The Meeting at the Golden Gate"
Detail from "The Nativity"
Dürer's Armorial Bearings
Christ haled before Annas
The Last Supper
Saint Antony, Metal Engraving
"In the Eighteenth Year"
"Una Vilana Wendisch"
Charcoal Drawing
PART I
CONCERNING GENERAL IDEAS IMPORTANT TO THE COMPREHENSION OF DÜRER'S LIFE
AND ART
CHAPTER I
THE IDEA OF PROPORTION
I
Ich hab vernomen wie der siben weysen aus kriechenland ainer gelert hab
das dymass in allen dingen sitlichen und naturlichen das pest sey.
DÜRER, British Museum MS., vol. iv., 82a.
I have heard how one of the Seven Sages of Greece taught that measure is
in all things, physical and moral, best.
La souveraine habileté consiste à bien connaitre le prix des choses. LA
ROCHEFOUCAULD, III. 252.
Sovereign skill consists in thoroughly understanding the value of
things.
The attempt that the last quarter century has witnessed, to introduce
the methods of science into the criticism of works of art, has tended,
it seems to me, to put the question of their value into the background.
The easily scandalous inquiries, "Who?" "When?" "Where?" have assumed an
impertinent predominance. When I hear people very decidedly asserting
that such a picture was painted by such an one, not generally supposed
to be the author, at such a time, &c. &c., I often feel uneasy in the
same way as one does on being addressed in a loud voice in a church or a
picture gallery, where other persons are absorbed in an acknowledged and
respected contemplation or study. I feel inclined to blush and whisper,
for fear of being supposed to know the speaker too well. It is an
awkward moment with me, for I am in fact very good friends with many
such persons. "Sovereign skill consists in thoroughly understanding the
value of things"--not their commercial value only, though that is
sovereign skill on the Exchange, but their value for those whose chief
riches are within them. The value of works of art is an intimate
experience, and cannot be estimated by the methods of exact science as
the weight of a planet can. There are and have been forgeries that are
more beautiful, therefore more valuable, than genuine specimens of the
class of work which they figure as. I feel that the specialist, with his
special measure and point of view, often endangers the fair name and
good repute of the real estimate; and that nothing but the dominion and
diffusion of general ideas can defend us against the specialist and keep
the specialist from being carried away by bad habits resulting from his
devotion to a single inquiry.
There was one general idea, of the greatest importance in determining
the true value of things, which preoccupied Dürer's mind and haunted his
imagination: the idea of proportion. I propose therefore to attempt to
make clear to myself and my readers what the idea of proportion really
implies, and of what service a sense for proportion really is; secondly,
to determine the special use of the term in relation to the appreciation
of works of art; thirdly, in relation to their internal
structure;--before proceeding to the special studies of Dürer as a man
and an artist.
II
I conceive the human reason to be the antagonist of all known forces
other than itself, and that therefore its most essential character is
the hope and desire to control and transform the universe; or, failing
that, to annihilate, if not the universe, at least itself and the
consciousness of a monster fact which it entirely condemns. In this
conception I believe myself to be at one with those by whom men have
been most influenced, and who, with or without confidence in the support
of unknown powers, have set themselves deliberately against the face of
things to die or conquer. This being so, and man individually weak, it
has been the avowed object of great characters--carrying with them the
instinctive consent of nations--to establish current values for all
things, according as their imagination could turn them to account as
effective aids of reason: that is, as they could be made to advance her
apparent empire over other elemental forces, such as motion, physical
life, &c. This evaluation, in so far as it is constant, results in what
we call civilisation, and is the only bond of society. With difficulty
is the value of new acquisitions recognised even in the realm of
science, until the imagination can place them in such a light as shall
make them appear to advance reason's ends, which accounts for the
reluctance that has been shown to accept many scientific results. Reason
demands that the world she would create shall be a fact, and declares
that the world she would transform is the real world, but until the
imagination can find a function for it in reason's ideal realm, every
piece of knowledge remains useless, or even an obstacle in the way of
our intended advance. This applies to individuals just as truly as it
does to mankind. And since man's reason is a natural phenomenon and does
apparently belong to the class of elemental forces, this warfare against
the apparent fact, and the fortitude and hope which its whole-hearted
prosecution begets, appear as a natural law to the intelligence and as a
command and promise to the reason.
The alternative between the will to cease and the will to serve reason,
with which I start out, may not seem necessary to all. "Forgive their
sin--and if not, blot me I pray thee out of thy book," was Moses'
prayer; and to me it seems that only by lethargy can any soul escape
from facing this alternative. The human mind in so far as it is active
always postulates, "Let that which I desire come to pass, or let me
cease!" Nor is there any diversity possible as to what really is
desirable: Man desires the full and harmonious development of his
faculties. As to how this end may most probably be attained, there is
diversity enough to represent every possible blend of ignorance with
knowledge, of lethargy with energy, of cowardice with courage.
"So endless and exorbitant are the desires of men, whether considered in
their persons or their states, that they will grasp at all, and can form
no scheme of perfect happiness with less."[1] So writes the most
powerful of English prose-writers. And this hope and desire, which is
reason, once thrown down, the most powerful among poets has brought from
human lips this estimate of life--
"It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
No one knows whether reason's object will or can be attained; but for
the present each man finds confidence and encouragement in so far as he
is able to imagine all things working together for the good of those who
desire good--in short, for "reasonable beings."[2] The more he knows,
the greater labour it is for him to imagine this; but the more he
concentrates his faculties on doing good and creating good things, the
more his imagination glows and shines and discovers to him new
possibilities of success: the better he is able to find--
"Sermons in stones and good in everything;"
"And make a moral of the devil himself."
But how is it that reason can accept an imagination that makes what in a
cold light she considers her enemy, appear her friend? All things
impress the mind with two contradictory notions--their actual condition
and their perfection. Even the worst of its kind impresses on us an idea
of what the best would be, or we could not know it for the worst.
Reason, then, seizes on this aspect of things which suggests their
perfection, and awards them her attention in proportion as such aspect
makes their perfection seem near, or as it may further her in
transforming the most pressing of other evils. All life tends to affirm
its own character; and the essential characteristic of man is reason,
which labours to perfect all things that he judges to be good, and to
transform all evil. Ultimate results are out of sight for all human
faculties except the early-waking eyes of long-chastened hope; but
reason loves this visionary mood, though she prefer that it be sung, and
find that less lyrical speech brings on it something of ridicule; for
such a rendering betrays, as a rule, faint desire or small power to
serve her in those who use it.
The sense of proportion, then, is that fineness of susceptibility by
which we appreciate in a given object, person, force, or mood,
serviceableness in regard to reason's work; in other words, by which we
estimate the capacity to transform the Universe in such a way that men
may ultimately be enabled to give their hearty consent to its existence,
which at present no man rationally can.
III
Now, art appeals to fine susceptibilities; for, as I have explained
elsewhere,[3] the value of works of art depends on their having come as
"real and intimate experiences to a large number of gifted men"--men who
have some kinship to that "finely touched and gifted man, the [Greek
_heuphnaes_] of the Greeks," to use the phrase of our greatest modern
critic. And in so far as we are able to judge between works successfully
making such an appeal, we must be governed by this sense of proportion,
which measures how things stand in regard to reason; that is, not merely
intellect, not merely emotion, but the alliance of both by means of the
imagination in aid of man's most central demand--the demand for
nobler life.
Perhaps I ought to point out before proceeding, that this position is
not that of the writers on art most in view at the present day. It is
the negation of the so-called scientific criticism, and also of the
personal theory that reduces art to an expression of, and an appeal to,
individual temperaments; it is the assertion of the sovereignty of the
aesthetic conscience on exactly the same grounds as sovereignty is
claimed for the moral conscience. Æsthetics deals with the morality of
appeals addressed to the senses. That is, it estimates the success of
such appeals in regard to the promotion of fuller and more harmonious
life. Flaubert wrote:
"Le génie n'est pas rare maintenant, mais ce que personne n'a plus et ce
qu'il faut tacher d'avoir, c'est la conscience."
("Genius is not rare nowadays, but conscience is what nobody has and
what one should strive after.")
To-day I am thinking of a painter. Painting is an art addressed
primarily to the eye, and not to the intelligence, not to the
imagination, save as these may be reached through the eye--that most
delicate organ of infinite susceptibility, which teaches us the meaning
of the word light--a word so often uttered with stress of ecstasy, of
longing, of despair, and of every other shade of emotion, that the sound
of it must soon be almost as powerful with the young heart, almost as
immediate in its effect, as the break of day itself, gladdening the eyes
and glorifying the earth. And how often is this joy received through the
eye entrusted back to it for expression? For the eye can speak with
varieties, delicacies, and subtle shades of motion far beyond the
attainment of any other organ. "This art of painting is made for the
eyes, for sight is the noblest sense of man,"[4] says Dürer; and again:
"It is ordained that never shall any man be able, out of his own
thoughts, to make a beautiful figure, unless, by much study, he hath
well stored his mind. That then is no longer to be called his own; it is
art acquired and learnt, which soweth, waxeth, and beareth fruit after
its kind. Thence the gathered secret treasure of the heart is manifested
openly in the work, and the new creature which a man createth in his
heart, appeareth in the form of a thing."[5]
Yes, indeed, the function of art is far from being confined to telling
us what we see, whatever some may pretend, or however naturally any
small nature may desire to continue, teach, or regulate great ones. All
so-called scientific methods of creating or criticising works of art are
inadequate, because the only truly scientific statements that can be
made about these inquiries are that nothing is certain--that no method
ensures success, and that no really important quality can be defined;
for what man can say why one cloud is more beautiful than another in the
same sky, any more than he can explain why, of two men equally absorbed
in doing their duty, one impresses him as being more holy than the
other? The degrees essential to both kinds of judgment escape all
definition; only the imagination can at times bring them home to us,
only the refined taste or chastened conscience, as the case may be,
witnesses with our spirit that its judgment is just, and bids us
recognise a master in him who delivers it. As the expression on a face
speaks to a delicate sense, often communicating more, other, and better
than can be seen, so the proportion, harmony, rhythm of a painting may
beget moods and joys that require the full resources of a well-stored
mind and disciplined character in order that they may be fully
relished--in brief, demand that maturity of reason which is the mark of
victorious man.
Such being my conception, it will easily be perceived how anxious I must
be to truly discern and express the relation between such objects as
works of art by common consent so highly honoured, and at the same time
so active in their effect upon the most exquisitely endowed of mankind.
Especially since to-day caprice, humour and temperament are, by the
majority of writers on art, acclaimed for the radical characteristic of
the human creative faculty, instead of its perversion and disease; and
it is thought that to be whimsical, moody, or self-indulgent best fits a
man both to create and appraise works of art, whereas to become so
really is the only way in which a man capable of such high tasks can
with certainty ruin and degrade his faculties. Precious, surpassingly
precious indeed, must every manifestation of such faculty before its
final extinction remain, since the race produces comparatively few
endowed after this kind.
Perhaps a sufficient illustration of this prevalent fallacy may be drawn
from Mr. Whistler's "Ten O'Clock," where he speaks of art:
"A whimsical goddess, and a capricious, her strong sense of joy
tolerates no dulness, and, live we never so spotlessly, still may she
turn her back upon us."
"As from time immemorial, she has done upon the Swiss in their
mountains."
Here is no proof of caprice, save on the witty writer's part; for men
who fast are not saved from bad temper, nor have the kindly necessarily
discreet tongues. The Swiss may be brave and honest, and yet dull.
Virtue is her own reward, and art her own. Virtue rewards the saint, art
the artist; but men are rewarded for attention to morality by some
measure of joy in virtue, for attention to beauty by some measure of joy
in works of art. Between the artist and the Philistine is no great gulf
fixed, in the sense that the witty "master of the butterfly" pretends to
assume, but an infinite and gentle decline of persons representing every
possible blend of the virtues and faults of these two types. Again, an
artist is miscalled "master of art." "Where he is, there she appears,"
is airy impudence. "Where she wills to be, there she chooses a man to
serve her," would not only have been more gallant but more reasonable;
for that "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth: so is
every one that is born of the spirit," and that "many are called, few
chosen," are sayings as true of the influence which kindleth art as of
that which quickeneth to holiness. Art is not dignified by being called
whimsical--or capricious. What can a man explain? The intention, behind
the wind, behind the spirit, behind the creative instinct, is dark. But
man is true to his own most essential character when, if he cannot
refrain from prating of such mysteries, he qualifies them as hope would
have him, with the noblest of his virtues; not when he speaks of the
unknown, in whose hands his destiny so largely rests, slightingly, as of
a woman whom he has seduced because he despised her--calling her
capricious because she answered to his caprice, whimsical, because she
was as flighty as his error. It is not art's function to reward virtue.
But, caprices and whimseys being ascribed to a goddess, it will be
natural to expect them in her worshipper; and Mr. Whistler revealed the
limitations of his genius by whimseys and caprice. Though it was in
their relations to the world that this goddess and her devotee claimed
freedoms so far from perfect, yet this, their avowed characteristic
abroad, I think in some degree disturbed their domestic relations,
Though others have underlined the absurdity of this theory by applying
themselves to it with more faith and less sense, I have chosen to quote
from the "Ten O'Clock," because I admire it and accept most of the ideas
about art advanced therein. The artist who wrote it was able, in Dürer's
phrase, "to prove" what he wrote "with his hand." Most of those who have
elaborated what was an occasional unsoundness of his doctrine into
ridiculous religions are as unable to create as they are to think; there
is no need to record names which it is wisdom to forget. But it may be
well to point out that Mr. Whistler does not succeed in glorifying great
artists when he declares that beauty "to them was as much a matter of
certainty and triumph as is to the astronomer the verification of the
result, foreseen with the light granted to him alone." No, he only sets
up a false analogy; for the true parallel to the artist is the saint,
not the astronomer; both are convinced, neither understands. Art is no
more the reward of intelligence than of virtue. She permits no caprice
in her own realm. Loyalty is the only virtue she insists on, loyalty in
regard to her servant's experience of beauty; he may be immoral in every
other way and she not desert him; but let him turn Balaam and declare
beauty absent where he feels its presence--though in doing this he hopes
to advance virtue or knowledge, she needs no better than an ass to
rebuke him. Nothing effects more for anarchy than these notions that art
derives from individual caprice, or defends virtue, or demonstrates
knowledge; for they are all based on those flattering hopes of the
unsuccessful, that chance, rules both in life and art, or that it is
possible to serve two masters.
Doctrines often repeated gain easy credence; and, since art demands
leisure in order to be at all enjoyed, ideas about it, in so fatiguing a
life as ours has become, take men off their guard, when their habitual
caution is laid to sleep, and, by an over-easiness, they are inclined to
spoil both their sense of distinction and their children. Yes, they
consent to theatres that degrade them, because they distract and amuse;
and read journals that are smart and diverting at the expense of dignity
and truth--in the same way as they smile at the child whom reason bids
them reprove, and with the like tragic result; for they become incapable
of enjoying works of art, as the child is incapacitated for the best of
social intercourse. To prophesy smooth things to people in this
condition, and flatter their dulness, is to be no true friend; and so
the modern art-critic and journalist is often the insidious enemy of the
civilisation he contents.
Nothing strikes the foreigner coming to England more than our lack of
general ideas. Our art criticism is no exception; it, like our
literature and politics, is happy-go-lucky and delights in the pot-shot.
We often hear this attributed admiringly to "the sporting instinct." "If
God, in his own time, granteth me to write something further about
matters connected with painting, I will do so, in hope that this art may
not rest upon use and wont alone, but that in time it may be taught on
true and orderly principles, and may be understood to the praise of God
and the use and pleasure of all lovers of art."[6]
Our art is still worse off than our trade or our politics, for it does
not even rest upon use and wont, but is wholly in the air. Yet the
typical modern aesthete has learnt where to take cover, for, though
destitute of defence, he has not entirely lost the instinct for
self-preservation; and, when he finds the eye of reason upon him, he
immediately flies to the diversity of opinions. But Dürer follows him
even there with the perfect good faith of a man in earnest.
"Men deliberate and hold numberless differing opinions about beauty, and
they seek after it in many different ways, although ugliness is thereby
rather attained. Being then, as we are, in such a state of error, I know
not certainly what the ultimate measure of true beauty is, and cannot
describe it aright. But glad should I be to render such help as I can,
to the end that the gross deformities of our work might be and remain
pruned away and avoided, unless indeed any one prefers to bestow great
labour upon the production of deformities. We are brought back,
therefore, to the aforesaid judgment of men, which considereth one
figure beautiful at one time and another at another....
"Because now we cannot altogether attain unto perfection, shall we
therefore wholly cease from learning? By no means. Let us not take unto
ourselves thoughts fit for cattle. For evil and good lie before men,
wherefore it behoveth the rational man to choose the good."[7]
A man may see, if he will but watch, who is more finely touched and
gifted than himself. In all the various fields of human endeavour, on
such men he should try to form himself; for only thus can he enlarge his
nature, correct his opinions. Something he can learn from this man,
something from that, and it is rational to learn and be taught. Are we
to be cattle or gods? "Is it not written in your law, I said, 'Ye are
gods?'" Reason demands that each man form himself on the pattern of a
god, and God is an empty name if reason be not the will of God. Then he
whom reason hath brought up may properly be called a son of God, a son
of man, a child of light. But it is easier to bob to such phrases than
to understand them. However, their mechanical repetition does not
prevent their having meant something once, does not prevent their
meaning being their true value. It is time we understood our art, just
as it is time we understood our religion. Docility, as I have pointed
out elsewhere, is one of the marks of genius. Dürer's spirit is the
spirit of the great artist who will learn even from "dull men of little
judgment."
"Let none be ashamed to learn, for a good work requireth good counsel.
Nevertheless, whosoever taketh counsel in the arts, let him take it from
one thoroughly versed in those matters, who can prove what he saith with
his hand. Howbeit any one may give thee counsel; and when thou hast done
a work pleasing to thyself, it is good for thee to show it to dull men
of little judgment that they may give their opinion of it. As a rule
they pick out the most faulty points, whilst they entirely pass over the
good. If thou findest something they say true, thou mayst thus better
thy work."[8]
Those who are thoroughly versed in art are the great artists; we have
guides then, and we have a way--the path they have trodden--and we have
company, the gifted and docile men of to-day whom we see to be improving
themselves; and, in so far as we are reasonable, a sense of proportion
is ours, which we may improve; and it will help us to catch up better
and yet better company until we enjoy the intimacy of the noblest, and
know as we are known. Then: "May we not consider it a sign of sanity
when we regard the human spirit as ... a poet, and art as a half written
poem? Shall we not have a sorry disappointment if its conclusion is
merely novel, and not the fulfilment and vindication of those great
things gone before?"[9] For my own part, those appear to me the grandest
characters who, on finding that there is no other purchase for effort
but only hope, and that they can never cease from hope but by ceasing to
live, clear their minds of all idle acquiescence in what could never be
hoped, and concentrate their energies on conquering whatever in their
own nature, and in the world about them, militates against their most
essential character--reason, which seeks always to give a higher
value to life.
IV
When we speak of the sense of proportion displayed in the design of a
building, many will think that the word is used in quite a different
sense, and one totally unrelated to those which I have been discussing.
But no; life and art are parallel and correspond throughout; ethics are
the Esthetics of life, religion the art of living. Taste and conscience
only differ in their provinces, not in their procedure. Both are based
on instinctive preferences; the canon of either is merely so many of
those preferences as, by their constant recurrence to individuals gifted
with the power of drawing others after them, are widely accepted.
The preference of serenity to melancholy, of light to darkness, are
among the most firmly established in the canon, that is all. The sense
of proportion within a design is employed to stimulate and delight the
eye. Ordinary people may fear there is some abstruse science about this.
Not at all; it is as simple as relishing milk and honey, and its
development an exact parallel to the training of the palate to
distinguish the flavours of teas, coffees and wines. "Taste and see" is
the whole business. There are many people who have no hesitation in
picking out what to their eye is the wainscot panel with the richest
grain: they see it at once. So with etchings; if people would only
forget that they are works of art, forget all the false or
ill-understood standards which they have been led to suppose applicable,
and look at them as they might at agate stones; or choose out the
richest in effect: the most suitable for a gay room, or a hall, or a
library, as though they were patterned stuffs for curtains; they would
come a thousand times nearer a right appreciation of Dürer's success
than by making a pot-shot to lasso the masterpiece with the tangle of
literary rubbish which is known as art criticism.
The harmonies and contrasts of juxtaposed colours or textures are
affected by quantity, and a sense of proportion decides what quantities
best produce this effect and what that. The correctness or amount of
information to be conveyed in the delineation of some object, in
relation to the mood which the artist has chosen shall dominate his
work, is determined by his sense of proportion. He may distort an object
to any extent or leave it as vague as the shadow on a wall in diffused
light, or he may make it precise and particular as ever Jan Van Eyck
did; so only that its distortion or elaboration is so proportioned to
the other objects and intentions of his work as to promote its success
in the eyes of the beholder.
There are no fallacies greater than the prevalent ones conveyed by the
expressions "out of drawing" or "untrue to nature." There is no such
thing as correct drawing or an outside standard of truth for works
of art.
"The conception of every work of art carries within it its own rule and
method, which must be found out before it can be achieved." "Chaque
oeuvre à faire a sa poétique en soi, qu'il faut trouver," said Flaubert.
Truth in a work of art is sincerity. That a man says what he really
means--shows us what he really thinks to be beautiful--is all that
reason bids us ask for. No science or painstaking can make up for his
not doing this. No lack of skill or observation can entirely frustrate
his communicating his intention to kindred natures if he is utterly
sincere. An infant communicates its joy. It is probable that the
inexpressible is never felt. Stammering becomes more eloquent than
oratory, a child's impulsiveness wiser than circumlocutory experience.
When a single intention absorbs the whole nature, communication is
direct and immediate, and makes impotence itself a means of
effectiveness. So the naïveties of early art put to shame the
purposeless parade of prodigious skill. Wherever there is communication
there is art; but there are evil communications and there is vicious
art, though, perhaps, great sincerity is incompatible with either. For
an artist to be deterred by other people's demands means that he is not
artist enough; it is what his reason teaches him to demand of himself
that matters, though, doubtless, the good desire the approval of
kindred natures.
A work of art addresses the eye by means of chosen proportions; it may
present any number of facts as exactly as may be, but if it offend the
eye it is a mere misapplication of industry, or the illustration of a
scientific treatise out of place; and those that choose ribbons well are
better artists than the man that made it. Or again it may overflow with
poetical thought and suggestion, or have the stuff to make a first-rate
story in it; but, if it offend the eye, it is merely a misapplication of
imagination, invention or learning, and the girl who puts a charming
nosegay together is a better artist than he who painted it. On the other
hand, though it have no more significance than a glass of wine and a
loaf of bread, if the eye is rejoiced by gazing on the paint that
expresses them, it is a work of art and a fine achievement. Still, it
may be as fanciful as a fairy-tale, or as loaded with import as the
Crucifixion; and, if it stimulates the eye to take delight in its
surfaces over and above mere curiosity, it is a work of art, and great
in proportion as the significance of what it conveys is brought home to
us by the very quality of the stimulus that is created in return for our
gaze. For painting is the result of a power to speak beautifully with
paint, as poetry is of a power to express beautifully by means of words
either simple things or those which demand the effort of a welltrained
mind in order to be received and comprehended. The mistake made by
impressionists, luminarists, and other modern artists, is that a true
statement of how things appear to them will suffice; it will not, unless
things appear beautiful to them, and they render them beautifully. It
will not, because science is not art, because knowledge is a different
thing from beauty. A true statement may be repulsive and degrading;
whereas an affirmation of beauty, whether it be true or fancied, is
always moving, and if delivered with corresponding grace is
inspiring--is a work of art and "a joy for ever." For reason demands
that all the eye sees shall be beautiful, and give such pleasure as best
consists with the universe becoming what reason demands that it shall
become. This demand of reason is perfectly arbitrary? Yes, but it is
also inevitable, necessitated by the nature of the human character. It
is equally arbitrary and equally inevitable that man must, where science
is called for, in the long run prefer a true statement to a lie. From
art reason demands beautiful objects, from science true statements: such
is human nature; for the possession of this reason that judges and
condemns the universe, and demands and attempts to create something
better, is that which differentiates human life from all other known
forces--is that by which men may be more than conquerors, may make peace
with the universe; for
"A peace is of the nature of a conquest;
For then both parties nobly are subdued
And neither party loser."
Of such a nature is the only peace that the soul can make with the
body--that man can make with nature--that habit can make with
instinct--that art can make with impulse. In order to establish such a
peace the imagination must train reason to see a friend in her enemy,
the physical order. For, as Reynolds says of the complete artist:
"He will pick up from dunghills, what, by a nice chemistry, passing
through his own mind, shall be converted into pure gold, and under the
rudeness of Gothic essays, he will find original, rational, and even
sublime inventions."[10]
It is not too much to say that the nature both of the artist and of the
dunghills is "subdued" by such a process, and yet neither is a "loser."
Goethe profoundly remarked that the highest development of the soul was
reached through worship first of that which was above, then of that
which was beneath it. This great critic also said, "Only with difficulty
do we spell out from that which nature presents to us, the _DESIRED_
word, the congenial. Men find what the artist brings intelligible and to
their taste, stimulating and alluring, genial and friendly, spiritually
nourishing, formative and elevating. Thus the artist, grateful to the
nature that made him, weaves a second nature--but a conscious, a fuller,
a more perfectly human nature."
[Illustration: Water-colour drawing of a Hare]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Swift, "Contests and Dissensions in Athens and Rome."]
[Footnote 2: It may be urged that diversities of opinion exist as to
what good is. The convenience of the words "good" and "evil" corresponds
to a need created by a common experience in the same way as the
convenience of the words "light" and "darkness" does. A child might
consider that a diamond generated light in the same way as a candle
does. He would be mistaken, but this would not affect the correctness of
his application of the word "light" to his experience; if he confused
light with darkness he must immediately become unintelligible. Good and
light are perceived and named--no one can say more of them; the effects
of both may be described with more or less accuracy. To say that light
is a mode of motion does not define it; we ask at once, What mode? And
the only answer is, that which produces the effect of light. A man born
blind, though he knew what was meant by motion, could never deduce from
this knowledge a conception of light.]
[Footnote 3: The Monthly Review, October 1902, "Rodin."]
[Footnote 4: "Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer," p. 177.]
[Footnote 5: Ibid. p. 247.]
[Footnote 6: "Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer," p. 252.]
[Footnote 7: "Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer," pp, 244 and 245.]
[Footnote 8: "Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer," p. 180.]
[Footnote 9: The Monthly Review, April 1901, "In Defence of Reynolds."]
[Footnote 10: Sixth Discourse.]
CHAPTER II
THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION ON THE CREATIVE IMPULSE
I
There are some artists of whom one would naturally write in a lyrical
strain, with praise of the flesh, and those things which add to its
beauty, freshness, and mystery--fair scenes of mountain, woodland, or
sea-shore; blue sky, white cloud and sunlight, or the deep and starry
night; youth and health, strength and fertility, frankness and freedom.
And, in such a strain, one would insist that the fondness and
intoxication which these things quicken was natural, wise, and lovely.
But, quite as naturally, when one has to speak of Dürer, the mind
becomes filled with the exhilaration and the staidness that the desire
to know and the desire to act rightly beget; with the dignity of
conscious comprehension, the serenity of accomplished duty with all the
strenuousness and ardour of which the soul is capable; with science
and religion.
It is natural to refer often to the towering eminence of these virtues
in Michael Angelo; both he and Dürer were not only great artists, and
active and powerful minds, but men imbued with, and conservative of,
piety. And it seems to me, if we are to appreciate and sympathise deeply
with such men, we must try to understand the religion they believed in;
to estimate, not only what its value was supposed to be in those days,
but what value it still has for us. Surely what they prized so highly
must have had real and lasting worth? Surely it can only be the relation
of that value to common speech and common thought which has changed, not
its relation to man's most essential nature? Therefore I will first try
to arrive at a general notion of the real worth of their ideas,--that
is, the worth that is equally great from their point of view and ours.
The whole of that period, the period of the so belauded Renascence, had
within it (or so it seems to me) an incurable insufficiency, which
troubles the affections of those who praise or condemn it; so that they
show themselves more passionate than those who praise or condemn the art
and life of ancient Greece. This insufficiency I believe to have been
due to the fact that Christian ideas were more firmly rooted in, than
they were understood by, the society of those days. And to-day I think
the same cause continues to propagate a like insufficiency, a like lack
of correspondence between effort and aim. Certain ideas found in the
reported sayings of Jesus have so fastened upon the European intellect
that they seem well-nigh inseparable from it. We are told that the
effort of the Greek, of Aristotle, was to "submit to the empire of
fact." The effort of the Jew was very similar; for the prophets, what
happened was the will of God, what will happen is what God intends. Now
it is noteworthy that Aristotle did not wish to submit to ignorance,
though it and the causes which produce it and preserve it in human minds
are among the most horrible and tremendous of facts; and it is the
imperishable glory of the prophets, that, whatever the priest the king,
the Sadducee or Pharisee might do, _they_ could not rest in or abide the
idea that God's will was ever evil; no inconsistency was too glaring to
check their indignation at Eastern fatalism which quietly supposed that
as things went wrong it was their nature to do so;--vanity, vanity, all
is vanity!--or that if men did wrong and prospered, it was God's doing,
and showed that they had pleased Him with sacrifices and performances.
II
'Wherever poetry, imagination, or art had been busy, there had appeared,
both in Judea and Greece, some degree of rebellion against the empire of
fact.. When Jesus said: "The kingdom of heaven is within you," he
recognised that the human reason was the antagonist of all other known
forces, and he declared war on the god of this world and prophesied the
downfall of--the empire of the apparent fact;--not with fume and fret,
not with rant and rage, as poets and seers had done, but mildly
affirming that with the soul what is best is strongest, has in the long
run most influence; that there is one fact in the essential nature of
man which, antagonist to the influence of all other facts, wields an
influence destined to conquer or absorb all other influences. He said:
"My Father which is in heaven, the master influence within me, has
declared that I shall never find rest to my soul until I prefer His
kingdom, the conception of my heart, to the kingdoms of earth and the
glory of the earth." 'We have seen that Dürer describes the miracle; the
work of art, thus:
"The secret treasure which a man conceived in his heart shall appear as
a thing" (see page 10).
And we know that he prized this, the master thing, the conception of the
heart, above everything else.
Much learning is not evil to a man, though some be stiffly set against
it, saying that art puffeth up. Were that so, then were none prouder
than God who hath formed all arts, but that cannot be, for God is
perfect in goodness. The more, therefore, a man learneth, so much the
better doth he become, and so much the more love doth he win for the
arts and for things exalted.
The learning Dürer chiefly intends is not book-learning or critical
lore, but knowledge how to make, by which man becomes a creator in
imitation of God; for this is of necessity the most perfect knowledge,
rivalling the sureness of intuition and instinct.
III
"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away."
Every one knows how anxious great artists become for the preservation of
their works, how highly they value permanence in the materials employed,
and immunity from the more obvious chances of destruction in the
positions they are to occupy. Michael Angelo is said to have painted
cracks on the Sistina ceiling to force the architect to strengthen the
roof. When Jesus made the assertion that his teaching would outlast the
influence of the visible world of nature and the societies of men--the
kingdoms of earth and the glory of the earth--he did no more than every
victorious soul strives to effect, and to feel assured that it has in
some large degree effected; the difference between him and them is one
of degree. It may be objected that different hearts harbour and cherish
contradictory conceptions. Doubtless; but does the desire to win the
co-operation and approval of other men consist with the higher
developments of human faculties? Is it, perhaps, essential to them? If
so, in so far as every man increases in vitality and the employment of
his powers, he will be forced to reverence and desire the solidarity of
the race, and consequently to relinquish or neglect whatever in his own
ideal militates against such solidarity. And this will be the case
whether he judge such eccentric elements to be nobler or less noble than
the qualities which are fostered in him by the co-operation of his
fellows. Jesus, at any rate, affirmed that the law of the kingdom within
a man's soul was: "Love thy neighbour as thyself"; and that obedience to
it would work in every man like leaven, which is lost sight of in the
lump of dough, and seems to add nothing to it, yet transforms the whole
in raising up the loaf; or as the corn of wheat which is buried in the
glebe like a dead body, yet brings forth the blade, and nourishes a
new life.
So he that should follow Jesus by obeying the laws of the kingdom, by
loving God (the begetter or fountainhead of a man's most essential
conception of what is right and good) and his neighbour, was assured by
his mild and gracious Master that he would inherit, by way of a return
for the sacrifices which such obedience would entail, a new and better
life. (Follow me, I laid down my life in order that I might take it
again. He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his
life _for_ my _sake_--as I did, in imitation of me--shall find it.) For
in order to make this very difficult obedience possible, it was to be
turned into a labour of love done for the Master's sake. As Goethe said:
"Against the superiority of another, there is no remedy
but love."
Is it not true that the superiority of another man humiliates, crushes
and degrades us in our own eyes, if we envy it or hate it instead of
loving it? while by loving it we make it in a sense ours, and can
rejoice in it. So Jesus affirmed that he had made the superiority of the
ideal his; so that he was in it, and it was in him, so that men who
could no longer fix their attention on it in their own souls might love
it in him. He was their master-conception, their true ideal, acting
before them, captivating the attention of their senses and emotions.
This is what a man of our times, possessed of rare receptivity and great
range of comprehension, considered to be the pith of Jesus' teaching.
Matthew Arnold gave much time and labour to trying to persuade men that
this was what the religion they professed, or which was professed around
them, most essentially meant. And he reminded us that the adequacy of
such ideas for governing man's life depended not on the authority of a
book or writings by eye-witnesses with or without intelligence, but on
whether they were true in experience. He quoted Goethe's test for every
idea about life, "But is it true, is it true for me, now?" "Taste and
see," as the prophets put it; or as Jesus said, "Follow me." For an
ideal must be followed, as a man woos a woman; the pursuit may have to
be dropped, in order to be more surely recovered; an ideal must be
humoured, not seized at once as a man seizes command over a machine.
This _secret of success was_ was only to be won by the development of a
temper, a spirit of docility. To love it in an example was the best,
perhaps the only way of gaining possession of it.
IV
As we are placed, what hope can we have but to learn? and what is there
from which we might not learn? An artist is taught by the materials he
uses more essentially than by the objects he contemplates; for these
teach him "how," and perfect him in creating, those only teach him
"what," and suggest forms to be created. But for men in general the
"what" is more important than the "how"; and only very powerful art can
exhilarate and refine them by means of subjects which they dislike
or avoid.
Every seer of beauty is not a creator of beautiful things; and in art
the "how" is so much more essential than the "what," that artists create
unworthy or degrading objects beautifully, so that we admire their art
as much as we loathe its employment; in nature, too, such objects are
met with, created by the god of this world. A good man, too, may create
in a repulsive manner objects whose every association is ennobling or
elevating.
"The kingdom of heaven is within you," but hell is also within.
"Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is hell
And where hell is, must we for ever be:
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven,"
as Marlowe makes his Mephistophilis say: and the best art is the most
perfect expression of that which is within, of heaven or of hell.
Goethe said:
"In the Greeks, whose poetry and rhetoric was simple and positive, we
encounter expressions of approval more often than of disapproval. With
the Romans, on the other hand, the contrary holds good; and the more
corrupted poetry and rhetoric become, the more will censure grow and
praise diminish."
I have sometimes thought that the difference between classic and more or
less decadent art lies in the fact that by the one things are
appreciated for what they most essentially are--a young man, a swift
horse, a chaste wife, &c.--by the other for some more or less peculiar
or accidental relation that they hold to the creator. Such writers
lament that the young are not old, the old not young, prostitutes not
pure, that maidens are cold and modest or matrons portly. They complain
of having suffered from things being cross, or they take malicious
pleasure in pointing that crossness out; whereas classical art always
rebounds from the perception that things are evil to the assertion of
what ought to be or shall be. It triumphs over the Prince of Darkness,
and covers a multitude of sins, as dew or hoar frost cover and make
beautiful a dunghill. Dunghills exist; but he who makes of Macbeth's or
Clytemnestra's crimes an elevating or exhilarating spectacle triumphs
over the god of this world, as Jesus did when he made the most
ignominious death the symbol, of his victory and glory. Little wonder
that Albert Dürer, and Michael Angelo found such deep satisfaction in
Him as the object of their worship--his method of docility was
next-of-kin to that of their art. Respect and solicitude create the
soul, and these two pre-eminently docile passions preside over the
soul's creation, whether it be a society, a life, or a thing of beauty.
V
Here, when art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart,
Lived and laboured Albrecht Dürer, the Evangelist of Art.
These jingling lines would scarcely merit consideration but that they
express a common notion which has its part of truth as well as of error.
Let us examine the first assertion (that art has been religion.)
Baudelaire, in his _Curiosités Esthétiques_ says: _La première affaire
d'un artiste est de substituer l'homme à la nature et de protester
contre elle_. ("The first thing for an artist is to substitute man for
nature and to protest against her.") The beginners and the smatterers
are always "students of nature," and suppose that to be so will suffice;
but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity,
life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or
humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from
other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and
exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in
readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of
victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a work of art, a life worthy of
universal remembrance is a masterpiece: only the materials employed
differentiate it from any other work of art. The life of Jesus is
considered as such a masterpiece. Thus we can say that if art has never
been religion, religion has always been and ever will be an art.
Now let us examine the second assertion that Dürer was an evangelist.
What kind of character do we mean to praise when we say a man is an
evangelist? Two only of the four evangelists can be said to reveal any
ascertainable personality, and only St. John is sufficiently outlined to
stand as a type; but I do not think we mean to imply a resemblance to
St. John. The bringer of good news, the evangelist par excellence, was
Jesus. He it was who made it evident that the sons of men have power to
forgive sins. Victory over evil possible--this was the good news. No
doubt every sincere Christian is supposed to be a more or less
successful imitator of Jesus; and as such, Dürer may rightly be called
an evangelist. But more than this is I think, implied in the use of the
word; an evangelist is, for us above all a bringer of good news in
something of the same manner as Jesus brought it, by living among
sinners for those sinners' sake, among paupers for those paupers' sake;
to see a man sweet, radiant, and victorious under these circumstances,
is to see an evangelist. Goethe's final claim is that, "after all, there
are honest people up and down the world who have got light from my
books; and whoever reads them, and gives himself the trouble to
understand me, will acknowledge that he has acquired thence a certain
inward freedom"; and for this reason I have been tempted to call him the
evangelist of the modern world. But it is best to use the word as I
believe it is most correctly employed, and not to yield to the
temptation (for tempting it is) to call men like Dürer and Goethe
evangelists. They are teachers who charm as well as inform us, as Jesus
was; but they are not evangelists in the sense that he was, for they did
not deal directly with human life where it is forced most against its
distinctive desire for increase in nobility, or is most obviously
degraded by having betrayed it.'[11]
VI
I have often heard it objected that Jesus is too feminine an ideal, too
much based on renunciation and the effort to make the best of failure.
No doubt that as women are, by the necessity of their function, more
liable to the ship-wreck of their hopes, the bankruptcy of their powers,
they have been drawn to cling to this hope of salvation in greater
numbers, and with more fervour; so that the most general idea of Jesus
may be a feminine one. It does not follow that this is the most correct
or the best: every object, every person will appear differently to
different natures. And it still remains true that there have been a
great many men of very various types who have drawn strength and beauty
from the contemplation and reverence of Jesus. That this ideal is too
much based on making the best of failure is an objection that makes very
little impression on me, for I think I perceive that failure is one of
the most constant and widespread conditions of the universe, and even
more certainly of human life.
VII
It remains now to see in what degree these ideas were felt or made
themselves felt through the Romanism and Lutheranism of the Renascence
period. Perhaps we English shall best recognise the presence of these
ideas, the working of this leaven--this docility, the necessary midwife
of 'genius, who transforms the difficult tasks which the human reason
sets herself into labours of love--in an Englishman; so my first example
shall be taken from Erasmus' portrait of Dean Colet.
It was then that my acquaintance with him began, he being then thirty, I
two or three months his junior. He had no theological degree, but the
whole University, doctors and all, went to hear him. Henry VII took note
of him, and made him Dean of St. Paul's. His first step was to restore
discipline in the Chapter, which had all gone to wreck. He preached
every saint's day to great crowds. He cut down household expenses, and
abolished suppers and evening parties. At dinner a boy reads a chapter
from Scripture; Colet takes a passage from it and discourses to the
universal delight. Conversation is his chief pleasure, and he will keep
it up till midnight if he finds a companion. Me he has often taken with
him on his walks, and talks all the time of Christ. He hates coarse
language, furniture, dress, food, books, all clean and tidy, but
scrupulously plain; and he wears grey woollen when priests generally go
in purple. With the large fortune which he inherited from his father, he
founded and endowed a school at St. Paul's entirely at his own cost--
masters, houses, salaries, everything.
He is a man of genuine piety. He was not born with it. He was naturally
hot, impetuous and resentful--indolent, fond of pleasure and of women's
society--disposed to make a joke of everything. He told me that he had
fought against his faults with study, fasting and prayer, and thus his
whole life was in fact unpolluted with the world's defilements. His
money he gave all to pious uses, worked incessantly, talked always on
serious subjects, to conquer his disposition to levity; not but what you
could see traces of the old Adam when wit was flying at feast or
festival. He avoided large parties for this reason. He dined on a single
dish, with a draught or two of light ale. He liked good wine, but
abstained on principle. I never knew a man of sunnier nature. No one
ever more enjoyed cultivated society; but here, too, he denied himself,
and was always thinking of the life to come.
His opinions were peculiar, and he was reserved in expressing them for
fear of exciting suspicion. He knew how unfairly men judge each other,
how credulous they are of evil, how much easier it is for a lying tongue
to stain a reputation than for a friend to clear it. But among his
friends he spoke his mind freely.
He admitted privately that many things were generally taught which he
did not believe, but he would not create a scandal by blurting out his
objections. No book could be so heretical but he would read it, and read
it carefully. He learnt more from such books than he learnt from
dogmatism and interested orthodoxy.[12]
Some may wonder what Colet could have found to say about Christ which
could not only interest but delight the young and witty Erasmus; and may
judge that at any rate to-day such a subject is sufficiently fly-blown.
The proper reflection to make is, "A rose by any other name would smell
as sweet."
Whether we say Christ or Perfection does not matter, it is what we mean
which is either enthralling or dull, fresh or fusty; "there's nothing
in a name."
"When Colet speaks I might be listening to Plato," says Erasmus in
another place, at a time when he was still younger and had just come
from what had been a gay and perhaps in some measure a dissolute life in
Paris: not that it is possible to imagine Erasmus as at any time
committing great excesses, or deeply sinning against the sense of
proportion and measure.
Success is the only criterion, as in art, so in religion: the man that
plucks out his eye and casts it from him, and remains the dull, greedy,
distressful soul he was before, is a damned fool; but the man who does
the same and becomes such that his younger friends report of him, "I
never knew a sunnier nature," is an artist in life, a great artist in
the sense that Christ is supposed to have been a great master; one who
draws men to him, as bees are drawn to flowers. Colet drew the young
Henry the Eighth as well as Erasmus. "The King said: 'Let every man
choose his own doctor. Dean Colet shall be mine!'" Though no doubt
charlatans have often fascinated young scholars and monarchs, yet it is
peculiarly impossible to think of Colet as a charlatan.
VIII
Next let us take a sonnet and a sentence from Michael Angelo:
Yes! hope may with my strong desire keep pace,
And I be undeluded, unbetrayed;
For if of our affections none finds grace
In sight of heaven, then, wherefore hath God made
The world which we inhabit? Better plea
Love cannot have than that in loving thee
Glory to that eternal peace is paid,
Who such divinity to thee imparts,
As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts.
His hope is treacherous only whose love dies
With beauty, which is varying every hour;
But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power
Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower,
That breathes on earth the air of paradise.[13]
It is very remarkable how strongly the conviction of permanence, and the
preference for the inward conception over external beauty are expressed
in this fine sonnet; and also that the reason given for accepting the
discipline of love is that experience shows how it "hallows and makes
pure all gentle hearts." In such a love poem--the object of which might
very well have been Jesus--I seem to find more of the spirit of his
religion, whereby he binds his disciples to the Father that ruled within
him, till they too feel the bond of parentage as deeply as himself and
become sons with him of his Father;--more of that binding power of Jesus
is for me expressed in this fine sonnet than in Luther's Catechism. The
religion that enables a great artist to write of love in this strain, is
the religion of docility, of the meek and lowly heart. For Michael
Angelo was not a man by nature of a meek and lowly heart, any more than
Colet was a man naturally saintly or than Luther was a man naturally
refined. But because Michael Angelo thus prefers the kingdom of heaven
to external beauty, one must not suppose that he, its arch high-priest,
despised it. Nobody had a more profound respect for the thing of beauty,
whether it was the creation of God or man. He said:
"Nothing makes the soul so pure, so religious, as the endeavour to
create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives for
perfection, strives for something that is God-like."
Now we can perceive how the same spirit worked in a great artist, not at
Nuremberg or London, but at Rome, the centre of the world, where a
Borgia could be Pope.
IX
Erasmus, the typical humanist, the man who loved humanity so much that
he felt that his love for it might tempt him to fight against God,
travelled from the one world to the other; passed from the society of
cardinals and princes to the seclusion of burgher homes in London, or to
chat with Dürer at Antwerp. He belonged perhaps to neither world at
heart; but how greatly his love and veneration of the one exceeded his
admiration and sense of the practical utility of the other, a comparison
of his sketch of Colet with such a note as this from his New Testament
makes abundantly plain:
"I saw with my own eyes Pope Julius II. at Bologna, and afterwards at
Rome, marching at the head of a triumphal procession as if he were
Pompey or Cæsar. St. Peter subdued the world with faith, not with arms
or soldiers or military engines. St. Peter's successors would win as
many victories as St. Peter won if they had Peter's spirit."
But we must not forget that the book in which these notes appeared was
published with the approval of a Pope, and that he and others sought its
author for advice as to how to cope best with their more hot-headed
enemy Martin Luther. We must also remember that we are told that Colet
"was not very hard on priests and monks who only sinned with women. He
did not make light of impurity, but thought it less criminal than spite
and malice and envy and vanity and ignorance. The loose sort were at
least made human and modest by their very faults, and he regarded
avarice and arrogance as blacker sins in a priest than a hundred
concubines." This spirit was not that of the Reformation which came to
stop, yet it existed and was widespread at that time; it was I think the
spirit which either formed or sustained most of the great artists. At
any rate it both formed and sustained Albert Dürer. Yet the true nature
of these ideas, derived from Jesus, could not be understood even by
Colet, even by Erasmus. For them it was tradition which gave value and
assured truth to Christ's ideas, not the truth of those ideas which gave
value to the traditions and legends concerning him. The value of those
ideas was felt, sometimes nearer, sometimes further off; it was loved
and admired; their lives were apprehended by it, and spent in
illustrating and studying it, as were also those of Albert Dürer and
Michael Angelo. To understand the life and work of such men, we must
form some conception of the true nature and value of those ideas, as I
have striven to do in this chapter. Otherwise we shall merely admire and
love them, as they admired and loved Jesus; and it has now become a
point of honour with educated men not only to love and admire, but to
make the effort to understand. Even they desired to do this. And I think
we may rejoice that the present time gives us some advantage over those
days, at least in this respect.
X
And lastly, in order to bring us back to our main subject, let us quote
from a stray leaf of a lost MS. Book of Dürer's, which contains the
description of his father's death.
... desired. So the old wife helped him up, and the night-cap
on his head had suddenly become wet with drops of sweat. Then
he asked to drink, so she gave him a little Reinfell wine. He
took a very little of it, and then desired to get into bed
again and thanked her. And when he had got into bed he fell
at once into his last agony. The old wife quickly kindled the
candle for him and repeated to him S. Bernard's verses, and
ere she had said the third he was gone. God be merciful to
him! And the young maid, when she saw the change, ran quickly
to my chamber and woke me, but before I came down he was
gone. I saw the dead with great sorrow, because I had not
been worthy to be with him at his end.
And thus in the night before S. Matthew's eve my father
passed away, in the year above mentioned (Sept. 20, 1502)
--the merciful God help me also to a happy end--and he left
my mother an afflicted widow behind him. He was ever wont to
praise her highly to me, saying what a good wife she was,
wherefore I intend never to forsake her. I pray you for God's
sake, all ye my friends, when you read of the death of my
father, to remember his soul with an "Our Father" and an "Ave
Maria"; and also for your own sake, that we may so serve God
as to attain a happy life and the blessing of a good end. For
it is not possible for one who has lived well to depart ill
from this world, for God is full of compassion. Through which
may He grant us, after this pitiful life, the joy of
everlasting salvation--in the name of the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost, at the beginning and at the end, one
Eternal Governor. Amen.
The last sentences of this may seem to share in the character of the
vain repetitions of words with which professed believers are only too
apt to weary and disgust others. They are in any case commonplaces: the
image has taken the place of the object; the Father in heaven is not
considered so much as the paternal governor of the inner life as the
ruler of a future life and of this world. The use of such phrases is as
much idolatry as the worship of statue and picture, or as little, if the
words are repeated, as I think in this case they were, out of a feeling
of awe and reverence for preceding mental impressions and experiences,
and not because their repetition in itself was counted for
righteousness. Their use, if this was so, is no more to be found fault
with than the contemplation of pictures or statues of holy personages in
order to help the mind to attend to their ensample, or the reading of a
poem, to fill the mind with ennobling emotions. Idolatry is natural and
right in children and other simple souls among primitive peoples or
elsewhere. It is a stage in mental development. Lovers pass through the
idolatrous stage of their passion just as children cut their teeth. It
is a pity to see individuals or nations remain childish in this respect
just as much as in any other, or to see them return to it in their
decrepitude. But a temper, a spirit, an influence cannot easily be
apprehended apart from examples and images; and perhaps the clearest
reason is only the exercise of an infinitely elastic idolatry, which
with sprightly efficiency finds and worships good in everything, just as
the devout, in Dürer's youth, found sermons in stones, carved stones
representing saint, bishop, or Virgin. And Dürer all his life long
continued to produce pictures and engravings which were intended to
preach such sermons.
Goethe admirably remarks:
"_Superstition_ is the poetry of life; the poet therefore suffers no
harm from being _superstitious_." (Aberglaube.)
Superstition and idolatry are an expenditure of emotion of a kind and
degree which the true facts would not warrant; poetry when least
superstitious is a like exercise of the emotions in order to raise and
enhance them; superstition when most poetical unconsciously effects the
same thing.
This glimpse he gives of the way in which death visited his home, and
how the visitation impressed him, is coloured and glows with that temper
of docility which made Colet school himself so severely, and was the
source of Michael Angelo's so fervent outpourings. And all through the
accounts which remain of his life, we may trace the same spirit ever
anew setting him to school, and renewing his resolution to learn both
from his feelings and from his senses.
XI
As I took a sentence from Michael Angelo, I will now take a sentence
from Dürer, one showing strongly that evangelical strain so
characteristic of him, born of his intuitive sense for human solidarity.
After an argument, which will be found on page 306, he concludes: "It is
right, therefore, for one man to teach another. He that doeth so
joyfully, upon him shall much be bestowed by God."[14] These last words,
like the last phrases of my former quotation from him, may stand perhaps
in the way of some, as nowadays they may easily sound glib or
irreverent. But are we less convinced that only tasks done joyfully, as
labours of love, deserve the reward of fuller and finer powers, and
obtain it? When Dürer thought of God, he did not only think of a
mythological personage resembling an old king; he thought of a mind, an
intention, "for God is perfect in goodness." Words so easily come to
obscure what they were meant to reveal; and if we think how the notion
of perfect goodness rules and sways such a man's mind, we shall not
wonder that he did not stumble at the omnipotency which revolts us,
cowed as we are by the presence of evil. The old gentleman dressed like
a king;--this was not the part of his ideas about God which occupied
Dürer's mind. He accepted it, but did not think about it: it filled what
would otherwise have been a blank in his mind and in the minds of those
about him. But he was constantly anxious about what he ought to do and
study in order to fulfil the best in himself, and about what ought to be
done by his town, his nation, and the civilisation that then was, in
order to turn man's nature and the world to an account answerable to the
beauty of their fairer aspects. God was the will that commanded that
"consummation devoutly to be wished." Obedience to His law revealed in
the Bible was the means by which this command could be carried out; and
to a man turning from the Church as it then existed to the newly
translated Bible texts, the commands of God as declared in those texts
seemed of necessity reason itself compared with the commands of the
Popes; were, in fact, infinitely more reasonable, infinitely more akin
to a good man's mind and will. Luther's revolt is for us now
characterised by those elements in it which proved inadequate--were
irrational; but then these were insignificant in comparison with the
light which his downright honesty shed on the monstrous and amazingly
irrational Church. This huge closed society of bigots and worldlings
which arrogated to itself all powers human and divine, and used them
according to the lusts and intemperance of an Alexander Borgia, a Julius
II., and a Leo X., was that farce perception of which made Rabelais
shake the world with laughter, and which roused such consuming
indignation in Luther and Calvin that they created the gloomy
puritanical asylums in which millions of Germans, English, and Americans
were shut up for two hundred years, as Matthew Arnold puts it. But Dürer
was not so immured: even Luther at heart neither was himself, nor
desired that others should be, prevented from enjoying the free use of
their intellectual powers. It was because he was less perspicacious than
Erasmus that he did not see that this was what he was inevitably doing
in his wrath and in his haste.
XII
Erasmus was, perhaps, the man in Europe who at that time displayed most
docility; the man whom neither sickness, the desire for wealth and
honour, the hope to conquer, the lust to engage in disputes, nor the
adverse chances that held him half his life in debt and necessitous
straits, and kept him all his life long a vagrant, constantly upon the
road--the man in whom none of these things could weaken a marvellous
assiduity to learn and help others to learn. He it was who had most
kinship with Dürer among the artists then alive; for Dürer is very
eminent among them for this temper of docility. It is interesting to see
how he once turned to Erasmus in a devout meditation, written in the
journal he kept during his journey to the Netherlands. His voice comes
to us from an atmosphere charged with the electric influence of the
greatest Reformer, Martin Luther, who had just disappeared, no man knew
why or whither; though all men suspected foul play. In his daily life,
by sweetness of manner, by gentle dignity and modesty, Dürer showed his
religion, the admiration and love that bound his life, in a way that at
all times and in all places commands applause. The burning indignation
of the following passage may in times of spiritual peace or somnolence
appear over-wrought and uncouth. We must remember that all that Dürer
loved had been bound by his religion to the teaching and inspiration of
Jesus, and had become inseparable from it. All that he loved--learning,
clear and orderly thought, honesty, freedom to express the worship of
his heart without its being turned to a mockery by cynical monk, priest,
or prelate;--these things directly, and indirectly art itself, seemed to
him threatened by the corruption of the Papal power. We must remember
this; for we shall naturally feel, as Erasmus did, that the path of
martyrdom was really a short cut, which a wider view of the surrounding
country would have shown him to be likely to prove the longest way in
the end. Indeed the world is not altogether yet arrived where he thought
Erasmus could bring it in less than two years. And Luther himself
returned to the scene and was active, without any such result, a dozen
years and more.
Oh all ye pious Christian men, help me deeply to bewail this man,
inspired of God, and to pray Him yet again to send us an enlightened
man. Oh Erasmus of Rotterdam, where wilt thou stop? Behold how the
wicked tyranny of worldly power, the might of darkness, prevails. Hear,
thou knight of Christ! Ride on by the side of the Lord Jesus. Guard the
truth. Attain the martyr's crown. Already indeed art thou a little old
man, and myself have heard thee say that thou givest thyself but two
years more wherein thou mayest still be fit to accomplish somewhat. Lay
out the same well for the good of the Gospel, and of the true Christian
faith, and make thyself heard. So, as Christ says, shall the Gates of
Hell in no wise prevail against thee. And if here below thou wert to be
like thy master Christ, and sufferest infamy at the hands of the liars
of this time, and didst die a little sooner, then wouldst thou the
sooner pass from death unto life and be glorified in Christ. For if thou
drinkest of the cup which He drank of, _with Him shalt thou reign and
judge with justice those who_ HAVE _dealt unrighteously_. Oh! Erasmus!
cleave to this, that God Himself may be thy praise, even as it is
written of David. For thou mayest, yea, verily thou mayest overthrow
Goliath. Because God stands by the Holy Christian Church, even as He
alone upholds the Roman Church, according to His godly will. May He help
us to everlasting salvation, who is God the Father, the Son, and Holy
Ghost, one eternal God! Amen!!
"With Him shalt thou reign and judge with justice those that have dealt
unrighteously." This will seem to many a mere cry for revenge; and so
perhaps it was. Still it may have been, as it seems to me to have been,
uttered rather in the spirit of Moses' "Forgive their sin--and if not,
blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book"; or the "Heaven and earth shall
pass away, but my words shall not pass away" of Jesus. If the necessity
for victory was uppermost, the opportunity for revenge may scarcely have
been present to Dürer's mind.
It is now more generally recognised than in Luther's day that however
sweet vengeance may be, it is not admirable, either in God or man.
The total impression produced by Dürer's life and work must help each to
decide for himself which sense he considers most likely. The truth, as
in most questions of history, remains for ever in the balance, and
cannot be ascertained.
XIII
I have called docility the necessary midwife of Genius, for so it is;
and religion is a discipline that constrains us to learn. The religion
of Jesus constrains us to learn the most difficult things, binds us to
the most arduous tasks that the mind of man sets itself, as a lover is
bound by his affection to accomplish difficult feats for his mistress'
sake. Such tasks as Michael Angelo and Dürer set themselves require that
the lover's eagerness and zest shall not be exhausted; and to keep them
fresh and abundant, in spite of cross circumstances, a discipline of the
mind and will is required. This is what they found in the worship of
Jesus. The influence of this religious hopefulness and self-discipline
on the creative power prevents its being exhausted, perverted, or
embittered; and in order that it may effect this perfectly, that
influence must be abundant not only within the artist, as it was in
Michael Angelo and Dürer, but in the world about them.
This, then, is the value of religious influence to creative art: and
though we to-day necessarily regard the personages, localities, and
events of the creed as coming under the category of "things that are
not," we may still as fervently hope and expect that the things of that
category may "bring to nought the things that are," including the
superstitious reverence for the creed and its unprovable statements; for
has not the victory in human things often been with the things that were
not, but which were thus ardently desired and expected? To inquire which
of those things are best calculated to advance and nourish creative
power, and in what manner, should engage the artist's attention far more
than it has of late years. For what he loves, what he hopes, and what he
expects would seem, if we study past examples, to exercise as important
an influence on a man's creative power as his knowledge of, and respect
for, the materials and instruments which he controls do upon his
executive capacity.
The universe in which man finds himself may be evil, but not everything
it contains is so: then it must for ever remain our only wisdom to
labour to transform those parts which we judge to be evil into likeness
or conformity to those we judge to be good: and surely he who neglects
the forces of hope and adoration in that effort, neglects the better
half of his practical strength? The central proposition of Christianity,
that this end can only be attained by contemplation and imitation of an
example, is, we shall in another place (pp. [305-312]) find, maintained
as true in regard to art by Dürer, and by Reynolds, our greatest writer
on aesthetics. These great artists, so dissimilar in the outward aspects
of their creations, agree in considering that the only way of
advancement open to the aspirant is the attempt to form himself on the
example of others, by imitating them not slavishly or mechanically, but
in the same spirit in which they imitated their forerunners: even as the
Christian is bound to seek union with Christ in the same spirit or way
in which Jesus had achieved union with his Father--that is, by laying
down life to take it again, in meekness and lowliness of heart. Docility
is the sovran help to perfection for Dürer and Reynolds, and more or
less explicitly for all other great artists who have treated of these
questions.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 11: Of course all that may have been meant by the phrase "the
Evangelist of Art" is that Dürer illustrated the narrative of the
Passion; but by this he is not distinguished from many others, and the
phrase is suggestive of far more.]
[Footnote 12: Froude's "Life of Erasmus," Lecture vi.]
[Footnote 13: Wordsworth's Translation,]
[Footnote 14: "Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer," p. 176.]
PART II
DÜRER'S LIFE IN RELATION TO THE TIMES IN WHICH HE LIVED
[Illustration]
CHAPTER I
DÜRER'S ORIGIN, YOUTH AND EDUCATION
I
Who was Dürer? He has told us himself very simply, and more fully than
men of his type generally do; for he was not, like Montaigne, one whose
chief study was himself. Yet, though he has done this, it is not easy
for us to fully understand him. It is perhaps impossible to place
oneself in the centre of that horizon which was of necessity his and
belonged to his day, a vast circle from which men could no more escape
than we from ours; this cage of iron ignorance in which every human soul
is trapped, and to widen and enlarge which every heroic soul lives and
dies. This cage appeared to his eyes very different from what it does to
ours; yet it has always been a cage, and is only lost sight of at times
when the light from within seems to flow forth, and with its radiant
sapphire heaven of buoyancy and desire to veil the eternal bars. It is
well to remind ourselves that ignorance was the most momentous, the most
cruel condition of his life, as of our own; and that the effort to
relieve himself of its pressure, either by the pursuit of knowledge, or
by giving spur and bridle to the imagination that it might course round
him dragging the great woof of illusion, and tent him in the ethereal
dream of the soul's desire, was the constant effort and resource of
his days.
II
At the age of fifty-three he took the pen and commenced:
In the year 1524, I, Albrecht Dürer the younger, have put together from
my father's papers the facts as to whence he was, how he came hither,
lived here, and drew to a happy end. God be gracious to him and
us! Amen.
Like his relatives, Albrecht Dürer the elder was born in the kingdom of
Hungary, in a little village named Eytas, situated not far from a little
town called Gyula, eight miles below Grosswardein; and his kindred made
their living from horses and cattle. My father's father was called Anton
Dürer; he came as a lad to a goldsmith in the said little town and
learnt the craft under him. He afterwards married a girl named
Elizabeth, who bare him a daughter, Katharina, and three sons. The first
son he named Albrecht; he was my dear father. He too became a goldsmith,
a pure and skilful man. The second son he called Ladislaus; he was a
saddler. His son is my cousin Niklas Dürer, called Niklas the Hungarian,
who is settled at Köln. He also is a goldsmith, and learnt the craft
here in Nürnberg with my father. The third son he called John. Him he
set to study, and he afterwards became a parson at Grosswardein, and
continued there thirty years.
So Albrecht Dürer, my dear father, came to Germany. He had been a long
time with the great artists in the Netherlands. At last he came hither
to Nürnberg in the year, as reckoned from the birth of Christ, 1455, on
S. Elogius' day (June 25). And on the same day Philip Pirkheimer had his
marriage feast at the Veste, and there was a great dance under the big
lime tree. For a long time after that my dear father, Albrecht Dürer,
served my grandfather, old Hieronymus Holper, till the year reckoned
1467 after the birth of Christ. My grandfather then gave him his
daughter, a pretty upright girl, fifteen years old, named Barbara; and
he was wedded to her eight days before S. Vitus (June 8). It may also be
mentioned that my grandmother, my mother's mother, was the daughter of
Oellinger of Weissenburg, and her name was Kunigunde.
And my dear father had by his marriage with my dear mother the following
children born--which I set down here word for word as he wrote it in
his book:
Here follow eighteen items, only one of which, the third, is of
interest.
3. Item, in the year 1471 after the birth of Christ, in the sixth hour
of the day, on S. Prudentia's day, a Tuesday in Rogation Week (May 21),
my wife bare me my second son. His godfather was Anton Koburger, and he
named him Albrecht after me, &c. &c.
All these, my brothers and sisters, my dear father's children, are now
dead, some in their childhood, others as they were growing up; only we
three brothers still live, so long as God will, namely: I, Albrecht, and
my brother Andreas and my brother Hans, the third of the name, my
father's children.
This Albrecht Dürer the elder passed his life in great toil and stern
hard labour, having nothing for his support save what he earned with his
hand for himself, his wife and his children, so that he had little
enough. He underwent moreover manifold afflictions, trials, and
adversities. But he won just praise from all who knew him, for he lived
an honourable, Christian life, was a man of patient spirit, mild and
peaceable to all, and very thankful towards God. For himself he had
little need of company and worldly pleasures; he was also of few words,
and was a God-fearing man.
III
We shall, I think, often do well, when considering the superb
ostentation of Dürer's workmanship, with its superabundance of curve and
flourish, its delight in its own ease and grace, to think of those young
men among his ancestors who made their living from horses on the
wind-swept plains of Hungary. The perfect control which it is the
delight of lads brought up and developing under such conditions to
obtain over the galloping steed, is similar to the control which it
gratified Dürer to perfect over the dashing stroke of pen or brush,
which, however swift and impulsive, is yet brought round and performs to
a nicety a predetermined evolution. And the way he puts a little
portrait of himself, finely dressed, into his most important pictures,
may also carry our thoughts away to the banks of the Danube where it
winds and straggles over the steppes, to picture some young
horse-breeder, whose costume and harness are his only wealth; who rides
out in the morning as the cock-bustard that, having preened himself,
paces before the hen birds on the plains that he can scour when his
wings, which are slow in the air, join with his strong legs to make
nothing of grassy leagues on leagues. And first, this life with its free
sweeping horizon, and the swallow-like curves of its gallops for the
sake of galloping, or those which the long lashes of its whips trace in
deploying, and which remind us of the lithe tendrils in which terminate
Dürer's ornamental flourishes; this life in which the eye is trained to
watch the lasso, as with well-calculated address it swirls out and drops
over the frighted head of an unbroken colt;--this life is first pent up
in a little goldsmith's shop, in a country even to-day famous for the
beauty and originality of its peasant jewelry: and here it is trained to
follow and answer the desire of the bright dark eyes of girls in
love;--in love, where love and the beauty that inspires it are the gifts
of nature most guarded and most honoured, from which are expected the
utmost that is conceived of delicacy in delight by a virile and healthy
race. "A pure and skilful man." Patient already has this life become,
for a jeweller can scarcely be made of impatient stuff; patient even
before the admixture of German blood when Albert the elder married his
Barbara Holper. The two eldest sons were made jewellers; but the third,
John, is set to study and becomes a parson, as if already learning and
piety stood next in the estimation of this life after thrift, skill and
the creation of ornament. And Germany boasts of this life beyond that of
any of her sons; but her blood was probably of small importance to the
efficiency that it attained to in the great Albert Dürer. The German
name of Dürer or Thürer, a door, is quite as likely to be the
translation, correct or otherwise, of some Hungarian name, as it is an
indication that the family had originally emigrated from Germany. In any
case, a large admixture by intermarriage of Slavonic blood would
correspond to the unique distinction among Germans, attained in the
dignity, sweetness and fineness which signalised Dürer. Of course, in
such matters no sane man looks for proof; but neither will he reject a
probable suggestion which may help us to understand the nature of an
exceptional man.
IV
Dürer continues to speak of his childhood:
And my father took special pleasure in me, because he saw that I was
diligent to learn. So he sent me to school, and when I had learnt to
read and write he took me away from it, and taught me the goldsmith's
craft. But when I could work neatly, my liking drew me rather to
painting than to goldsmith's work, so I laid it before my father; but he
was not well pleased, regretting the time lost while I had been learning
to be a goldsmith. Still he let it be as I wished, and in 1486 (reckoned
from the birth of Christ) on S. Andrew's day (November 30) my father
bound me apprentice to Michael Wolgemut, to serve him three years long.
During that time God gave me diligence, so that I learnt well, but I had
much to suffer from his lads.
When I had finished my learning my father sent me off, and I stayed away
four years till he called me back again. As I had gone forth in the year
1490 after Easter (Easter Sunday was April 11), so now I came back again
in 1494 as it is reckoned after Whitsuntide (Whit Sunday was May 18).
Erasmus tells us that German disorders were "partly due to the natural
fierceness of the race, partly to the division into so many separate
States, and partly to the tendency of the people to serve as
mercenaries." That there were many swaggerers and bullies about, we
learn from Dürer's prints. In every crowd these gentlemen in leathern
tights, with other ostentatious additions to their costume, besides
poniards and daggers to emphasise the brutal male, strut straddle-legged
and self-assured; and of course raw lads and loutish prentices yielded
them the sincerest flattery. We can well understand that the model boy,
to whom "God had given diligence," with his long hair lovely as a
girl's, and his consciousness of being nearly always in the right, had
much to suffer from his fellow prentices. Besides, very likely, he
already consorted with Willibald Pirkheimer and his friends, who were
the aristocrats of the town. And though he may have been meek and
gentle, there must have appeared in everything he did and was an
assertion of superiority, all the more galling for its being difficult
to define and as ready to blush as the innocent truth herself.
V
It is much argued as to where Dürer went when his father "sent him off."
We have the direct statement of a contemporary, Christopher Scheurl,
that he visited Colmar and Basle; and what is well nigh as good, for a
visit to Venice. For Scheurl wrote in 1508: _Qui quum nuper in Italiam
rediset, tum a Venetis, tum a Bononiensibus artificibus, me saepe
interprete cansalutatus est alter Apelles._
"When he lately _returned_ to Italy, he was often greeted as a second
Apelles, by the craftsmen both of Venice and Bologna (I acting as their
interpreter)."
Before we accept any of these statements it is well to remember how
easily quite intimate friends make mistakes as to where one has been and
when; even about journeys that in one's own mind either have been or
should have been turning-points in one's life. For they will attribute
to the past experiences which were never ours, or forget those which we
consider most unforgettable. No one who has paid attention to these
facts will consider that historians prove so much or so well as they
often fancy themselves to do. In the present case what is really
remarkable is, that none of these sojournings of the young artist in
foreign art centres seem to have produced such a change in his art as
can now be traced with assurance. At Colmar he saw the masterpieces and
the brothers of the "admirable Martin," as he always calls Schongauer.
At Basle there is still preserved a cut wood-block representing St.
Jerome, on the back of which is an authentic signature; there is besides
a series of uncut wood-blocks, the designs on which it is easy to
imagine to have been produced by the travelling journeyman that Dürer
then seemed to the printers and painters of the towns he passed through.
By those processes by which anything can be made of anything, much has
been done to give substantiality to the implied first visit to Venice.
There are drawings which were probably made there, representing ladies
resembling those in pictures by Carpaccio as to their garments, the
dressing of their hair, and the type of their faces. Of course it is not
impossible that such a lady or ladies may have visited Nuremberg, or
been seen by the young wanderer at Basle or elsewhere. And the
resemblance between a certain drawing in the Albertina and one of the
carved lions in red marble now on the Piazzetta de' Leoni does not count
for much, when we consider that there is nothing in the workmanship of
these heads to suggest that they were done after sculptured
originals;--the manes, &c., being represented by an easy penman's
convention, as they might have been whether the models were living or
merely imagined. Nor is there any good reason for dating the drawings of
sites in the Tyrol, supposed to have been sketched on the road, rather
this year than another. Lastly, the famous sentence in a letter written
from Venice during Dürer's authenticated visit there, in 1506, may be
construed in more than one sense. The passage is generally rather
curtailed when quoted.
He (Giovanni Bellini) is very old, but is still the best painter of them
all. The thing that pleased me so well eleven years ago, pleases me now
no more; if I had not seen it for myself, I should never have believed
any one who told me. You must know, too, that there are many better
painters here than Master Jacob (Jacopo de' Barbari) is abroad; yet
Anton Kolb would swear an oath that no better painter than Jacob lives.
If "the thing that pleased so well eleven years before" was a picture or
pictures by Master Jacob or by Andrea Mantegna, as is usually supposed,
the phrase, "If I had not seen it for myself I should never have
believed any one who told me" is extremely strange. It is not usual to
expect to change one's opinion of a work of art by hearsay, or to
imagine others, when they have not done so, predicting with assurance
that we shall change a decided opinion upon the merits of a work of art;
yet one of these two suppositions seems certainly to be implied. I do
not say that it is impossible to conceive of either, only that such
cursory reference to such conceptions is extremely strange. Again, if
work by Jacopo de' Barbari is referred to, it might very well have been
seen elsewhere than at Venice eleven years ago; and indeed the last
sentence in the passage might be taken to imply as much. To me at least
the truth appears to be that these hints, which we may well have
misunderstood, point to something which the imagination is only too
delighted to entertain. It is a charming dream--the young Dürer, just of
age, trudging from town to town, designing wood-blocks for a printer
here, questioning the brothers of the "admirable Martin" there, or again
painting a sign in yet another place, such as Holbein painted for the
schoolmaster at Basle; and at last arriving in Venice--Venice untouched
as yet by the conflicting ideals that were even then being brought to
birth anew: Mediaeval Venice, such as we see her in the pictures of
Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. One painting of real importance in the
work of Dürer remains to us from this period: the greatest of modern
critics has described it and its effect on him in a way which would make
any second attempt impertinent.
I consider as invaluable Albrecht Dürer's portrait of himself painted in
1493, when he was in his twenty-second year. It is a bust half
life-size, showing the two hands and the forearms. Crimson cap with
short narrow strings, the throat bare to below the collar bone, an
embroidered shirt, the folds of the sleeves tied underneath with
peach-coloured ribbons, and a blue-grey, fur-edged cloak with yellow
laces, compose a dainty dress befitting a well-bred youth. In his hand
he significantly carries a blue _eryngo_, called in German "Mannstreu."
He has a serious, youthful face, the mouth and chin covered with an
incipient beard. The whole splendidly drawn, the composition simple,
grand and harmonious; the execution perfect and in every way worthy of
Dürer, though the colour is very thin, and has cracked in some places.
Such is the figure which we may imagine making its way among the crowd
in Gentile Bellini's Procession of the "True Cross" before St. Mark's,
with eyes all wonder and lips often consciously imprisoning the German
tongue, which cannot make itself understood. How comes he so finely
dressed, the son of the modest Nuremberg goldsmith? Has he won the
friendship of some rich burgher prince at Augsburg, or Strasburg, or
Basle? Has he been enabled to travel in his suite as far as Venice? Or
has he earned a large sum for painting some lord's or lady's portrait,
which, if it were not lost, would now stand as the worthy compeer of
this splendid portrait of the "true man" far from home; true to that
home only, or true to Agnes Frey?--for some suppose the sprig of eryngo
to signify that he was already betrothed to her. Or perhaps he has
joined Willibald Pirkheimer at Basle or elsewhere, and they two,
crossing the Alps together, have become friends for life? Will they part
here ere long, the young burgher prince to proceed to the Universities
of Padua and Mantua, the future great painter to trudge back over the
Alps, getting a lift now and again in waggon or carriage or on pillion?
Let the man of pretentious science say it is bootless to ask such
questions; those who ask them know that it is delightful; know that it
is the true way to make the past live for them; guess that would
historians more generally ask them, their books would be less often
dry as dust.
VI
It may be that to this period belongs the meeting with Jacopo de'
Barbari to which a passage in his MS. books (now in the British Museum)
refers: and that already he began to be exercised on the subject of a
canon of proportions for the human figure. In the chapter which I devote
to his studies on this subject it will be seen how the determination to
work the problem out by experiment, since Jacopo refused to reveal, and
Vitruvius only hinted at the secret, led to his discovering something of
far more value than it is probable that either could have given him. And
yet the belief that there was a hidden secret probably hindered him from
fully realising the importance of his discovery, or reaping such benefit
from it as he otherwise might have done. How often has not the belief
that those of old time knew what is ignored to-day, prevented men from
taking full advantage of the conquests over ignorance that they have
made themselves! Because what they know is not so much as they suppose
might be or has been known, they fail to recognise the most that has yet
been known--the best foundation for a new building that has yet been
discovered--and search for what they possess, and fail to rival those
whose superiority over themselves is a delusion of their own hearts. So
early Dürer may have begun this life-long labour which, though not
wholly vain, was never really crowned to the degree it merited: while
others living in more fertile lands reaped what they had not sown, he
could only plough and scatter seed. As Raphael is supposed to have said,
all that was lacking to him was knowledge of the antique.
Perhaps many will blame me for writing, unlearned, as I am; in my
opinion they are not wrong; they speak truly. For I myself had rather
hear and read a learned man and one famous in this art than write of it
myself, being unlearned. Howbeit I can find none such who hath written
aught about how to form a canon of human proportions, save one man,
Jacopo (de' Barbari) by name, born at Venice and a charming painter. He
showed me the figures of a man and woman, which he had drawn according
to a canon of proportions; and now I would rather be shown what he meant
(_i.e._, upon what principles the proportions were constructed) than
behold a new kingdom. If I had it (his canon), I would put it into print
in his honour, for the use of all men. Then, however, I was still young
and had not heard of such things before. Howbeit I was very fond of art,
so I set myself to discover how such a canon might be wrought out. For
this aforesaid Jacopo, as I clearly saw, would not explain to me the
principles upon which he went. Accordingly I set to work on my own idea
and read Vitruvius, who writes somewhat about the human figure. Thus it
was from, or out of, these two men aforesaid that I took my start, and
thence, from day to day, have I followed up my search according to my
own notions.
VII
When I returned home, Hans Prey treated with my father and gave me his
daughter, Mistress Agnes by name, and with her he gave me two hundred
florins, and we were wedded; it was on Monday before Margaret's (July 7)
in the year 1494.
The general acceptance of the gouty and irascible Pirkheimer's
defamation of Frau Dürer as a miser and a shrew called forth a display
of ingenuity on the part of Professor Thausing to prove the contrary.
And I must confess that if he has not quite done that, he seems to me to
have very thoroughly discredited Pirkheimer's ungallant abuse. Sir
Martin Conway bids us notice that Dürer speaks of his "dear father" and
his "dear mother" and even of his "dear father-in-law," but that he
never couples that adjective with his wife's name. It is very dangerous
to draw conclusions from such a fact, which may be merely an accident:
or may, if it represents a habit of Dürer's, bear precisely the opposite
significance. For some men are proud to drop such outward marks of
affection, in cases where they know that every day proves to every
witness that they are not needed. He also considers that her portraits
show her, when young, to have been "empty-headed," when older, a "frigid
shrew." For my own part, if the portrait at Bremen (see opposite)
represents "mein Angnes," as its resemblance to the sketch at Vienna
(see illus.) convinces me it does, I cannot accept either of these
conclusions arrived at by the redoubtable science of physiognomy. The
Bremen portrait shows us a refined, almost an eccentric type of beauty;
one can easily believe it to have been possessed by a person of
difficult character, but one certainly who must have had compensating
good qualities. The "mein Angnes" on the sketch may well be set against
the absent "dears" in the other mentions her husband made of her,
especially when we consider that he couples this adjective with the
Emperor's name, "my dear Prince Max." Of her relations to him nothing is
known except what Pirkheimer wrote in his rage, when he was writing
things which are demonstrably false. We know, however, that she was
capable, pious, and thrifty; and on several occasions, in the
Netherlands, shared in the honours done to her husband. It is natural to
suppose that as they were childless, there may have existed a moral
equivalent to this infertility; but also, with a man such as we know
Dürer to have been, and a woman in every case not bad, have we not
reason to expect that this moral barrenness which may have afflicted
their union was in some large measure conquered by mutual effort and
discipline, and bore from time to time those rarer flowers whose beauty
and sweetness repay the conscious culture of the soul? It seems
difficult to imagine that a man who succeeded in charming so many
different acquaintances, and in remaining life-long friends with the
testy and inconsiderate Pirkheimer, should have altogether failed to
create a relation kindly and even beautiful with his Agnes, whose
portrait we surely have at her best in the drawing at Bremen.
Considerations as to the general position of married women in those days
need not prevent us of our natural desire to think as well as possible
of Dürer and his circumstances. We know that for a great many men the
wife was not simply counted among their goods and chattels, or regarded
as a kind of superior servant. We are able to take a peep at many a
fireside of those days, where the relations that obtained, however
different in certain outward characters, might well shame the greater
number of the respectable even in the present year of grace. We know
what Luther was in these respects; and have rather more than less reason
to expect from the refined and gracious Dürer the creation of a worthy
and kindly home. Why should we expect him to have been less successful
than his parents in these respects?
[Illustration: AGNES FREY. DÜRER'S WIFE (?)--Silver-point drawing
heightened with white on a dun paper. Kunsthalle, Bremen]
[Illustration: "MEIN ANGNES"--Pen sketch of the artist's wife, in the
Albertina at Vienna]
VIII
Some time after the marriage it happened that my father was so ill with
dysentery that no one could stop it. And when he saw death before his
eyes he gave himself willingly to it, with great patience, and he
commended my mother to me, and exhorted me to live in a manner pleasing
to God. He received the Holy Sacraments and passed away Christianly (as
I have described at length in another book) in the year 1502, after
midnight, before S. Matthew's eve (September 20). God be gracious and
merciful to him.
The only leaf of the "other book" referred to that has survived is that
which I have already quoted at length.
CHAPTER II
THE WORLD IN WHICH HE LIVED
I
Now let us consider what the world was like in which this virile,
accurate and persevering spirit had grown up. Over and over again, the
story of the New Birth has been told; how it began in France, and met an
untimely fate at the hands of English invaders, then took refuge in
Italy, where it grew to be the wonder of the world; and how the
corruption of the ruling classes and of the Church, with the indignation
and rebellion that this gave rise to, combined to frustrate the promise
of earlier days.
When the Roman Empire gradually became an anarchy of hostile fragments,
every large monastery, every small town, girded itself with walls and
tended to become the germ of a new civilisation. Popes, kings, and great
lords, haunted by reminiscence of the vanished empire, made spasmodic
attempts to subject such centres to their rule and tax them for their
maintenance. In the first times, the Church--the See of Rome--made by
far the most successful attempt to get its supremacy acknowledged, and
had therefore fewer occasions to resort to violence. It was more
respected and more respectable than the other powers which claimed to
rule and tax these immured and isolated communities dotted over Europe;
but as time went on, the Church became less and less beneficent, more
and more tyrannical. Meanwhile kings and emperors, having learned wisdom
by experience, found themselves in a position to take advantage of the
growing bad odour of the Church; and by favouring the civil communities
and creating a stable hierarchy among the class of lords and barons from
which they had emerged, were at last able to face the Church, with its
_protégés,_ the religious communities, on an equal footing.
The religious communities, owing to the vow of celibacy, had become more
and more stagnant, while the civil communities increased in power to
adapt themselves to the age. All that was virile and creative combined
in the towns; all that was inadequate, sterile, useless, coagulated in
the monasteries, which thus became cesspools, and ultimately took on the
character of festering sores by which the civil bodies which had at
first been purged into them were endangered. Luther tells us how there
was a Bishop of Würzburg who used to say when he saw a rogue, "'To the
cloister with you. Thou art useless to God or man.' He meant that in the
cloister were only hogs and gluttons, who did nothing but eat and drink
and sleep, and were of no more profit than as many rats." And the
loathing that another of these sties created in the young Erasmus, and
the difficulty he had to escape from the clutches of its inmates--never
feeling safe till the Pope had intervened--show us that by their wealth
and by the engine of their malice, the confessional (which they had
usurped from the regular clergy), they were as formidable as they were
useless. It became necessary that this antiquated system of social
drainage should be superseded.
In England and Germany it was swept away. In centres like Nuremberg, the
desire for reformation and the horror of false doctrine were grounded in
practical experience of intolerable inconveniences, not in a clear
understanding of the questions at issue. Intellectually, the leaders of
the Reformation had no better foundation than those they opposed: for
them, as for their opponents, the question was not to be solved by an
appeal to evident truths and experience, but to historical documents and
traditions, supposed, to be infallible. For a clear intelligence, there
is nothing to choose between the infallibility of oecumenical councils
or of Popes, and that of the Bible. Both have been in their time the
expression of very worthy and very human sentiments; both are incapable
of rational demonstration.
II
Scattered over Europe, wherever the free intelligence was waking and had
rubbed her eyes, were men who desired that nuisances should be removed
and reforms operated without schism or violence. To these Erasmus spoke.
His policy was tentative, and did not proceed, like that of other
parties, by declaring that a perfect solution was to hand. Luther's
action divided these honest, upright souls, and would-be children of
light, into three unequal camps.
As a rule the downright, headstrong, and impatient became reformers. The
respectful, cautious and long-suffering, such as More, Warham, and
Adrian IV., clung to the Roman establishment, were martyred for it or
broke their hearts over it. Erasmus and a handful of others remained
true to a tentative policy, and, compared with their contemporaries,
were meek and lowly in heart--became children of light. To them we now
look back wistfully, and wish that they might have been, if not as
numerous as the Churchmen and Beformers, at least a sufficient body to
have made their influence an effective force, with the advantage of more
light and more patience that was really theirs. But, alas! they only
counted as the first dissolvent which set free more corrosive and
detrimental acids. The exhilaration of action and battle was for others;
for them the sad conviction that neither side deserved to be trusted
with a victory. Yet, beyond the world whose chief interest was the
Reformation, we may be sure that such men as Charles V., Michael Angelo,
Rabelais, Montaigne, and all those whom they may be taken to represent,
were in essential agreement with Erasmus. Luther and Machiavelli alone
rejected the Papacy as such: the latter's more stringent intellectual
development led him also to discard every ideal motive or agent of
reform for violent means. He was ready even to regard the passions of
men like Caesar Borgia, tyrants in the fullest sense of the word, as the
engines by which civilisation, learning, art, and manners, might be
maintained. Whereas Luther appealed to the passions of common honest
men, the middle classes in fact. It is easy to let either Luther or
Machiavelli steal away our entire sympathy. On the one hand, no
compromise, not even the slightest, seems possible with criminal
ruffians such as a Julius II. and an Alexander Borgia; on the other
hand, the power swollen by the tide of minor corruption, which such men
ruled by might, did come into the hands of a Leo X., an Adrian IV.; and
though that power was obviously tainted through and through, it might
have been mastered and wielded in the cause of reform. Erasmus hoped for
this. Even Julius II. protected him from the superiors of his convent.
Even Julius II. patronised Michael Angelo and Raphael and everything
that had a definite character in the way of creative power or
scholarship; and could appreciate at least the respect which what he
patronised commanded. He could appreciate the respect commanded by the
austerity and virtue of those who rebelled against him and denounced his
cynical abuse of all his powers, whether natural or official. He liked
to think he had enemies worth beating. Such a ruler is a sore temptation
to a keen intellect. "Everything great is formative," and this Pope was
colossal--a colossal bully and robber if you like--but the good he did
by his patronage was real good, was practical. Michael Angelo and
Raphael could work as splendidly as they desired. Erasmus was helped and
encouraged. Timid honesty is often petty, does nothing, criticises and
finds fault with artists and with learning, runs after them like Sancho
Panza after Don Quixote, is helpless and ridiculous and horribly in the
way. Leo X. was intelligent and well-meaning; wisdom herself might hope
from such a man. Be the throne he is sitting on as monstrous and corrupt
a contrivance as it may, yet it is there, it does give him authority; he
is on it and dominates the world. It is easy to say, "But the period of
the Renascence closed, its glory died away." Suppose Luther had been as
subtle as he was whole-hearted, and had added to his force of character
a delicacy and charm like that of St. Francis; or suppose that Erasmus
instead of his schoolfellow Adrian IV. had become Pope; what a different
tale there might have been to tell! Who will presume to point out the
necessity by which these things were thus and not otherwise? "Regrets
for what 'might have been' are proverbially idle," cries the historian
from whom I have chiefly quoted. I do not recollect the proverb, unless
he refers to "It is no use crying over spilt milk;" but in any case such
regrets are far from being necessarily idle. "What might have been" is
even generally "what ought to have been;" and no study has been or is
likely to be so pregnant for us as the study of the contrast between
"what was" and "what ought to have been," though such studies are
inevitably mingled with regrets. We have every reason to regret that the
Reformation was so hasty and ill-considered, and that the Papacy was as
purblind as it was arrogant. The plant of the Roman Church machinery,
which it had taken centuries to lay down, came into the hands of men who
grossly ignored its function and the conditions of its working. They
used its power partly for the benefit of the human race, by patronising
art and scholarship; but chiefly in self-indulgence. If honest
intelligence had been given control, a man so partially equipped for his
task would not have been goaded into action; but only force, moral or
physical, can act at a disadvantage; light and reason must have the
advantage of dominant position to effect anything immediate. If they are
not on the throne, all they can do is to sow seed, and bewail the
present while looking forward to a better future. Now, most educated men
are for tolerance, and see as Erasmus saw. We see that Savonarola and
Luther were not so right as they thought themselves to be; we see that
what they condemned as arrogancy and corruption is partly excusable--is
in some measure a condition of efficiency in worldly spheres where one
has to employ men already bad. True, the great princes and cardinals of
those days not only connived at corruption and ruled by it, but often
even professed it. Still in every epoch, under all circumstances, the
majority of those who have governed men have more or less cynically
employed means that will not bear the light of day. While these
magnificoes of the Renascence do stand alone, or almost alone, by the
ample generosity of their conception of the objects that power should be
exerted in furtherance of; their outlook on life was more commensurate
with the variety and competence of human nature than perhaps that of any
ruling class has been before or since. As Shakespeare is the amplest of
poets, so were theirs the most fruitful of courts. From the great
Medicis to our own Elizabeth they all partake of a certain grandiose
vitality and variety of intention.
III
Greatness demands self-assertion; self-assertion is a great virtue even
in a Julius II. There is a vast deal of humbug in the use we make of the
word humility. We talk about Christ's humility, but whose self-assertion
has ever been more unmitigated? "I am the Way, the Truth, and the
Light." "Learn of Me that I am meek and lowly, and ye shall find rest to
your souls." No doubt it is the quality of the self asserted that
justifies in our eyes the assertion; humility then is not opposed to
self-assertion. When Michael Angelo shows that he thinks himself the
greatest artist in the world, he is not necessarily lacking in humility;
nor is Luther, asserting the authority of his conscience against the
Pope and Emperor; nor Dürer, saying to us in those little finely-dressed
portraits with which he signs his pictures, "I am that I am--namely, one
of the handsomest of men and the greatest artist north of the Alps." Or
when Erasmus lets us see that he thinks himself the most learned man
living,--if he is the most learned, so much the better that he should
know this also as well as the rest. The artist and the scholar were
bound to feel gratitude for the corrupt but splendid Church and courts,
which gave them so much both in the way of maintenance and opportunity.
It may be asked, has all the honesty and the not always evident purity
of Protestantism done so much for the world as those dissolute Popes and
Princes? And the artist, judging with a hasty bias perhaps, is likely to
answer no.
IV
For us nowadays the pith of history seems no more to be the lives of
monarchs, or the fighting of battles, or even the deliberations of
councils; these things we have more and more come to regard merely as
tools and engines for the creation of societies, homes, and friends. And
so, though religion and religious machinery dominated the life of those
days, it is not in theological disputes, neither is it in oecumenical
councils and Popes, nor in sermons, reformers, and synods, that we find
the essence of the soul's life. Rather to us, the pictures, the statues,
the books, the furniture, the wardrobes, the letters, and the scandals
that have been left behind, speak to us of those days; for these we
value them. And we are right, the value of the Renaissance lies in these
things, I say "the scandals" of those days; for a part of what comes
under that head was perhaps the manifestation of a morality based on a
wider experience; though its association with obvious vices and its
opposition to the old and stale ideals gave it an illegitimate
character; while the re-establishment of the more part of those ideals
has perpetuated its reproach. There can be no intellectual charity if
the machinery and special sentences of current morality are supposed to
be final or truly adequate. Their tentative and inadequate character,
which every free intelligence recognises, is what endorses the wisdom of
Jesus', saying, "Judge not that ye be not judged." Ordinary honest and
good citizens do not realise how much that is in every way superior to
the gifts of any single one of themselves is yearly sacrificed and
tortured for their preservation as a class. On what agonies of creative
and original minds is the safety of their homes based? These respectable
Molochs who devour both the poor and the exceptionally gifted, and are
so little better for their meal, were during the Renascence for a time
gainsaid and abashed; yet even then their engines, the traditional
secular and ecclesiastic policies, were a foreign encumbrance with which
the human spirit was loaded, and which helped to prevent it from reaping
the full result of its mighty upheaval.
To see things as they are, and above all to value them for what is most
essential in them with regard to the development of our own
characters;--that is, I take it, consciously or unconsciously, the main
effort of the modern spirit. On the world, the flesh, and the devil, we
have put new values; and it was the first assertion of these new values
which caused the Renascence. Fine manners, fine clothes, and varied
social interchange make the world admirable in our eyes, not at all a
bogey to frighten us. Health, frankness, and abundant exercise make the
flesh a pure delight in our eyes; lastly, this new-born spirit has made
"a moral of the devil himself," and so for us he has lost his terror.
Rabelais was right when he laughed the old outworn values down, and
declared that women were in the first place female, men in the first
place male; that the written word should be a self-expression, a
sincerity, not a task or a catalogue or a penance, but, like laughter
and speech, essentially human, making all men brothers, doing away with
artificial barriers and distinctions, making the scholar shake in time
with the toper, and doubling the divine up with the losel; bidding even
the lady hold her sides in company with the harlot. Eating and drinking
were seen to be good in themselves; the eye and the nose and the palate
were not only to be respected but courted; free love was better than
married enmity. No rite, no church, no god, could annihilate these facts
or restrain their influence any more than the sea could be tamed. Dürer
was touched with this spirit; we see it in his fine clothes, in his
collector's rapacity, above all in his letters to his friend
Pirkheimer--a man more typical of that Rabelaisian age than Dürer and
Michael Angelo, who were both of them not only modern men but men
conservative of the best that had been--men in travail for the future,
absorbed by the responsibility of those who create.
Pirkheimer, one year Dürer's senior, was a gross fat man early in life,
enjoying the clinking of goblets, the music of fork and knife, and the
effrontery of obscene jests. A vain man, a soldier and a scholar,
pedantic, irritable, but in earnest; a complimenter of Emperors, a
leader of the reform party, a partisan of Luther's, the friend and
correspondent of Erasmus, the elective brother of Dürer. The man was
typical; his fellows were in all lands. Dürer was surprised to find how
many of them there were at Venice--men who would delight Pirkheimer and
delight in him. "My friend, there are so many Italians here who look
exactly like you I don't know how it happens! ... men of sense and
knowledge, good lute players and pipers, judges of painting, men of much
noble sentiment and honest virtue; and they show me much honour and
friendship." Something of all this was doubtless in Dürer too; but in
him it was refined and harmonised by the sense and serious concern, not
only for the things of to-day, but for those of to-morrow and yesterday;
the sense of solidarity, the passion for permanent effect, eternal
excellence. These things, in men like Pirkheimer, still more in Erasmus,
and even in Rabelais and Montaigne, are not absent; but they are less
stringent, less religious, than they are in a Dürer or a Michael Angelo.
CHAPTER III
DÜRER AT VENICE
I
There are several reasons which may possibly have led Dürer to visit
Venice in 1505. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi, or Exchange of the German
Merchants at Venice, had been burned down the winter before, and they
were in haste to complete a new one. Dürer may have received assurance
that the commission to paint the altar-piece for the new chapel would be
his did he desire it. At any rate he seems to have set to work on such a
picture almost as soon as he arrived there. It is strange to think that
Giorgione and Titian probably began to paint the frescoes on the facade
while he was still at work in the chapel, or soon after he left. The
plague broke out in Nuremberg before he came away; but this is not
likely to have been his principal motive for leaving home, as many
richer men, such as his friend Pirkheimer, from whom he borrowed money
for the journey, stayed where they were. Nor do Dürer's letters reveal
any alarm for his friend's, his mother's, his wife's, or his brother's
safety. He took with him six small pictures, and probably a great number
of prints, for Venice was a first-rate market.
II
The letters which follow are like a glimpse of a distant scene in a
_camera obscura_, and, like life itself, they are full of repetitions
and over-insistence on what is insignificant or of temporary interest.
To-day they call for our patience and forbearance, and it will depend
upon our imaginative activity in what degree they repay them; even as it
depends upon our power of affectionate assimilation in what degree and
kind every common day adds to our real possessions.
I have made my citations as ample as possible, so as to give the reader
a just idea of their character while making them centre as far as
possible round points of special interest.
_To the honourable, wise Master Wilibald Pirkheimer, Burgher of Nürberg,
my kind Master_. VENICE, _January 6, 1506._
I wish you and yours many good, happy New Years. My willing service,
first of all, to you dear Master Pirkheimer! Know that I am in good
health; I pray God far better things than that for you. As to those
pearls and precious stones which you gave me commission to buy, you must
know that I can find nothing good or even worth its price. Everything is
snapped up by the Germans who hang about the Riva. They always want to
get four times the value for anything, for they are the falsest knaves
alive. No one need look for an honest service from any of them. Some
good fellows have warned me to beware of them, they cheat man and beast.
You can buy better things at a lower price at Frankfurt than at Venice.
[Illustration: Wilibald Pirkheimer--Charcoal Drawing, Dumesnil
Collection, Paris _Face p._ 80]
About the books which I was to order for you, the Imhofs have already
seen after them; but if there is anything else you want, let me know and
I will attend to it for you with all zeal. Would to God I could do you a
right good service! gladly would I accomplish it, seeing, as I do, how
much you do for me. And I pray you be patient with my debt, for indeed I
think much oftener of it than you do. When God helps me home I will
honourably repay you with many thanks; for I have a panel to paint for
the Germans for which they are to pay me a hundred and ten Rhenish
florins--it will not cost me as much as five. I shall have scraped it and
laid on the ground and made it ready within eight days; then I shall at
once begin to paint and, if God will, it shall be in its place above the
altar a month after Easter.
* * * * *
VENICE, _February 17_, 1506.
How I wish you were here at Venice! There are so many nice men among the
Italians who seek my company more and more every day--which is very
pleasing to one--men of sense and knowledge, good lute-players and
pipers, judges of painting, men of much noble sentiment and 'honest
virtue, and they show me much honour and friendship. On the other hand
there are also amongst them some of the most false, lying, thievish
rascals; I should never have believed that such were living in the
world. If one did not know them, one would think them the nicest men the
earth could show. For my own part I cannot help laughing at them
whenever they talk to me. They know that their knavery is no secret but
they don't mind.
Amongst the Italians I have many good friends who warn me not to eat and
drink with their painters. Many of them are my enemies and they copy my
work in the churches and wherever they can find it; and then they revile
it and say that the style is not _antique_ and so not good. But Giovanni
Bellini has highly praised me before many nobles. He wanted to have
something of mine, and himself came to me and asked me to paint him
something and he would pay well for it. And all men tell me what an
upright man he is, so that I am really friendly with him. He is very
old, but is still the best painter of them all. And that which so well
pleased me eleven years ago pleases me no longer, if I had not seen it
for myself I should not have believed any one who told me. You must know
too that there are many better painters here than Master Jacob (Jacopo
de' Barbari) is abroad (_wider darvsen Meister J._), yet Anton Kolb
would swear an oath that no better painter lives than Jacob. Others
sneer at him, saying if he were good he would stay here, and so forth.
I have only to-day begun to sketch in my picture, for my hands were so
scabby (_grindig_) that I could do no work with them, but I have got
them cured.
Now be lenient with me and don't get in a passion so easily, but be
gentle like me. I don't know why you will not learn from me. My friend!
I should like to know if any one of your loves is dead--that one close
by the water for instance, or the one called [Illustration] or
[Illustration] or a [Illustration] so that you might supply her place by
another. ALBRECHT DÜRER.
VENICE, February 28, 1506.
I wish you had occasion to come here, I know you would not find time
hang on your hands, for there are so many nice men in this country,
right good artists. I have such a throng of Italians about me that at
times I have to shut myself up. The nobles all wish me well, but few of
the painters.
* * * * *
VENICE, _April_ 2, 1506.
The painters here, let me tell you, are very unfriendly to me. They have
summoned me three times before the magistrates, and I have had to pay
four florins to their school. You must also know that I might have
gained a great deal of money if I had not undertaken to paint the German
picture. There is much work in it and I cannot get it quite finished
before Whitsuntide. Yet they only pay me eighty-five ducats for it. Now
you know how much it costs to live, and then I have bought some things
and sent some money away, so that I have not much before me now. But
don't misunderstand me, I am firmly purposed not to go away hence till
God enables me to repay you with thanks and to have a hundred florins
over besides. I should easily earn this if I had not got the German
picture to paint, for all men except the painters wish me well.
Tell my mother to speak to Wolgemut about my brother, and to ask him
whether he can make use of him and give him work till I come, or whether
he can put him with some one else. I should gladly have brought him with
me to Venice, and that would have been useful both to me and him, and he
would have learnt the language, but my mother was afraid that the sky
would fall on him. Pray keep an eye on him yourself, the women are no
use for that. Tell the lad, as you so well can, to be studious and
honest till I come, and not to be a trouble to his mother; if I cannot
arrange everything I will at all events do all that I can. Alone I
certainly should not starve, but to support many is too hard for me, for
no one throws his gold away.
Now I commend myself to you. Tell my mother to be ready to sell at the
Crown-fair (_Heiligthumsfest_). I am arranging for my wife to have come
home by then; I have written to her too about everything. I will not
take any steps about buying the diamond ornament till I get your
next letter.
I don't think I shall be able to come home before next autumn, when what
I earned for the picture, which was to have been ready by Whitsuntide,
will be quite used up in living expenses, purchases, and payments; what,
however, I gain afterwards I hope to save. If you see fit don't speak of
this further, and I will keep putting off my leaving from day to day and
writing as though I was just coming. I am indeed very uncertain what to
do next. Write to me again soon.
Given on Thursday before Palm Sunday in the year 1506. ALBRECHT DÜRER,
Your Servant.
VENICE, _August_ 18, 1506.
_To the first, greatest man in the world. Your servant and slave
Albrecht Dürer sends salutation to his Magnificent master Wilibald_
Pirkheimer. _My truth! I hear gladly and with great satisfaction of your
health and great honours. I wonder how it is possible for a man like you
to stand against_ so many _wisest princes,_ swaggerers _and soldiers; it
must be by some special grace of God. When I read your letter about this
terrible grimace, it gave me a great fright and I thought it was a most
important thing,_[15] but I warrant that you frightened even Schott's
men,[16] you with your fierce look and your holiday hopping step. But it
is very improper for such folk to smear themselves with civet. You want
to become a real silk-tail and you think that, if only you manage to
please the girls, the thing is done. If you were only as taking a fellow
as I am, it would not provoke me so. You have so many loves that merely
to pay each one a visit you would take a month or more before you got
through the list.
For one thing I return you my thanks, namely, for explaining my position
in the best way to my wife; but I know that there is no lack of wisdom
in you. If only you had my meekness you would have all virtues. Thank
you also for all the good you have done me, if only you would not bother
me about the rings! If they don't please you, break their heads off and
pitch them out on to the dunghill as Peter Weisweber says. What do you
mean by setting me to such dirty work? _I_ have become a _gentleman_
at Venice.
I have also heard that you can make lovely rhymes; you would be a find
for our fiddlers here; they fiddle so beautifully that they can't help
weeping over it themselves. Would God our Rechenmeister girl could hear
them, she would cry too. At your bidding I will again lay aside my anger
and bear myself even more bravely than usual.
Now let me commend myself to you; give my willing service to our Prior
for me; tell him to pray God for me that I may be protected, and
especially from the French sickness; I know of nothing that I now dread
more than that, for well nigh every one has got it. Many men are quite
eaten up and die of it.
VENICE, _September_ 8, 1506.
Most learned, approved, wise, knower of many languages, sharp to detect
all encountered lies and quick to recognise plain truth! Honourable
much-regarded Herr Wilibald Pirkheimer. Your humble servant Albrecht
Dürer wishes you all hail, great and worthy honour _in the devil's name,_
so much for the twaddle of which you are so fond. I wager that for
this[17] you would think me too an orator of a hundred parts. A chamber
must have more than four corners which is to contain the gods of memory.
I am not going to cram my head full of them; that I leave to you; for I
believe that however many chambers there might be in the head, you would
have something in each of them. The Margrave would not grant an audience
long enough!--a hundred headings and to each heading, say, a hundred
words, that takes 9 days 7 hours 52 minutes, not counting the sighs
which I have not yet reckoned in. In fact you could not get through the
whole at one go; it would stretch itself out like the speech of some old
driveller.
I have taken all manner of trouble about the carpets but cannot find any
broad ones; they are all narrow and long. However I still look about
every day for them and so does Anton Kolb.
I have given Bernhard Hirschvogel your greeting and he sent you his
service. He is full of sorrow for the death of his Son, the nicest lad
I ever saw.
I can get none of your foolish featherlets. Oh, if only you were here!
how you would like these fine Italian soldiers! How often I think of
you! Would to God that you and Kunz Kamerer could see them! They have
great scythe-lances with 278 points, if they only touch a man with them
he dies, for they are all poisoned. Hey! I can do it well, I'll be an
Italian soldier. The Venetians as well as the Pope and the King of
France are collecting many men; what will come of it I don't know, but
people ridicule our King very much.
Wish Stephan Paumgartner much happiness from me. I don't wonder at his
having taken a wife. Give my greeting to Borsch, Herr Lorenz, and our
fair friends, as well as to your Rechenmeister girl, and thank that
head-chamber of yours alone for remembering her greeting; tell her she's
a nasty one.
[Illustration]
I sent you olive-wood from Venice to Augsburg, where I directed it to be
left, a full ten hundredweight. She says she would not wait for it;
_whence the stink_.
My picture, you must know, says it would give a ducat for you to see it,
it is well painted and beautifully coloured. I have earned much praise
but little profit by it. In the time it took to paint I could easily
have earned 220 ducats, and now I have declined much work, in order that
I may come home. I have stopped the mouths of all the painters who used
to say that I was good at engraving but, as to painting. I did not know
how to handle my colours. Now every one says that better colouring they
have never seen.
My French mantle greets you and my Italian coat also. It strikes me that
there is an odour of gallantry about you; I can scent it out even at
this distance; and they tell me here that when you go a-courting you
pretend not to be more than twenty-five years old--oh, yes! double that
and I'll believe it. My friend, there are so many Italians here who look
exactly like you; I don't know how it happens!
The Doge and the Patriarch have also seen my picture. Herewith let me
commend myself to you as your servant. I must really go to sleep as it
is striking the seventh hour of the night, and I have already written to
the Prior of the Augustines, to my father-in-law, to Mistress Dietrich,
and to my wife, and they are all downright whole sheets full. So I have
had to hurry over this letter, read it according to the sense. You would
doubtless do better if you were writing to a lot of Princes. Many good
nights and days too. Given at Venice on our Lady's day in September.
You need not lend my wife and mother anything; they have got money
enough,
ALBRECHT DÜRER.
VENICE, _September 23_, 1506.
Your letter telling me of the praise that you get to overflowing from
Princes and nobles gave me great delight. You must be altogether altered
to have become so gentle; I shall hardly know you when I meet you again.
You must know that my picture is finished as well as another
_Quadro_[18] the like of which I have never painted before. And as you
are so pleased with yourself, let me tell you that there is no better
Madonna picture in the land than mine; for all the painters praise it,
as the nobles do you. They say that they have never seen a nobler,
more charming painting, and so forth.
* * * * *
But in order to come home as soon as possible, I have, since my picture
was finished, refused work that would have yielded me more than 2000
ducats. This all men know who live about me here.
Bernhard Holzbeck has told me great things of you, though I think he
does so because you have become his brother-in-law. But nothing makes me
more angry than when any one says that you are good-looking; if that
were so I should become really ugly. That could make me mad. I have
found a grey hair on myself, it is the result of so much excitement. And
I fear that while I play such pranks with myself there are still bad
days before me, &c.
My French mantle, my doublet, and my brown coat send you a hearty
greeting, I should be glad to see what great thing your head-piece can
produce that you hold yourself so high.
VENICE, _about October_ 13, 1506.
Knowing that you are aware of my devotion to your service there is no
need for me to write to you about it; but so much the more necessary is
it for me to tell you of the great pleasure it gives me to hear of the
high honour and fame which your manly wisdom and learned skill have
brought you. This is the more to be wondered at, for seldom or never in
a young body can the like be found. It comes to you, however, as to me,
by a special grace of God. How pleased we both are when we fancy
ourselves worth somewhat--I with my painting, and you with your wisdom.
When any one praises us, we hold up our heads and believe him. Yet
perhaps he is only some false flatterer who is scorning us all the time.
So don't credit any one who praises you, for you've no notion how
utterly and entirely unmannerly you are. I can quite see you standing
before the Margrave and speaking so pleasantly--behaving exactly as if
you were flirting with Mistress Rosentaler, cringing as you do. It did
not escape me that, when you wrote your last letter, you were quite full
of amorous thoughts. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, an old fellow
like you pretending to be so good-looking. Flirting pleases you in the
same way that a shaggy old dog likes a game with a kitten. If you were
only as fine and gentle a man as I, I could understand it. If I become
burgomaster I will serve you with the Luginsland.[19] as you do to pious
Zamesser and me. I will have you for once shut up there with the ladies
Rechenmeister, Rosentaler, Gärtner, Schutz, and Pör, and many others
whom for shortness I will not name; they must deal with you.
People enquire more after me than you, for you yourself write that both
girls and honourable wives ask after me--that is a sign of my virtue.
When, however, God helps me home I don't know how I shall any longer
stand you with your great wisdom; but for your virtue and good temper I
am glad, and your dogs will be the better for it, for you will no longer
strike them lame. Now however that you are thought so much of at home,
you won't dare to talk to a poor painter in the street any more; to be
seen with the painter varlet would be a great disgrace for you.
O, dear Herr Pirkheimer, just now while I was writing to you, the alarm
of fire was raised and six houses over by Pietro Venier are burnt, and a
woollen cloth of mine, for which only yesterday I paid eight ducats, is
burnt, so I too am in trouble. There is much excitement here about
the fire.
As to your summons to me to come home soon, I shall come as soon as ever
I can, but I must first gain money for my expenses. I have paid away
about 100 ducats for colours and other things. I have ordered you two
carpets for which I shall pay to-morrow, but I could not get them cheap.
I will pack them in with my linen.
And as to your threat that, unless I come home soon, you will make love
to my wife, don't attempt it--a ponderous fellow like you would be the
death of her.
I must tell you that I set to work to learn dancing and went twice to
the school, for which I had to pay the master a ducat. No one could get
me to go there again. To learn dancing I should have had to pay away all
that I have earned, and at the end I should have known nothing about it.
[Illustration: HANS BURGKMAIR--Black chalk drawing on yellowish prepared
ground. The lights and background in watercolor may possibly have been
added later At Oxford]
In reply to your question when I shall come home, I tell you, so that my
lords may also make their arrangements, that I shall have finished here
in ten days; after that I should like to ride to Bologna to learn the
secrets of the art of perspective, which a man is willing to teach me. I
should stay there eight or ten days and then return to Venice. After
that I shall come with the next messenger. How I shall freeze after this
sun! Here I am a gentleman, at home only a parasite.
III
Sir Martin Conway writes:
He (Dürer) enjoyed Venice; he liked the Italians; he was oppressed with
orders for work; the climate suited him, and the warm sun was a pleasant
contrast to the snows and frost of a Franconian winter. But Dürer's
German heart was true; its truth was the secret of his success.... The
syren voice of Italy charmed to their destruction most Germans who
listened to it. Brought face to face with the Italian Ideal of Grace,
they one after another abandoned for it the Ideal of Strength peculiarly
their own.
We do not resort to these arguments to approve Holbein or Van Dyck for
their long residence in England. I am not sure how much false sentiment
inspired Thausing when he first praised Dürer in this strain; but I must
confess I suspect it was no little. I incline to think that the best
country for an artist is not always the one he was born in, but often
that one where his art finds the best conditions to foster it. We do not
honour Dürer by supposing that he would have been among that majority of
Dutch and German artists who, weaker than Roger van der Weyden and
Burgkmair, returned from Italy injured and enfeebled; even if he had
passed the greater portion of his life with her syren voice in his ears.
Dürer could not bring himself to undergo for art's sake what Michael
Angelo endured; years of exile from a beloved native city, and, still
worse, years of exile from the most congenial spiritual atmosphere.
Nevertheless, we must remember that the difference of language would
have made life in Venice for Dürer a much more complete exile than life
in Verona was for Dante, or life in Rome for Michael Angelo. So he did
not share the patronage and generous recognition which gave Titian such
a splendid opportunity. He ceased for a time at least to be a gentleman
to become a hanger-on, a parasite once more. At Antwerp he once more was
met by the same generosity and recognition only to refuse again to
accept it as a gift for life and return to his beloved Nuremberg, where
it is true his position continually improved, though it never equalled
what had been offered at Venice and Antwerp.
IV
The tone of some of the pleasantries in these letters may rather
astonish good people who, having accepted the fact that Dürer was a
religious man, have at once given him the tone and address of a meeting
of churchwardens, if they have not conjured up a vision of him in a
frock coat. "Things are what they are," said Bishop Butler, and so are
women; boys will be boys. The distinctive functions of the two sexes
were in those days kept more in view if not more in mind than is the
case to-day. The fashions in dress and in deportment were particularly
frank upon this point, especially for the young. One may allow as much
as is desired for the corruption of manners produced by the civil and
religious mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, and friars. There will
always remain a certain truth and propriety, a certain grace and charm
in those costumes and that deportment, as also in the freedom of jest
which characterises even the most modest of Shakespeare's heroines; and
under the influence of their spell we shall feel that all has not been
gain in the change that has gradually been operated. No doubt virtue is
a victory over nature, and chastity a refinement; but among conquerors
some are easy and good-natured, others tactless, awkward, insulting; and
among the chaste some are fearless and enjoy the freedom which courage
and clear conscience give, others timid and suffer the oppression of
their fears. Even among sinners some make the best of weaknesses and
redeem them a great deal more than half, while others magnify smaller
faults by lack of self-possession till they are an insupportable
nuisance. We may well admit that from the successes of those days, those
who succeed to our delight to-day may glean additional attractions.
V
We know that Dürer stopped on at Venice into the year 1507, by a note
which he made in a copy of Euclid, now in the library at Wolfenbüttel.
"This book have I bought at Venice for a ducat in the year 1507.
Albrecht Dürer"; and by another stray note we learn the state of his
worldly affairs on his return.
The following is my property, which I have with difficulty acquired by
the labour of my hand, for I have had no opportunity of great gain. I
have moreover suffered much loss by lending what was not repaid me, and
by apprentices who never paid their fees, and one died at Rome whereby I
lost my wares.
In the thirteenth year of my wedlock (Le., 1507-8) I have paid great
debts with what I earned at Venice. I possess fairly good household
furniture, good clothes, chests, some good pewter vessels, good
materials for my work, bedding and cupboards, and good colours worth 100
florins Rhenish.
The wares that Dürer lost in Rome were doubtless chiefly woodcuts and
engravings which his prentice had taken to sell during his
_wanderjahre_, as Dürer himself during his own had very likely sold
prints for Wolgemut. One of the reasons which had taken him to Venice
may have been to summon Marc Antonio before the Signoria, for having
copied not only his engravings, but the monogram with which he signed
them; in any case he obtained a decree defending him against such
artistic forgery. Dürer's most steady resource seems to have been the
sale of prints; it is these that his wife had sold in his absence, and
in the diary of his journey to the Netherlands there is constant mention
of such sales. Nuremberg was very much behind Antwerp or Venice in the
price paid for works of art; and the possibilities of such a market as
Rome had very likely tempted Dürer to trust his prentice with an unusual
quantity of prints. His worldly affairs were neither brilliant nor
secure; yet we shall find him tempted on receiving an important
commission to spend so much in time and material as to make it
impossible for him to realise a profit. We are accustomed to think that
these trials were spared to artists in the past by the munificence of
patrons: but apart from the fact that patrons often paid only with
promises or by granting credit, at Nuremberg there were few magnificent
patrons, and its burghers were in no way so generous or so extravagant
as those of Venice or Antwerp. In fact, Dürer's position was very
similar to that of the modern artist, who finds little and insufficient
patronage, and can make more if he is lucky by the reproduction of his
creations for the great public. But Dürer still had one advantage over
his fellow-sufferers of to-day--that of being his own publisher.
Doubtless portraits were as popular then as nowadays; but if the public
taste had not been prostituted by a seductive commercialism to the
degree that at present obtains, on the other hand, at Nuremberg at
least, the fashion seems to have been very little developed; and most of
Dürer's important portraits seem to have been the result of his sojourns
away from home.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 15: Thus far the original is in bad Italian.]
[Footnote 16: The retainers of Konz Schott, a neighbouring baron, at one
time a conspicuous enemy of Nürnberg.]
[Footnote 17: These words are in Italian in the original.]
[Footnote 18: Prof. Thausing suggests that this "other _Quadro_" is the
"Christ among the Doctors" in the Barberini Gallery at Rome--a picture
containing seven life-size half-figures or heads, and dated 1506. The
inscription states it to have been _opus quinque dierum_. At Brunswick
there is an old copy of it. The original studies for the hands are
likewise in existence. In Lorenzo Lotto's Madonna of 1508 in the
Borghese Gallery at Rome, the head of St. Onuphrius is taken from the
model who sat for the front Pharisee on the left in Dürer's picture.]
[Footnote 19: A Nürnberg prison.]
CHAPTER IV
DÜRER AND HIS PATRONS AND FRIENDS
I
Dürer had hitherto occasionally enjoyed the patronage of the wise
Elector, Frederick of Saxony, for whom he painted the brilliant
_Adoration of the Magi_ in the Uffizi. He was soon to obtain that of
Maximilian, but this genial and eccentric emperor proved a fussy patron,
as quick to change his mind and to interfere with impossible demands and
criticisms, as he was slow to pay and deficient in means for being truly
generous. There are a certain number of letters which give a glimpse of
Dürer's relations with his clients; they show him appealing always to
the judgment of artists against the ignorant buyer, and giving more than
he bargained to give, though thereby he eats up his legitimate profits;
lastly, they show him vowing never again to enter upon work so
unprofitable, but to give all his time to the creation of engravings and
woodcuts. The first is written to Michael Behaim, who died in 1511, and
had commissioned him to make a design for a woodcut of his coat of arms.
DEAR MASTER MICHAEL BEHAIM,--I send you back the coat of arms again.
Pray let it stay as it is. No one could improve it for you, for I made
it artistically and with care. Those who see it and understand such
matters will tell you so. If the leafwork on the helm were tossed up
backward, it would hide the fillet. Your humble servant, ALBRECHT DÜRER.
[Illustration: Photograph J. Lowy--THE ADORATION OF THE TRINITY,
1511--From the painting at Vienna]
The other letters concern the lost _Coronation of the Virgin_, the
centre panel of an altar-piece of which the wings are still at
Frankfurt, of which town Jacob Heller, who commissioned it, was a
burgher. They were to be studio work, and are supposed to be chiefly due
to Dürer's brother Hans. There is, however, one picture extant which
gives an idea of the execution of the missing centre panel, the _Holy
Trinity and All Saints_ at Vienna; which, in spite of his vow never to
do such work again, was commenced shortly after the _Coronation_, and
for a Nuremberg patron. How much he was paid for it is not known; but it
cannot have been a really adequate sum, as towards the end of his life
he writes to the Nuremberg Council, "I have not received from people in
this town work worth five hundred florins, truly a trifling and
ridiculous sum, and not the fifth part of that has been profit." The
preceding picture, referred to in the first letters, is the _Martyrdom
of the Ten Thousand by Sapor II_. All three pictures were signed, like
the _Feast of the Rose Garlands_ by little finely-dressed portraits of
the painter.
NÜRNBERG, _August_ 28, 1507.
I did not want to receive any money in advance on it till I began to
paint it, which, if God will, shall be the next thing after the Prince's
work;[20] for I prefer not to begin too many things at once and then I
do not become wearied. The Prince too will not be kept waiting, as he
would be if I were to paint his and your pictures at the same time, as I
had intended. At all events have confidence in me, for, so far as God
permits, I will yet according to my power make something that not many
men can equal.
Now many good nights to you. Given at Nürnberg on Augustine's day, 1507.
ALBRECHT DÜRER.
* * * * *
NÜRNBERG, March 19, _1508_.
Dear Herr Jacob Heller. In a fortnight I shall be ready with Duke
Friedrich's work; after that I shall begin yours, and, as my custom is,
I will not paint any other picture till it is finished. I will be sure
carefully to paint the middle panel with my own hand; apart from that,
the outer sides of the wings are already sketched in--they will be in
stone colour; I have also had the ground laid. So much for news.
I wish you could see my gracious Lord's picture; I think it would please
you. I have worked at it straight on for a year and gained very little
by it; for I only get 280 Rhenish gulden for it, and I have spent all
that in the time.
* * * * *
NÜRNBERG, _August 24, 1508_.
Now I commend myself to you. I want you also to know that in all my days
I have never begun any work that pleased me better than this picture of
yours which I am painting. Till I finish it I will not do any other
work; I am only sorry that the winter will so soon come upon me. The
days grow so short that one cannot do much.
I have still one thing to ask you; it is about the _MADONNA_[21] that
you saw at my house; if you know of any one near you who wants a picture
pray offer it to him. If a proper frame was put to it, it would be a
beautiful picture, and you know that it is nicely done. I will let you
have it cheap. I would not take less than fifty florins to paint one
like it. As it stands finished in the house it might be damaged for me,
so I would give you full power to sell it for me cheap for thirty
florins--indeed, rather than that it should not be sold I would even let
it go for twenty-five florins. I have certainly lost much food over it.
* * * * *
Nürnberg, _November_ 4, 1508.
I am justly surprised at what you say in it about my last letter: seeing
that you can accuse me of not holding to my promises to you. From such a
slander each and everyone exempts me, for I bear myself, I trust, so as
to take my stand amongst other straightforward men. Besides I know well
what I have written and promised to you, and you know that in my
cousin's house I refused to promise you to make a good thing, because I
cannot. But to this I did pledge myself, that I would make something for
you that not many men can. Now I have given such exceeding pains to your
picture, that I was led to send you the aforesaid letter. I know that
when the picture is finished all artists will be well pleased with it.
It will not be valued at less than 300 florins. I would not paint
another like it for three times the price agreed, for I neglect myself
for it, suffer loss, and earn anything but thanks from you.
You further reproach me with having promised you that I would paint your
picture with the greatest possible care that ever I could. That I
certainly never said, or if I did I was out of my senses, for in my
whole lifetime I should scarcely finish it. With such extraordinary care
I can hardly finish a face in half a year; now your picture contains
fully 100 faces, not reckoning the drapery and landscape and other
things in it. Besides, who ever heard of making such a work for an
altar-piece? no one could see it. But I think it was thus that I wrote
to you--that I would paint the picture with great or more than ordinary
pains because of the time which you waited for me.
You need not look about for a purchaser for my Madonna, for the Bishop
of Breslau has given me seventy-two florins for it, so I have sold it
well. I commend myself to you. Given at Nürnberg in the year 1508, on
the Sunday after All Saints' Day.
ALBRECHT DÜRER.
* * * * *
NÜRNBERG, _March_ 21, 1509.
I only care for praise from those who are competent to judge; and if
Martin Hess praises it to you, that may give you the more confidence.
You might also inquire from some of your friends who have seen it; they
will tell you how it is done. And if you do not like the picture when
you see it, I will keep it myself, for I have been begged to sell it and
make you another. But be that far from me! I will right honourably hold
with you to that which I have promised, taking you, as I do, for an
upright man.
* * * * *
NÜRNBERG, _July_ 10, 1509.
As you go on to say that if you had not bargained with me for the
picture you would never do so now, and that I may keep it--I return you
this answer: to retain your friendship, if I had to suffer loss by the
picture, I would have done so, but now since you regret the whole
business and provoke me to keep the picture I will do so, and that
gladly, for I know how to get 100 florins more for it than you would
have given me. In future I would not take 400 florins to paint another
such as this.
ALBRECHT DÜRER.
NÜRNBERG, _July_ 24, 1509. DEAR HERR HELLER, I have read the letter
which you addressed to me. You write that you did not mean to decline
taking the picture from me. To that I can only say that I don't
understand what you do mean. When you write that if you had not ordered
the picture you would not make the bargain again, and that I may keep it
as long as I like and so on--I can only think that you have repented of
the whole business, so I gave you my answer in my last letter.
But, at Hans Imhof's persuasion, and having regard to the fact that you
ordered the picture of me, and also because I should prefer it to find a
place at Frankfurt rather than anywhere else, I have consented to send
it to you for 100 florins less than it might well have brought me.
I am reckoning that I shall thus render you a pleasing service;
otherwise I know well how I could draw far greater pecuniary advantage
from it, but your friendship is dearer to me than any such trifling sum
of money. I trust however that you would not wish me to suffer loss over
it when you are better off than I. Make therefore your own arrangements
and commands. Given at Nürnberg on Wine-Tuesday before James'.
ALBRECHT DÜRER.
NÜRNBERG, _August 26_, 1509. First my willing service to you, dear Herr
Jacob Heller. In accordance with your last letter I am sending the
picture well packed and seen to in all needful points. I have handed it
over to Hans Imhof and he has paid me another 100 florins. Yet believe
me, on my honour, I am still out of pocket over it besides losing the
time which I have bestowed upon it. Here in Nürnberg they were ready to
give 300 florins for it, which extra 100 florins would have done very
nicely for me had I not preferred to please and serve you by sending you
the picture. For I value the keeping of your friendship at more than 100
florins. I would also rather have this painting at Frankfurt than
anywhere else in all Germany.
If you think that I have behaved unfairly in not leaving the payment to
your own free-will, you must bear in mind that this would not have
happened if you had not written by Hans Imhof that I might keep the
picture as long as I liked. I should otherwise gladly have left it to
you even if thereby I had suffered a greater loss still. My impression
of you is that, supposing I had promised to make you something for about
ten florins and it cost me twenty, you yourself would not wish me to
lose by it. So pray be content with the fact that I took 100 florins
less from you than I might have got for the picture--for I tell you that
they wanted to take it from me, so to speak, by force.
I have painted it with great care, as you will see, using none but the
best colours I could get. It is painted with good ultramarine under, and
over, and over that again, some five or six times; and then after it was
finished I painted it again twice over so that it may last a long time.
If it is kept clean I know it will remain bright and fresh 500 years,
for it is not done as men are wont to paint. So have it kept clean and
don't let it be touched or sprinkled with holy water. I feel sure it
will not be criticised, or only for the purpose of annoying me; and I
answer for it it will please you well. No one shall ever compel me to
paint a picture again with so much labour. Herr Georg Tausy himself
besought me to paint him a Madonna in a landscape with the same care and
of the same size as this picture, and he would give me 400 florins for
it. That I flatly refused to do, for it would have made a beggar of me.
Of ordinary pictures I will in a year paint a pile which no one would
believe it possible for one man to do in the time. But very careful
nicety does not pay. So henceforth I shall stick to my engraving, and
had I done so before I should to-day have been a richer man by
1000 florins.
I may tell you also that, at my own expense, I have had for the middle
panel a new frame made which has cost me more than six florins. The old
one I have broken off, for the joiner had made it roughly; but I have
not had the other fastened on, for you wished it not to be. It would be
a very good thing to have the rims screwed on so that the picture may
not be shaken.
If anyone wants to see it, let it hang forward two or three finger
breadths, for then the light is good to see it by. And when I come over
to you, say in one, two, or three years' time, if the picture is
properly dry, it must be taken down and I will varnish it over anew with
some excellent varnish, which no one else can make; it will then last
100 years longer than it would before. But don't let anybody else
varnish it, for all other varnishes are yellow, and the picture would be
ruined for you. And if a thing, on which I have spent more than a year's
work, were ruined it would be grief to me. When you have it set up be
present yourself to see that it gets no harm. Deal carefully with it,
for you will hear from your own and from foreign painters how it
is done.
Give my greeting to your painter Martin Hess. My wife asks you for a
_Trinkgeld_, but that is as you please, I screw you no higher, &c. And
now I hold myself commended to you. Read by the sense, for I write in
haste. Given at Nürnberg on Sunday after Bartholomew's, 1509.
ALBRECHT DÜRER.
NÜRNBERG, _October 12_, 1509.
DEAR HERR JACOB HELLER, I am glad to hear that my picture pleases you,
so that my labour has not been bestowed in vain. I am also happy that
you are content about the payment--and that rightly, for I could have
got 100 florins more for it than you have given me. But I preferred to
let you have it, hoping, as I do, thereby to retain you as my friend
down in your parts.
My wife thanks you very much for the present you have made her; she will
wear it in your honour. My young brother also thanks you for the two
florins _Trinkgeld_ you sent him. And now I too thank you myself for all
the honour &c. In reply to your question how the picture should be
adorned I send you a slight design of what I should do if it were mine,
but you must do what you like. Now, many happy times to you. Given on
Friday before Gall's, 1509. ALBRECHT DÜRER.
Dürer must have commenced the All Saints picture almost immediately
after having finished Heller's _Coronation of the Virgin_. Perhaps he
had practically accepted the commission from Matthsus Landauer before he
wrote to Heller that he would never again undertake a picture with so
much work and labour in it, for he afterwards was as good as his word.
This new work was for the chapel of an almshouse founded by Landauer and
Erasmus Schiltkrot for twelve old men citizens of Nuremberg. The
original frame designed by Dürer is now in the Germanic Museum, though a
copy has replaced the picture. After the completion of the _Trinity and
All Saints_, Dürer apparently carried out his threat and gave up
painting for a dozen years, devoting his energies more especially to a
magnificent series of engravings on copper. He also completed his series
of wood engravings and published them with text, and produced a number
of single cuts, many of them among his very best, like the _Assumption
of the Magdalen_, and the _St. Christopher_, here reproduced.
[Illustration: ST. CHRISTOPHER Woodcut, B. 103]
[Illustration: THE ASSUMPTION OF THE MAGDALEN Woodcut, B. 121]
II
In 1514 his mother died. He has recounted her death twice over, as he
did that of his father already cited; for the single surviving leaf of
the "other book" happens to contain this also. In the briefer
chronicle he says:
Two years after my Father's death (i.e., 1504) I took my Mother into my
house, for she had nothing more to live upon. So she dwelt with me till
the year 1513, as they reckon it; when, early one Tuesday morning, she
was taken suddenly and deadly ill, and thus she lay a whole year long.
And a whole year after the day she was first taken ill, she received the
holy sacraments and christianly passed away two hours before
nightfall--it was on a Tuesday, the 17th day of May in the year 1514. I
said the prayers for her myself. God Almighty be gracious to her.
The account in the "other book" is more circumstantial:
Now you must know that, in the year 1513, on a Tuesday before Rogation
week, my poor afflicted Mother, whom two years after my Father's death,
as she was quite poor, I took into my house, and after she had lived
nine years with me, was one morning suddenly taken so deadly ill that we
broke into her chamber; otherwise, as she could not open, we had not
been able to come to her. So we carried her into a room downstairs and
she received both sacraments, for every one thought she would die,
because ever since my Father's death she had never been in good health.
Her most frequent habit was to go much to the church. She always
upbraided me well if I did not do right, and she was ever in great
anxiety about my sins and those of my brother. And if I went out or in
her saying was always, "Go in the name of Christ." She constantly gave
us holy admonitions with deep earnestness and she always had great
thought for our souls' health. I cannot enough praise her good works and
the compassion she showed to all, as well as her high character.
This my pious Mother bare and brought up eighteen children; she often
had the plague and many other severe and strange illnesses, and she
suffered great poverty, scorn, contempt, mocking words, terrors, and
great adversities. Yet she bore no malice.
In 1514 (as they reckon it), on a Tuesday--it was the 17th day of
May--two hours before nightfall and more than a year after the
above-mentioned day in which she was taken ill, my Mother, Barbara
Dürer, christianly passed away, with all the sacraments, absolved by
papal power from pain and sin. But she first--gave me her blessing and
wished me the peace of God, exhorting me very beautifully to keep myself
from sin. She asked also to drink S. John's blessing, which she
then did.
She feared Death much, but she said that to come before God she feared
not. Also she died hard, and I marked that she saw something dreadful,
for she asked for the holy-water, although, for a long time, she had not
spoken. Immediately afterwards her eyes closed over. I saw also how
Death smote her two great strokes to the heart, and how she closed mouth
and eyes and departed with pain. I repeated to her the prayers. I felt
so grieved for her that I cannot express it. God be merciful to her.
To speak of God was ever her greatest delight, and gladly she beheld the
honour of God. She was in her sixty-third year when she died and I have
buried her honourably according to my means.
[Illustration: "1514, on Oculi Sunday (March 19). This is Albrecht
Dürer's mother; she was 63 years of age." After her death he added in
ink, "And departed this life in the year 1514 on Tuesday Holy Cross Day
(May 16) at two o'clock in the night" Charcoal-drawing. Royal Print
Room, Berlin]
God, the Lord, grant me that I too may attain a happy end, and that God
with his heavenly host, my Father, Mother, relations, and friends may
come to my death. And may God Almighty give unto us eternal life. Amen.
And in her death she looked much sweeter than when she was still alive.
III
Such was the home life of this great artist; and from homes presenting
variations on this type proceeded probably all the giants of the
Renaissance, whose work we think so surpasses in effort, in scope, and
in efficiency, all that has been achieved since. This Christianity was
unreformed; it existed side by side with dissolute monasteries and
worldly cynical prelates, surrounded by sordid hucksters and brutal
soldiery. Turn to Erasmus' portrait of Dean Colet, and we see that it
existed in London, among the burghers, even in the household of a Lord
Mayor. We are almost forced on the reflection that nothing that has
succeeded to it has produced men equal to those who sprang immediately
out of it.
However much and however justly the assurance of Christian assertion in
the realm of theory may be condemned, the success of the Christian life,
wherever it has approached a conscientious realisation, stands out among
the multitudinous forms of its corruption; and those who catch sight of
it are almost bound to exclaim in the spirit of Shakespeare's:
"How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world."
I have heard a Royal Academician remark how even the poorest copies and
reproductions of the masterpieces of Greek sculpture retain something of
the charm and dignity of the original: whereas the quality of modern
work is quickly lost in a reduction or even in a cast. I believe this
may be best explained by the fact that the chief research of the Greek
artist was to establish a beautiful proportion between the parts and the
whole; and that fidelity to nature, dexterity of execution, the
symbolism of the given subject, and even the finish of the surfaces,
were always when necessary sacrificed to this. Whereas in modern work,
even when the proportions of the whole are considered, which is rarely
the case, they are almost without exception treated as secondary to one
or more of these other qualities. Is it not possible that Jesus in his
life laid down a proportion, similar to that of Greek masterpieces for
the body, between the efforts and intentions which create the soul and
pour forth its influence?--a proportion which, when it has been once
thoroughly apprehended, may be subtly varied to suit new circumstances,
and produce a similar harmony in spheres of activity with which Jesus
himself had not even a distant connection? We often find that the rudest
copies from copies of his actual life are like the biscuit china Venus
of Milo sold by the Italian pedlar, which still dimly reflects the main
beauties of the marble in the Louvre.
IV
In 1512 Kaiser Maximilian came to Nuremberg, and soon afterward Dürer
began working for him. The employment he found for the greatest artist
north of the Alps was sufficiently ludicrous; and perhaps Dürer showed
that he felt this, by treating the major portion as studio work; though,
no doubt, the impatience of his imperial patron in a measure
necessitated the employment of many aids.
It is difficult to do justice to the fine qualities of Maximilian.
Perhaps he was not really so eccentric as he seems. The oddity of his
doings and sayings may be perhaps more properly attributed to his having
been a thorough German. The genial men of that nation, even to-day and
since it has come more into line in point of culture with France and
England, are apt to have a something ludicrous or fantastic clinging to
them; even Goethe did not wholly escape. Maximilian was strong in body
and in mind, and brimming over with life and interest. We are told that
when a young man he climbed the tower of Ulm Cathedral by the help of
the iron rings that served to hold the torches by which it was
illuminated on high days and holidays. Again we read: "A secretary had
embezzled 3000 gulden. Maximilian sent for him and asked what should be
done to a confidential servant who had robbed his master. The secretary
recommended the gallows. 'Nay, nay,' the Emperor said, and tapped him on
the shoulder, 'I cannot spare you yet'"; an anecdote which reveals more
good sense and a larger humanity than either monarchs or others are apt
to have at hand on such vexing occasions. Thausing says admirably, "A
happy imagination and a great idea of his exalted position made up to
him for any want of success in his many wars and political
negotiations," and elsewhere calls him the last of the "nomadic
emperors," who spent their lives travelling from palace to palace and
from city to city, beseeching, cajoling, or threatening their subjects
into obedience. He himself said, "I am a king of kings. If I give an
order to the princes of the empire, they obey if they please, if they do
not please they disobey." He was even then called "the last of the
knights," because he had an amateurish passion for a chivalry that was
already gone, and was constantly attempting to revive its costumes and
ordinances. Then, like certain of the Pharaohs of Egypt, he was pleased
to read of, and see illustrated by brush and graver, victories he had
never won, and events in which he had not shone. He himself dictated or
planned out those wonderful lives or allegories of a life which might
have been his. It was on such a work of futile self-glorification that
he now wished to employ Dürer.
The novelty of the art of printing, and the convenience to a nomadic
emperor of a monument that could be rolled up, suggested the form of
this last absurdity--a monster woodcut in 92 blocks which, when joined
together, produced a picture 9 feet by 10, representing what had at
first been intended as an imitation of a Roman triumphal arch; but so
much information about so many more or less dubious ancestors, &c., had
to be conveyed by quaint and conceited inventions, that in the end it
was rather comparable to the confusion of a Juggernaut car, which
never-the-less imposes by a barbarous wealth and magnificence of
fantastic detail. And to this was to be joined another monster,
representing on several yards of paper a triumphal procession of the
emperor, escorted by his family, and the virtues of himself and
ancestors, &c. Such is fortune's malice that Dürer, who alone or almost
alone had conceived of the simplicity of true dignity and the beauty of
choice proportions and propriety, should have been called upon by his
only royal patron to superintend a production wherein the rank and
flaccid taste of the time ran riot. The absurdity, barbarism, and
grotesque quaintness of this monument to vanity cannot be laid
exclusively at Maximilian's door; for the architecture, particularly of
the fountains, in Altdorfer's or Manuel's designs, and in those of many
others, reveals a like wantonness in delighted elaboration of the
impossible and unstructural. The scholars and pedantic posturers who
surrounded the emperor no doubt improved and abetted. Probably it was
this Juggernaut element, inherited from the Gothic gargoyle, which
Goethe censured when he said that "Dürer was retarded by a gloomy
fantasy devoid of form or foundation." Perhaps this was written at a
period when the great critic was touched with that resentment against
the Middle Ages begotten by the feeling that his own art was still
encumbered by its irrational and confused fantasy. We who certainly are
able to take a more ample view of Dürer's situation in the art of his
times, see that he is rather characterised by an effort which lay in
exactly the same direction as that of Goethe's own; and while
sympathising with the irritation expressed, can also admire the great
engraver for having freed himself in so large a degree from the
influence of fantasy "devoid of form and foundation," even as the
justest Shakespearean criticism admires the degree in which the author
of Othello freed himself from Elizabethan conceits. It is difficult to
appreciate the difference for a great artist in having the general taste
with rather than against the purer tendencies of his art. Probably the
Greeks and certain Italians owe their freedom from eccentricity, in a
very large measure, to this cause. But I intend to treat these questions
more at length in dealing with Dürer's character as an artist and
creator. It was necessary to touch on the subject here, because
Maximilian embodies the peculiar and fantastic aftergrowth, which
sprouted up in some northern minds from the old stumps remaining from
the great mediaeval forest of thoughts and sentiments which had
gradually fallen into decay. All around, even in the same minds, waved
the saplings of the New Birth when these old stumps put forth their so
fantastic second youth, seeming for a time to share in the new vigour,
though they were never to attain expansion and maturity.
V
Thausing shrewdly remarks, "This love of fame and naïve delight in the
glorification of his own person are further proofs that the Emperor Max
was the true child of his age. No one was so akin to him in this respect
as the painter of his choice, Albert Dürer." This last is a reference to
those strutting, finely-dressed portraits of the artist which stand
beside the entablatures bearing his name, that of his birthplace, the
date, &c., in four out of the five most elaborate pictures which Dürer
painted. But I would like to suggest that probably this apparent
resemblance to his royal patron is not thus altogether well accounted
for. May there not have been something of Homer's invocation of his
Muse, or of that sincerity which makes Dante play such a large part in
the "Divine Comedy"?--something resembling the ninth verse of the
Apocalypse: "I John, who also am your brother and companion in
tribulation ... was in the isle that is called Patmos ... and heard
behind me a great voice as of a trumpet, saying...." Those little
strutting portraits of himself sprung, perhaps, out of this relation to
those about him of the man by native gift very superior, who is not made
contemptuous or inclined to emphasise his isolation, but who is ever
ready to say, "It is I, be not afraid." The man who painted and
conceived this is the man you know, whom you have admired because he
carried his fine clothes so well in your streets. Here I am even in the
midst of this massacre of saints, I have conceived it all and taken a
whole year to elaborate it; and since you see me looking so cool and
well-dressed in the midst of it, you need not be offended or
overwhelmed. Such is ever the naïvety of great souls among those whose
culture is primitive. It is like the boasted bravery of the eldest among
little children, wholly an act of kindness and consideration, not a
selfish vaunt. That they should be admired and trusted is for them a
foregone conclusion; and when they call on that admiration and trust,
they do it merely for the sake of those whom they would encourage and
console, for whose sakes they will even hide whatever in them is really
unworthy of such admiration and such trust.
We do not easily realise the corporate character of life in those days.
Very much that seems to us quaint and absurd drew proper significance
from the practical solidarity that then obtained; what appears to us a
strange vanity or parade may have appeared to them respect for the
guild, the town, the country to which they belonged. Dürer signed
"Noricus,"--of Nuremberg;--and preferred its little lucrative
citizenship to those more remunerative offered by Venice and Antwerp.
"Let all the world behold how fine the artist of Nuremberg is." Just as
he says, "God gave me diligence," so it seems natural to him to
attribute a large half of his fame and glory to his native town. In many
respects the great man of those days felt less individual than an
ordinary man does now; for classes did not so merge one into the other,
and their character was more distinct and authoritative. The little
portrait of himself added to those wonderful _tours-de-force_ made them
something that belonged to Nuremberg and to Germans. Even so it would be
with some treasure cup, all gold and jewels, belonging to a village
schoolmaster, which none of his neighbours dared look at save in his
presence; for he was the son of a great baron whom his elder brothers
robbed of everything except this, and his presence among them alone made
them able to feel that it really belonged to their village, was theirs
in a fashion. These suggestions will not, I think, appear fantastic to
those who ponder on the apparently vainglorious address of much of
Dürer's work, and keep in mind such a passage from his writings as this:
"I would gladly give everything I know to the light, for the good of
cunning students who prize such art more highly than silver and gold. I
further admonish all who have any knowledge in these matters that they
write it down. Do it truly and plainly, not toilsomely and at great
length, for the sake of those who seek and are glad to learn, to the
great honour of God and your own praise. If I then set something
burning, and ye all add to it skilful furthering, a blaze may in time
arise therefrom which shall shine throughout the whole world."[22]
But still, even if such considerations may bring many to accept my
explanation of this contrast, I do not want to over-insist on it. I
think that wherever men have been superior in character, as well as in
gift or rank, to those about them, something of this spirit of the good
eldest child in a family is bound to be manifested. But just as such a
child may be veritably boastful and vain at other times,--however purely
now and then, in crises of apparent difficulty or danger, its vaunt and
strut may spring from real kindness and a considerate wish to inspire
courage in the younger and weaker;--so doubtless there was a
haughtiness, sometimes a fault, in Dürer as in Milton.
VI
But we have been led a long way from Kaiser Max and his portable
monument. The reader will re-picture how the court arrived at Nuremberg
like a troop of actors, whose performance was really their life, and was
taken quite seriously and admired heartily by the good and solid
burghers. This old comedy, often farce, entitled "The Importance of
Authority," is no longer played with such a telling make-up, or with
such showy properties as formerly, but is still as popular as ever; as
we Londoners know, since the last few years have given us perhaps an
over-dose of processions, illuminations, &c. &c. In this case the chief
actors in the show piece were men of mark of an exceptionally
entertaining character; with many of them Dürer and Pirkheimer were soon
on the best of terms.
Foremost, Johann Stabius, the companion of the Emperor for sixteen years
without intermission in war and in peace, who was associated with Dürer
to provide the written accompaniment for the monument; a literary
jack-of-all-trades of ready wit and lively presence. A contemporary
records: "The emperor took constant pleasure in the strange things which
Stabius devised, and esteemed him so highly that he instituted a new
chair of Astronomy and Mathematics for him at Vienna," in the Collegium
Poetarum et Mathematicorum founded in the year 1501, under the
presidency of Conrad Celtes.
In all probability there would have been besides the learned protonotary
of the supreme court, Ulrich Varenbuler, often mentioned as a friend in
the letters of Erasmus and Pirkheimer, and the subject of the largest of
Dürer's portrait woodcuts, which shows him to us some ten years later,
still a handsome trenchant personality, with a liking for fine clothes,
and the self-reliant expression of a man who is conscious that the
thought he takes for the morrow is not likely to be in vain.
It may be that Dürer then met for the first time too the Imperial
architect, Johannes Tscherte, for whom he afterwards drew two armillary
spheres, to take the place of those on which he had cast ridicule; for
Pirkheimer wrote to Tscherte: "I wish you could have heard how Albert
Dürer spoke to me about your plate, in which there is not one good
stroke, and laughed at me. What honour it will do us when it makes its
appearance in Italy, and the clever painters there see it!" To which
Tscherte replied: "Albert Dürer knows me well, he is also well aware
that I love art, though I am no expert at it; let him if he likes
despise my plate, I never pretended it was a work of art." And in a
later letter he speaks "of the armillary spheres drawn by our common
friend Albert Dürer." He was one of those who helped Dürer in his
mathematical and geometrical studies; and he, like Pirkheimer, dedicated
books to him. Although the mathematics of those times are hardly
considered seriously nowadays, they then ranked with verse-making as a
polite accomplishment, and had all the charm of novelty. Dürer, no
doubt, had some gift that way, as he seems to have made a hobby of them
during many years. Besides those who came in the Imperial troop, Dürer
had many opportunities of meeting men of this kind, for such were
constantly passing through Nuremberg. Dürer has left us what are
evidently portraits of some whose names are lost: of others we have both
name and likeness, among them the English ambassador, Lord Morley.
In 1515 "Rafahel de' Urbin, who is held in such high esteem by the Pope,
he made these naked figures and sent them to Albrecht Dürer at Nuremberg
to show him his hand." This shows us that travellers through Nuremberg
sometimes brought with them something of the breath of the great
Renaissance in Italy. The drawing, which bears the above inscription in
Dürer's own handwriting on the back, is a fine one in red sanguine,
representing the same male model in two different poses, in the
Albertina. Raphael had, we are told by Lodovico Dolce, drawings,
engravings, and woodcuts of Dürer's hanging in his studio; and Vasari
tells us he said: "If Dürer had been acquainted with the antique he
would have surpassed us all." The Nuremberg master, in return for the
drawing, sent a portrait of himself to Raphael, which has unfortunately
been lost. There appears to have been quite a rage for Dürer's work in
Italy, and above all at Rome: we know that it provoked Michael Angelo to
remonstrate; probably on many lips it was merely a vaunt of superior
knowledge or taste, as rapture over the conjectural friends or aids of a
great quatrocentist is to-day. The tokens of esteem which he won from
distinguished travellers, and this drawing which reached him testifying
to the interest and friendship felt for him by the Italian whose fame
was most widespread, must have been full of encouragement, and have
compensated in some measure for the feeling he had that he was only a
hanger-on at Nuremberg, though he might still have been "a gentleman" in
Venice. Yet Nuremberg itself furnished many desirable or notable
acquaintances. There was Dürer's neighbour, the jurist, Lazarus
Spengler; later the most prominent reformer in Nuremberg, who in 1520
dedicated to him his "Exhortation and Instruction towards the leading of
a virtuous life," addressing him as "his particular and confidential
friend and brother," whom he considers, "without any flattery, to be a
man of understanding, inclined to honesty and every virtue, who has
often in our daily familiar intercourse been to me in no common degree a
pattern and an example to a more circumspect way of life;" whom,
finally, he asks to improve his little book to the best of his ability.
Dürer had before this rendered him service in designing his coat of arms
for a woodcut and furnishing a frontispiece to his translation of
Eusebius' "Life of St. Jerome." He was, moreover, a poet, author of "an
often-translated song"; he wrote verses to discourage Dürer from
spending his time in producing the doggerel rhymes which at one time he
was moved to attempt,--framing poems of didactic import, and publishing
one or two on separate sheets with a woodcut at the top, in spite of the
inappreciative reception given to them by Spengler and Pirkheimer.
Besides Spengler, there were "Christopher Kress, a soldier, a traveller,
and a town councillor;" and Caspar Nützel, of one of the oldest
families, and Captain-general of the town bands. Both of these went with
Dürer to the Diet at Augsburg in 1518. The martial Paumgartners were two
brothers for whom Dürer painted the early triptych at Munich (see page
204). One of them is supposed to figure as St. George in the All Saints
picture. Lastly, there were the Imhoffs, the merchant princes of
Nuremberg, as the Fuggers were at Augsburg. A son of the family married
Felicitas, Pirkheimer's favourite daughter, in 1515, and Dürer stood
godfather to their little Hieronymus in 1518. It is easy to imagine that
there was many a supper and dinner, when a thousand strange subjects
were even more strangely discussed; when Pirkheimer now made them roar
with a hazardous joke, or again dumbfounded them with Greek quotations
pompously done into German, or made their flesh creep and the
superstitions of their race stir in them by mysteriously enlarging on
his astrological lore,--for to his many weaknesses he added this, which
was then scarcely recognised as one.
VII
In spite of all his wealthy and influential friends, Dürer found it
difficult to get the emperor to indemnify him for his labours, though
the Town Council had received a royal mandate as early as 1512 from
Landau. The following is an extract:
Whereas our and the Empire's trusty Albrecht Dürer has devoted much zeal
to the drawings he has made for us at our command, and has promised
henceforth ever to do the like, whereat we have received particular
pleasure; and whereas we are informed on all hands that the said Dürer
is famous in the art of painting before all other Masters: we have
therefore felt ourself moved, to further him with our especial grace,
and we accordingly desire you with earnest solicitude, for the affection
you bear us, to make the said Dürer free of all town imposts, having
regard to our grace and to his famous art, which should fairly turn to
his profit with you, &c.
The town councillors sent some of their principal members to treat with
Dürer, and he resigned his claim "in order to honour the said
councillors and to maintain their privileges, usages, and rights." In
1515 the drawings for the "Gate of Honour" were finished, and Dürer
began to press again for pay. Stabius had promised to speak for him, but
nothing had come of it. Albrecht thought Christoph Kress could be of
more avail; so he wrote to him:
(No date, but certainly 1515). DEAR HERR KRESS, The first thing I have
to ask you is to find out from Herr Stabius whether he has done anything
in my business with his Imperial Majesty, and how it stands. Let me know
this in the next letter you write to my Lords. Should it happen that
Herr Stabius has made no move in the matter, ... Point out in particular
to his Imperial Majesty that I have served his Majesty for three years,
spending my own money in so doing, and if I had not been diligent the
ornamental work would have been nowise so successfully finished. I
therefore pray his Imperial Majesty to recompense me with the 100
florins--all which you know well how to do. You must know also that I
made many other drawings for his Majesty besides the "Triumph."
Not long after this, Maximilian, by a _Privilegium_ (dated Innsbruck,
September 6, 1515), settled an annual pension of 100 florins on
the artist.
We Maximilian, by God's grace, &c., make openly known by this letter for
ourself and our successors in the Empire, and to each and every one to
wit, that we have regarded and considered the art, skill, and
intelligence for which our and the Empire's trusty and well-beloved
Albrecht Dürer has been praised before us, and likewise the pleasing,
honest and useful services which he has often and willingly done for us
and the Holy Empire and also for our own person in many ways, and which
he still daily does and henceforward may and shall do: and that we
therefore, of set purpose, after mature deliberation, and with the full
knowledge of ourself and the Princes and Estates of the Empire, have
graciously promised and granted to this same Dürer what we herewith and
by virtue of this letter make known:
_That is to say_, that one hundred florins Rhenish shall be yielded,
given, and paid by the honourable, our and the Empire's trusty and
well-beloved Burgomaster and Council of the town of Nürnberg and their
successors unto the said Albrecht Dürer, against his quittance, all his
life long and no longer, yearly and in every year, on our behalf, out of
the customary town contributions which the said Burgomaster and Council
of the town of Nürnberg are bound to yield and pay, yearly and in every
year, into our Treasury. And whatever the said Burgomaster and Council
of the town of Nürnberg and their successors shall yield, give, and pay
to the said Albrecht Dürer, as stands written above, against his
quittance, the same sum shall be accepted and reckoned to them as paid
and yielded for the customary town contributions which they, as stands
written above, are bound to pay into our Treasury, as if they had paid
the same into our own hands and received our quittance therefor, and no
harm or detriment shall in anywise be done therefor unto them or their
successors by
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