“Masterpieces in Colour” Series

Others in Preparation.

DÜRER

[vii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[9]

THIS is a wonderful world! And not
the least wonderful thing is our ignorance
of it.

I would chat with you, reader, for a
while; would discuss Dürer, whom I have
known and loved for many a year, and
whom I want to make beloved by you also.
Here I sit, pen in hand, and would begin.

[10]
Begin—where?

With the Beginnings?

The Beginnings? Where do things
begin; when and why?

So our ignorance, like a many-headed
monster, raises its fearsome heads and would
bar the way.

By most subtle links are all things connected—cause
and effect we call them;
and if we but raise one or the other, fine
ears will hear the clinking—and the monster
rises.

There are so many things we shall
never know, cries the poet of the unsaid,
Maeterlinck.

Let us venture forth then and grope
with clumsy fingers amongst the treasures
stored; let us be content to pick up a
jewel here and there, resting our minds in
awe and admiration on its beauty, though
we may not readily understand its use and
meaning. Foolish men read books and[11]
dusty documents, catch a few dull words
from the phrasing of long thoughts, and
will tell you, these are facts!

Wise men read books—the books of
Nature and the books of men—and say,
facts are well enough, but oh for the right
understanding!

For between sunrise and sunset, between
the dusk of evening and the dusk of dawn,
things happen that will never happen again;
and the world of to-day is ever a world of
yesterdays and to-morrows.

Reader, I lift my torch, and by its dim
light I bid you follow me.

For it is a long journey we have to
make through the night of the past. Many
an encumbrance of four and a half centuries
we shall have to lay aside ere we reach
the treasure-house of Dürer’s Art.

From the steps of Kaiser Wilhelm II.’s
throne we must hasten through the ages
to Kaiser Maximilian’s city, Nuremberg—[12]to
the days when Wilhelm’s ancestors were
but Margraves of Brandenburg, scarcely
much more than the Burggraves of Nuremberg
they had originally been.

From the days of the Maxim gun and
the Lee-Metford to the days of the howitzer
and the blunderbuss. When York was
farther away from London than New York
is to-day.

When the receipt of a written letter was
fact but few could boast of; and a secret
billet-doux might cause the sender to be
flung in gaol. When the morning’s milk
was unaccompanied by the morning news;
for the printer’s press was in its infancy.

When the stranding of a whale was an
event of European interest, and the form
of a rhinoceros the subject of wild conjecture
and childish imagination.

When this patient earth of ours was to
our ancestors merely a vast pancake toasted
daily by a circling sun.

[13]

[15]
When the woods were full of hobgoblins,
and scaly Beelzebubs were busily engaged
in pitching the souls of the damned down
a yawning hell-mouth, and the angels of
the Lord in crimson and brocade carried
the blessed heavenward. In those days
scholars filled their books with a curious
jumble of theology, philosophy, and old
women’s talk. Dr. Faustus practised black
magic, and the besom-steeds carried witches
from the Brocken far and wide into all
lands.

Then no one ventured far from home
unaccompanied, and the merchants were
bold adventurers, and Kings of Scotland
might envy Nuremberg burgesses—so
Æneas Sylvius said.

And that a touch of humour be not
lacking, I bid you remember that my lady
dipped her dainty fingers into the stew,
and, after, threw the bare bones to the
dogs below the table; and I also bid you[16]
remember that satins and fine linen oft
clothed an unwashed body.

Cruel plagues, smallpox, and all manner
of disease and malformations inflicted a
far greater number than nowadays, and the
sad ignorance of doctors brewed horrid
draughts amongst the skulls, skeletons,
stuffed birds, and crocodiles of their fearsome-looking
“surgeries.”

In short, it was a “poetic” age; when
all the world was full of mysteries and
possibilities, and the sanest and most level-headed
were outrageously fantastic.

There are people who will tell you that
the world is very much the same to-day
as it was yesterday, and that, after all,
human nature is human nature in all
ages all the world over. But, beyond the
fact that we all are born and we all
must die, there is little in common between
you and me—between us of to-day and
those of yesterday—and we resemble each[17]
other most nearly in things that do not
matter.

Frankly, therefore, Albrecht Dürer, who
was born on May 21, 1471, is a human
being from another world, and unless you
realise that too, I doubt you can understand
him, much less admire him.

For his Art is not beautiful.

Germans have never been able to create
anything beautiful in Art: their sense of
beauty soars into Song.

But even whilst I am writing these
words it occurs to me that they are no
longer true, for the German of to-day is no
longer the German of yesterday, “standing
peaceful on his scientific watch-tower; and
to the raging, struggling multitude here
and elsewhere solemnly, from hour to hour,
with preparatory blast of cow-horn emit
his ‘Höret ihr Herren und lasst’s euch
sagen’ …” as Carlyle pictures him; he
is most certainly not like the Lutheran[18]
German with a child’s heart and a boy’s rash
courage.

Frankly I say you cannot admire Dürer
if you be honestly ignorant or ignorantly
honest.

We of to-day are too level-headed; our
brains cannot encompass the world that
crowded Dürer’s dreams.

For the German’s brain was always
crowded; he had not that nice sense of
space and emptiness that makes Italian Art
so pleasant to look upon, and which the
Japanese employ with astonishing subtlety.
You remember Wagner’s words in Goethe’s
“Faust”—

“Zwar weiss ich viel; doch möcht ich Alles wissen.”

(I know a lot, yet wish that I knew All.)

It is not only his eagerness to show you
all he knows, but also his ravenous desire
to know all that is to be known. Hence
we speak of German thoroughness, at once
his boast and his modesty.

[19]
Here again I have to pull up. Generalisations
are so easy, appear so justified,
and are more often than not misleading.

Dürer was not a pure-blooded Teuton;
his father came from Eytas in Hungary.¹

That German music owes a debt of gratitude
to Hungary is acknowledged. Does
Dürer owe his greatness to the strain of
foreign blood?

Possibly; but it does not matter. He
was a man, and a profound man, therefore
akin to all the world, as Dante and Michelangelo,
as Shakespeare and Millet. Born
into German circumstances he appears in
German habit—that is all.

His father Albrecht was a goldsmith,
and Albrecht the son having shown himself
worthy of a better education than his
numerous brothers, was, after finishing
school, apprenticed to and would have re[20]mained
a goldsmith, had his artistic nature
not drawn him to Art; at least so his
biographer, i.e. the painter himself, tells us.
It was not the artist alone who longed
for freer play, for freer expression of his
faculties. It was to a great extent, I feel
sure, the thinker.

Dürer took himself tremendously seriously;
were it not for some letters that
he has left us, and some episodes in his
graphic art, one might be led to imagine
that Dürer knew not laughter, scarcely
even a smile. He consequently thought it
of importance to acquaint the world with
all the details of his life and work, recording
even the moods which prompted him
to do this or that. In Dürer the desire to
live was entirely absorbed in the desire to
think. He was not a man of action, and
the records of his life are filled by accounts
of what he saw, what he thought, and
what others thought of him; coupled with[21]
frequent complaints of jealousies and lack of
appreciation. Dürer was deep but narrow,
and in that again he reflects the religious
spirit of Protestantism, not the wider culture
of Humanism. His ego looms large
in his consciousness, and it is the salvation
of the soul rather than the expansion of
the mind which concerns him; but withal
he is like Luther—a Man.

His idea then of Art was, that it “should
be employed,” as he himself explained, “in
the service of the Church to set forth the
sufferings of Christ and such like subjects,
and it should also be employed to preserve
the features of men after their death.” A
narrow interpretation of a world-embracing
realm.

The scope of this little volume will not
admit of a detailed account of Dürer’s life.

We may not linger on the years of his
apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut,
where he suffered much from his fellow-[22]‘prentices.
We must not accompany him
on his wanderjahre, these being the three
years of peregrination which always followed
the years of apprenticeship.

Neither may we record details, as of his
marriage with Agnes Frey—”mein Agnes,”
upon his return home in 1494. “His Agnes”
was apparently a good housewife and a
shrewd business woman, to whom he afterwards
largely entrusted the sale of his
prints.

He had a great struggle for a living.
And here an amusing analogy occurs to me.
Painting does not pay, he complains at one
time, and therefore he devotes himself to
“black and white.”

Was it ever thus? Would that some
of our own struggling artists remembered
Dürer, and even when they find themselves
compelled to do something to keep the
pot aboiling, at any rate do their best.

[23]

[25]
We have it on Dürer’s own authority that
he took up etching and wood-engraving because
it paid better. And strange—into
this bread-and-butter work he put his best.

It is not his painting that made his
fame and name, though in that branch of
Art he was admired by a Raphael and a
Bellini.

Agnes Frey bore him no children; this
fact, I think, is worthy of note. Even a
cursory glance at Dürer’s etchings and
woodcuts will reveal the fact that he was
fond of children—”kinderlieb,” as the Germans
say. I do not doubt that he would
have given us even more joy and sunshine
in his Art had he but called a child his own.

Instead, we have too often the gloomy
reflection of death throughout his work.
The gambols and frolics of angelic cupids
are too often obscured by the symbols of
suffering, sin, and death.

Again, we must not allow a logical conclusion
to be accepted as an absolute truth.

[26]
Dürer was certainly more familiar with
death and suffering than we are.

Unless the grey lady and the dark
angel visit our own homes, most of us—of
my readers, at any rate—have to seek
deliberately the faces of sorrow in the
slums and the grimaces of death in the
Coroner’s Court. But in Dürer’s days death
lurked beyond the city walls; the sight of
the slain or swinging victims of knightly
valour, and peasant’s revenge, blanched the
cheeks of many maidens, and queer plagues
and pestilences mowed the most upright to
the ground. The Dance of Death was a
favourite subject with the old painters,
not because their disposition was morbid,
but because the times were more out of
joint than they are now.

All these points have to be realised
before one can hope to understand Dürer
even faintly. Again, when we examine more
closely the apparently quaint and fantastic[27]
form his mode of visualising takes, we
must make allowances for the habits and
customs and costumes of the times—as
indeed one has to, in the case of all old
masters, and for which reason I humbly
submit that the study of old masters
properly belongs to the few, not the
many. A great deal of erroneous opinions
are held simply because it is difficult
to disentangle the individual from the
typical.

Dürer, whose wanderjahre had taken him
to Strasburg and Bâle and Venice, returned
home again apparently uninfluenced.

Critics from Raphael’s age down to the
last few years have lamented this fact;
have thought that “knowledge of classic
antiquity” might have made a better artist
of him.

Now, Dürer was not an artist in its wider
sense; he was a craftsman certainly, but
above all a thinker. Dürer uses his eyes[28]
for the purposes of thought; he could close
them without disturbing the pageants of his
vision. But whereas we have no hint that
his dreams were of beauty, we have every
indication that they were literal transcriptions
of literary thoughts. When he came
to put these materialisations into the form
of pictures or prints, the craftsman side, the
practical side of his nature, resolved them
into scientific problems, with the remarkable
result that these visions are hung on
purely materialistic facts. From our modern
point of view Dürer was decidedly lacking
in artistic imagination, which even such
men as Goya and Blake, or “si parva
licet comparere magnis” John Martin and
Gustave Doré, and the delightful Arthur
Rackham of our own times possess.

His importance was his craftsmanship,
whilst the subject-matter of his pictures—the
portraits excepted—and particularly of
his prints, are merely of historic interest—[29]“von
kulturhistorischer Bedeutung,” the
German would say.

In 1506 and 1507 he visited Venice, as
already stated, gracefully received by the
nobles and Giovanni Bellini, but disliked
by the other painters.

He returned home apparently uninfluenced
by the great Venetians, Titian, remember,
amongst them. Gentile Bellini
and Vittore Carpaccio were then the only
painters at Venice who saw the realistic
side of Nature; but they were prosaic,
whilst our Dürer imbued a wooden bench
or a tree trunk with a personal and human
interest. Those of my readers who can
afford the time to linger on this aspect of
Dürer’s activity should compare Carpaccio’s
rendering of St. Jerome in his study with
Dürer’s engraving of the same subject.

Dürer the craftsman referred in everything
he painted or engraved to Nature.
But of course it was Nature as he and his[30]
times saw it; neither Hals, Rembrandt,
neither Ribera, Velazquez, neither Chardin
nor Constable, neither Monet nor Whistler
had as yet begun to ascend the rungs of
progress towards truthful—that is, “optical
sight.”

Dürer’s reference to Nature means an
intricate study of theoretical considerations,
coupled with the desire to record everything
he knew about the things he wished
to reproduce.

His was an analytical mind, and every
piece of work he produced is a careful
dovetailing of isolated facts. Consequently
his pictures must not be looked at, but
looked into—must be read.

Again an obvious truth may here mislead
us. The analytical juxtaposition of
facts was a characteristic of the age.
Dürer’s Art was a step forward; he—like
Raphael, like Titian—dovetailed, where
earlier men scarcely joined. Dürer has as[31]
yet not the power that even the next
generation began to acquire—he never
suggests anything; he works everything
out, down to the minutest details. There
are no slight sketches of his but such as
suggest great travail of sight, encumbranced
by an over-thoughtful mind.

To understand Dürer you require time;
each print of the “Passions,” “The Life of
Mary,” the “Apokalypse,” should be read
like a page printed in smallest type, with
thought and some eye-strain. That of
course goes very much against the grain of
our own age; we demand large type and
short stories.

The study of his work entails considerable
self-sacrifice. Your own likes and
dislikes you have to suppress, and try to
see with eyes that belong to an age long
since gone. Do not despise the less self-sacrificing,
who refuse the study of old Art;
and distrust profoundly those others who[32]
laud it beyond measure. The green tree is
the tree to water; the dead tree—be its
black branches and sere leaves never so
picturesque—is beyond the need of your
attentions.

The Scylla and Charybdis of æsthetic
reformers is praise of the old, and poor
appraising of the new.

Now the old Italians thought Dürer a
most admirable artist, blamed what they
called the defects of his Art on the ungainliness
of his models, and felt convinced
that he might have easily been the first
among the Italians had he lived there,
instead of the first among the “Flemings.”
They were of course wrong, for it is the
individual reflex-action of Dürer’s brain
which caused his Art to be what it is; in
Italy it would still have been an individual
reflex-action, and Dürer had been in Venice
without the desired effect. Dürer might,
however, himself seem to confirm the Italians’[35]
opinion: he strayed into the barren fields
of theoretical speculations—barren because
some of his best work was done before he
had elaborated his system, barren because
speculation saps the strength of natural
perception. Dürer sought a “Canon of
Beauty,” and the history of Art has proved
over and over again that beauty canonised
is damned.

One more remark: his contemporaries
and critics praised the extraordinary technical
skill with which he could draw straight
lines without the aid of a ruler, or the
astounding legerdemain with which he reproduced
every single hair in a curl—the
“Paganini” worship which runs through
all the ages; which in itself is fruitless;
touches the fiddle-strings at best or cerebral
cords, not heart-strings.

Out of all the foregoing, out of all the
mortal and mouldering coverings we have
now to shell the real, the immortal Dürer[36]—the
Dürer whose mind was longing for
truth, whose soul was longing for harmony,
and who out of his longings fashioned his
Art, as all great men have done and will
do until the last.

On the title-page of the “Small Passion”
is a woodcut—the “Man of Sorrows.”

There, reader, you have, in my opinion,
the greatness of Dürer; he never surpassed
it. It is the consciousness of man’s impotence;
it is the saddest sight mortal eyes
can behold—that of a man who has lost
faith in himself.

If Dürer were here now I am sure he
would lay his hand upon my shoulder, and,
his deep true eyes searching mine, his soft
and human lips would say:—

You are right, my friend; this is my
best, for it is the spirit of my age that
spoke in me then.

In front of the Pantheon at Paris is a
statue called The Thinker. A seated man,[37]
unconscious of his bodily strength, for all
his consciousness is in the iron grip of
thought. He looks not up, not down—he
looks before him; and methinks, reader, I
can hear an unborn voice proclaim:

This too was once the Spirit of an Age.
Two milestones on the path of human progress;
an idle fancy if you will—no more.

Of the Man of Sorrows then we spoke:
It is a small thing, but done exceeding
well, for in the simplicity of form it embraces
a world of meaning; and whilst you
cannot spare one iota from the words of
the Passion, on account of this picture, yet
all the words of Christ’s suffering seem
alive in this plain print. Could there be a
better frontispiece?

In judging, not enjoying, a work of art,
one should first make sure that one understands
the methods of the artist; one should
next endeavour to discover his evident purpose
or aim, or “motif,” and forming one’s[38]
judgment, ask: Has the artist succeeded in
welding aim and result into one organic
whole?

Neither the “motif” nor its form are in
themselves of value, but the harmony of
both—hence we may place Dürer’s “Man of
Sorrows” by the side of Michelangelo’s
“Moses,” as of equal importance, of equal
greatness. This “Man of Sorrows” we
must praise as immortal Art, and the reason
is evident; Dürer, who designed it during
an illness, had himself suffered and knew
sorrow—felt what he visualised.

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

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

[41]

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

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

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

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

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

Assuming that a passage such as this
can be illustrated, and that without the use
of colour, is his a good illustration? Does
it reproduce the spirit and meaning of St.
John, or only the words? Look at the two-edged
sword glued to the mouth, look at
the eyes “as a flame of fire”; can you
admit more than that it pretends to be
a literal translation? But it is not even
literal; verse 17 says distinctly, “And when[42]
I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.” But
St. John is here represented as one praying.
Then what is the inference? That
Dürer was unimaginative in the higher
sense of the word; that he, like the Spirit
of the Reformation, sought salvation in the
WORD. Throughout Dürer’s Art we feel
that it was constrained, hampered by his
inordinate love of literal truthfulness; not
one of his works ever rises even to the level
of Raphael’s “Madonna della Seggiola.”
Like German philosophy, his works are so
carefully elaborated in detail that the
glorious whole is lost in more or less warring
details. His Art suffers from insubordination—all
facts are co-ordinated. He
himself knew it, and towards the end of
this life hated its complexity, caused by
the desire to represent in one picture the
successive development of the spoken or
written word; a desire which even in our
days has not completely disappeared.

[43]
Dürer therefore appeals to us of to-day
more through such conceptions as the wings
of the Paumgaertner altar-piece, or the
four Temperaments (St. Peter, St. John,
St. Mark, and St. Paul), than through the
crowded centre panels of his altar-pieces;
and the strong appeal of his engravings,
such as the “Knight of the Reformation”
(1513) or the “Melancholia” (1514), is mainly
owing to the predominant big note of the
principal figures, whilst in the beautiful St.
Jerome (“Hieronymus im Gehäus”) it is the
effect of sunshine and its concomitant feeling
of well-being—Gemüthlichkeit, to use
an untranslatable German word—which
makes us linger and dwell with growing
delight on every detail of this wonderful
print.

In spite of appearances to the contrary,
Dürer was, as I have said, unimaginative.
He needed the written word or another’s
idea as a guide; he never dreamt of an[44]
Art that could be beautiful without a
“mission”—he never “created.” Try to
realise for a moment that throughout his
work—in accordance with the conception
of his age—he mixes purely modern dress
with biblical and classical representation,
as if our Leightons, Tademas, Poynters,
were to introduce crinolines, bustles, or
“empire” gowns amongst Venuses and
Apollos. In the pathetic “Deposition from
the Cross” the Magdalen is just a “modern”
Nuremberg damsel, and the Virgin’s headwrap
is slung as the northern housewife
wore it, and not like an Oriental woman’s;
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are
clad as Nuremberg burghers, and only in
the figure of John does he make concession
to the traditional “classic” garment.
Such an anachronistic medley could only
appear logical so long as the religious
spirit and the convictions of the majority
were at one. I dare scarcely hint at, much[45]
less describe, the feelings that would be
stirred in you if a modern painter represented
the Crucifixion with Nicodemus and
the man from Arimathea in frock-coats,
Mary and the Magdalen in “walking costume,”
and a company of Horse-guards in
attendance. The abyss of over four centuries
divides us from Dürer; my suggestion
sounds blasphemous almost, yet it is a
thought based on fact and worthy of most
careful note.

Owing to a convention—then active,
now defunct—Dürer grasped the hands of
all the living, bade them stop and think.
Not one of those who beheld his work
could pass by without feeling a call of
sympathy and understanding. “Everyman”
Dürer!—that is his grandeur. To this the
artists added their appreciation; what he
did was not only truly done, but on the
testimony of all his brothers in Art well
done. So with graver, pen, and brush he[46]
gave his world the outlines of Belief. In
his pictures the illiterate saw, as by revelation,
that which they could not read,
and the literate, the literati—Erasmus, Pirkheimer,
Melanchthon amongst the most
prominent—saw the excellence of the manner
of his revelations.

I cannot think of any better way of
explaining the effect of Dürer’s Art as an
illustrator upon his time, than to beg you
to imagine the delight a short-sighted man
experiences when he is given his first pair
of spectacles. Everything remains where
it is; he has not lost his sense of orientation,
but on a sudden he sees everything
more clearly, more defined, more in detail:
and where he previously had only recognised
vague effects he begins to see their
causes. Such was the effect of Dürer’s
Art: features, arms, hands, bodies, legs,
feet, draperies, accessories, tree-trunks and
foliage, vistas, radiance and light, not sug[47]gested
but present, truly realised. When
I say Dürer was not imaginative I mean to
convey that imagination was characteristic
of the age, not of him alone, but the
materialisation, the realisation of fancy, that
is his strength.

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

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

Dürer was the great master of line—he
thinks in line. This line is firstly the
outline or contour in its everyday meaning;
secondly, it is the massed army of lines that
go to make shadow; thirdly, it is line in
its psychical aspect, as denoting direction,
aim, tendency, such as we have it in the
print of the “Melancholia.” No one before[48]
him had ever performed such wonderful
feats with “line,” not even Mantegna with
his vigorous but repellent parallels.

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

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

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

[49]

[51]
When we come to his subject pictures,
we will have to notice at once that they
have been constructed, not felt. It has been
remarked that Dürer did for northern Art,
or at least attempted, what Leonardo did
for Italian Art, viz., converted empirical Art
into a theoretical science. Whether such
conversion was not in reality a perversion,
is a question that cannot be discussed
here. We have, at any rate, in Dürer a
curious example of an artist referring to
Nature in order to discard it; the idealist
become realist in order to further his
idealism. Most of his pictures contain
statements of pictorial facts which are
in themselves most true, but taken in
conjunction with the whole picture quite
untrue. Dürer lacked the courage to trust
his sense of sight, his optic organ: beauty
with him is a thing which must be thought
out, not seen. Dürer had come into direct
contact with Italian Art, had felt himself a[52]
gentleman in Venice, and only a “parasite”
in Nuremberg. From Italy he imported
a conception of beauty which really
was quite foreign to him. Italy sowed
dissension in his mind, for he was ever
after bent on finding a formula of beauty,
which he could have dispensed with had
he remained the simple painter as we know
him in his early self-portrait of 1493. There
can be no doubt that Dürer was principally
looking towards Italy for approval, as indeed
he had little reason to cherish the
opinions of the painters in his own country,
who were so greatly his inferiors both in
mind as in their Art.

Much has been made of the fact that
painting was a “free” Art, not a “Guild”
in Nuremberg. Now carpentering was also
a “free” Art at Nuremberg, and painting
was not “free” in Italy, so the glory of
freedom is somewhat discounted; but whatever
Art was, Dürer, at any rate, was not[53]
an artist in Raphael’s, Bellini’s, or Titian’s
sense. He was pre-eminently a thinker,
a moralist, a scientist, a searcher after
absolute truth, seeking expression in Art.
Once this is realised his pictures make
wonderfully good reading.

The “Deposition,” for example, is full of
interest. The dead Christ, whose still open
lips have not long since uttered “Into Thy
hands, O Lord,” is being gently laid on
the ground, His poor pierced feet rigid, the
muscles of His legs stiff as in a cramp.
The Magdalen holds the right hand of the
beloved body, and the stricken mother of
Christ is represented in a manner almost
worthy of the classic Niobe. Wonderfully
expressive, too, are all the hands in this
picture. Dürer found never-ending interest
in the expressiveness of the hand. But if
we were to seek in his colour any beauty
other than intensity, we should be disappointed,
as we should for the matter of[54]
that in any picture painted before the advent
of Titian.

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

Dürer is no colourist, because, as we[55]
have already said, painting was the problem,
not the joy of expression—in that he is
Mantegna’s equal, and Beato Angelico’s
inferior.

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

This “Madonna with the Siskin” is a
typical Dürer. In midst of the attempted
Italian repose and “beauty” of the principal
figures, we have the vacillating,
oscillating profusion of Gothic detail. The
fair hair of the Madonna drawn tightly
round the head reappears in a gothic mass
of crimped curls spread over her right
shoulder. On her left hangs a piece of
ribbon knotted and twisted. The cushion
on which the infant Saviour sits is slashed,[56]
laced, and tassled. The Infant holds a
prosaic “schnuller” or baby-soother in His
right hand, whilst the siskin is perched
on the top of His raised forearm. Of the
wreath-bearing angels, one displays an
almost bald head, and the background is
full of unrest. Even the little label bearing
the artist’s name, by which old masters
were wont to mark their pictures, and
which in Bellini’s case, for instance, appears
plain and flatly fixed, bends up, like the
little films of gelatine, which by their movements
are thought to betray the holder’s
temperament.

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

There are a good many “lines” in the
“Siskin” Madonna which bear cancelling:[57]
not one in the Madonna of the title-page
of the “Marieenleben,” which for that reason
is a work of greater Art.

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

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

Thus we see his great pictures one
after the other: his Paumgaertner altar-piece,
his “Deposition”—both in Munich;
“The Adoration of the Magi” in the
Uffizi; the much damaged but probably
justly famed “Rosenkranz fest” in Prague,
with his own portrait and that of his
friend Pirckheimer in the background, and
Emperor Max and Pope Julius II. in the[58]
foreground; the Dresden altar-piece, or the
“Crucifixion,” with the soft body of the
crucified Christ and the weirdly fluttering
loin-cloth; the strangely grotesque “Christ
as a Boy in the Temple” in the Barberini
Palace; the “Adam and Eve”; the “Martyrdom
of the 10,000 Christians”—thus, I say,
we see them one after the other pass before
us, and are almost unmoved.

True, the Paumgaertner altar-piece has
stirred us on account of the wing-pictures,
but there is good reason for that, and we
will revert to this reason later. The “Adoration
of the Magi” seems reminiscent of
Venetian influence. Not until we reach
the year 1511 do we encounter a work
that must arrest the attention of even the
most indolent: it is the “Adoration of the
Holy Trinity,” or the All Saints altar-piece,
painted for Matthew Landauer, whom we
recognise, having seen Dürer’s drawing of
his features, in the man with the long nose[61]
on the left of the picture. This picture is
without a doubt the finest, the greatest
altar picture ever painted by any German.
It is not by any means a large picture,
measuring only 4 ft. 3 in. × 3 ft. 10-3/4 in.,
but it is so large in conception that it
might well have been designed to cover a
whole wall. Dürer has here surpassed himself;
he has for once conceived with the
exuberance of a Michelangelo, for it is
more serious than a Raphael, it is less
poetic than a Fra Angelico: but personally
I state my conviction, that if ever all the
Saints shall unite in adoration of the Trinity,
this is the true and only possibility, this is
instinct with verisimilitude, this might be
taken for “documentary evidence.” This
communion of saints was beholden by man.
If ever a man was a believer irrespective
of Church, Creed, or sect—Dürer was he.
I confess to a sense of awe in beholding
this work, akin to Fra Angelico in its[62]
sincerity, akin to Michelangelo in its
grandeur, and German wholly in the
naturalness of its mystery. With more
than photographic sharpness and minuteness
of detail does Dürer materialise the
vision: God-Father, an aged King—a Charlemagne;
God-Son, the willing sufferer; the
Holy Ghost, the dove of Sancgrael; the
Heavenly Hosts above; the Saints beside
and below—Saints that have lived and
suffered, and are now assembled in praise—for
the crowd is a living, praying, praising,
and jubilant crowd.

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

Albertus Dürer Noricus faciebat.

This picture is not a vision—it is the
statement of a dogmatic truth; as such it
is painted with all the subtlety of doctrinal
reasoning; not a romantic vision, nor a[63]
human truth, such as we find in Rembrandt’s
religious works. It is a ceremonial
picture, only the ceremony is full, not
empty; full of conviction, reverence, and
faith! Such pictures are rare amongst
Italians—in spite of all their sense of
beauty; more frequent amongst the trans-alpine
peoples, but never built in so much
harmony. Unfortunately it has suffered, and
is no longer in its pristine condition; it
were fruitless therefore to discuss the merits
of its colour.

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

The “Adams and Eves” of the Uffizi[64]
and the Prado cannot rouse my enthusiasm
either. In these pictures Dürer makes an
attempt to create something akin to Dr.
Zamenhof’s Esperanto; a universal standard
for the language of Art in the one case, of
Life in the other: and in either case this
language, laboriously and admirably constructed
but lacking in vitality, leaves the
heart untouched. Dürer’s attempts to paint
a classical subject, such as Hercules slaying
the Stymphalian birds, are unsatisfying. I
cannot see any beauty of conception in a
timid and illogical mixture of realism and
phantasy—it is not whole-hearted enough.
Even Rembrandt’s ridiculous “Rape of Ganymede”
has reason and Art on his side.
Imagination was not Dürer’s “forte”; it is
therefore with all the greater pleasure that
we turn to his portraits.

Portraits are always more satisfactory
than subject pictures, a fact which is
particularly noticeable to-day. There are[65]
scores of painters whose portrait-painting
is considerably more impressive than their
subject-painting—not because portrait-painting
is less difficult, but because it is more
difficult to detect the weaknesses of painting
in a portrait.

From the early Goethe-praised self portrait
of 1493 down to the wonderful portraits
of 1526 there are but few that are not rare
works of Art, and of the few quite a goodly
proportion may not be genuine at all.

Dürer’s ego loomed large in his consciousness,
and therefore, unlike Rembrandt
(who also painted his own likeness time and
again, though only for practice), Dürer was
really proud of his person—as to be sure he
had reason to be.

The portrait of 1493 shows us the young
Dürer, who was in all probability betrothed
to his “Agnes”; he is holding the emblem
of Fidelity—Man’s Troth as it is called
in German—which on Goethe’s authority I[66]
may explain is “Eryngo,” or anglice Sea-holly,
in his hand.

Five years later this same Dürer, having
probably returned from Venice, appears in
splendid array, a true gentleman, gloved,
and his naturally wavy hair crisply crimped,
clad in a most fantastic costume.

As his greatest portrait the Munich one,
dated 1500, has always been acclaimed.
His features here bear a striking resemblance
to the traditional face of Christ, and
no doubt the resemblance was intentional.
The nose, characterised in other pictures
by the strongly raised bridge, loses this
disfigurement in its frontal aspect. There
is an almost uncanny expression of life in
his eyes; dark ages of Byzantine belief
and Art spring to the mind, and compel
the spectator into an attitude of reverence
not wholly due to the merits of the
painting.

The comparison with Holbein’s work[67]
naturally obtrudes itself, when Dürer’s
portraits are the subject of discussion.

In the Wallace collection is a most delightful
little miniature portrait of Holbein,
by his own hand. Compare the two heads.
What a difference! Holbein the craftsman
par excellence; the man to whom drawing
came as easily as seeing comes to us.
With shrewd, cold, weighing eyes he
sizes himself up in the mirror. He, too, is
a man of knowledge; he does his work
faithfully and exceedingly well, but leaves it
there. He never moralises, draws no conclusions,
infers nothing, states merely facts—and
if the truth must be said, is the
greater craftsman.

Dürer’s mind was deeper; one might
say the springs of his talent welling upwards
had to break through strata of cross-lying
thought, reaching his hand after much
tribulation, and teaching it to set down
all he knew.

[68]
So the Paumgaertner portraits, at one
time supposed to represent Ulrich von
Hutten and Franz von Sickingen—the
Reformation knights—show a marvellous
grasp of character, wholly astonishing in
the unconventional attitude, whilst the portrait
of his aged master, Michael Wohlgemut,
overstates in its anxiety not to understate.

His portrait of Kaiser Maximilian, quiet,
dignified, is yet somewhat small in conception.

Two years later, however, he painted a
portrait now in the Prado, representing
presumably the Nuremberg patrician, Hans
Imhof the Elder.

Purely technically considered this picture
appears to be immeasurably above his
own portrait of 1500, and above any other
excepting the marvellous works of 1526.
Whoever this Hans Imhof was, Dürer has
laid bare his very soul. These later por[71]traits
show that Dürer stood on the threshold
of the modern world.

Hieronymus Holzschuer is another of
Dürer’s strikingly successful efforts to portray
both form and mind, and although
the colour of the man’s face is of a conventional
pink, yet the pale blue background,
the white hair, the pink flesh, and the
glaring eyes stamp themselves indelibly on
the mind of the beholder, much to the
detriment of the other picture in the Berlin
Gallery, Jacob Muffel. Jacob Muffel, contrary
to Jerome Holzschuer, looks a miser,
a hypocrite, and the more unpleasant, as he
does not by any means look a fool. But
Dürer’s craftsmanship here exceeds that of
the Holzschuer portrait, whom we love for
the sake of his display of white hair and
flaming eyes. The enigma to me is how a
man who had painted the three last portraits
mentioned, could have fallen to the level of the
“Madonna with the Apple” of the same year.

[72]
The finest portrait under his name is
the “Portrait of a Woman” at Berlin. This
indeed is a brilliant piece of portraiture,
absolutely modern in feeling, exceeding
Holbein; and unless my eyes, which have
not rested upon its surface for over ten
years, deceive me, it is quite unlike any
portrait painted by him before—the nearest
perhaps being the man’s portrait at Munich
of 1507. The picture is supposed to show
Venetian influence, and might therefore
belong to this epoch; but, to my thinking,
documentary evidence alone could make
this picture in its not Dürer-like mode
of seeing an undoubted work from his
hand.

Space forbids further enumeration, further
discussion of his work. As to details of his
biography the reader will find in almost
every library some reliable records of his
life, and several inexpensive books have
also appeared of recent years.

[73]
Dürer’s life was in reality uneventful. He
died suddenly on April 6, 1528, in Nuremberg,
having in all probability laid the foundations
of his illness on his celebrated
journey into Flanders in 1520-21, where he
was fêted everywhere, and right royally
received both by the civic authorities and
his own brothers of the palette.

His stay at Venice as a young man,
and this last-mentioned journey, were the
greatest adventures of his body. His mind
was ever adventurous, seeking new problems,
overcoming new difficulties. It is so tempting
to liken him to his own “Jerome in his
Study,” yet St. Jerome’s life was the very
antithesis of our Dürer. In Dürer there
was nothing of the “Faust-Natur,” as the
Germans are fond of expressing an ill-balanced,
all-probing mind. Dürer’s moral
equilibrium was upheld by his deep and
sincere religious convictions. He is firmly
convinced that God has no more to say to[74]
humanity than the Bible records. Dürer’s
difficulties end where Faust’s began.

The last years of Dürer’s life were
spent in composing books on the theory
and practice of Art.

To write an adequate “Life of Dürer”
then is impossible in so small a compass.
And if anything I said were wise, it were
surely the fact that I wanted you, reader,
in the very beginning to expect no more
than a dim light on the treasure store of
Dürer’s Thought and Dürer’s Art.

But however dim the light, I hope it
has been a true light.

And here my conscience smites me!
All along I may have appeared querulous,
seeking to divulge Dürer’s limitations rather
than his excellences.

Perhaps! There are so many misconceptions
about Dürer. He was a deep-thinking
man; he was like the churches
of the North—narrow, steep, dimly religious[75]
within, full of traceries, lacework, gargoyles,
and grotesques without.

I have read that it used to be said in
Italy: All the cities of Germany were blind,
with the exception of Nuremberg, which was
one-eyed. True! True also of Dürer and
German Art.

In 1526, two years before his death,
Dürer presented a panel to his native city,
now cut in two, robbed of its Protestant
inscription, and hanging in the Alte Pinakothek
at Munich. Dürer’s last great work!

It is as though he felt that the divine
service of his life was drawing to its close.
His life and Art I have likened to a Gothic
Cathedral; his last works were as the closed
wings of a gigantic altar-piece, before which
he leaves posterity gazing overawed.

The life-size figures of this great work
represent the four Apostles: St. John in
flaming red, with St. Peter, St. Mark in
white, with St. Paul.

[76]
Dürer’s greatest work: here for once his
mind and his hand were at one.

Menacing, colossal in conception these
figures rise, simple with the simplicity
Dürer aimed for, and at last attained;
Byzantine in their awe-inspiring grandeur.
But instead of the splendour of Byzantine
gold he places his figures upon a jet-black
ground, as if he wished to instil the
knowledge that there is no light except
that which the four Apostles reflect. He
had said as much indeed himself years ago.
These four figures, “painted with greater
care than any other,” are his artistic last
will and testament. In the letter, by
which he humbly begs acceptance of these
pictures from the Council, he quotes the
words of the four Apostles, which his
pictures illustrate, viz:—

St. Peter, in his second epistle in the
second chapter.

[77]
St. John, in the first epistle in the
fourth chapter.

St. Paul, in the second epistle to
Timothy in the third chapter.

St. Mark, in his Gospel in the twelfth
chapter.

Read them and behold: The Book and
the sword! The religion of love in Saracenic
fierceness. The menacing guardians
of the Word.

Dürer with finality excludes the faithless
from all hope. It is this finality, this
absolute faith in the Word, this firm conviction
of the finiteness of all things,
which characterise the whole of his
Art. The spirit which brooks no uncertainty
and suffers no metaphor, glues a
veritable sword to the lips of the “Son
of man.”

This finality is the cause of Dürer’s isolation.
He has no followers in the world
of creative Art. Close the doors of Dürer’s[78]
cathedral and the world rolls on, rolls by
unheeding.

After Dürer and Luther had gone—Luther,
on whose behalf Dürer uttered so touching
a prayer—Germany, the holy empire, fell
upon evil times. After the death of Maximilian
the fields of the cloth of gold and the
fields of golden harvest were turned into
rude jousting places of ruder rabble. The
hand of time was set back for centuries.

We have a shrewd suspicion that
Carlyle’s German, with his cowhorn blasts,
did not tell the universe “what o’clock it
really is.” We have a shrewd suspicion
that in the beginning of last century the
clocks in Germany had only just begun
ticking after centuries of rest.

I am straying, reader.

What was it that Dürer had inscribed on
the Apostle Panels?

“All worldly rulers in these times of danger
should beware that they receive not false Teaching for[79]
the Word of God. For God will have nothing added
to His Word nor yet taken away. Hear, therefore,
these four excellent men, Peter, John, Paul, and Mark,
their warning.”

The narrow outlook of his time speaks
here!

For words which bear addition or suffer
subtraction, can never be the words of
God.

God’s words are worlds. Our words are
stammerings, scarcely articulate.

Reader! look you, my torch burns dimly;
let us back unto the day.

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., London and Derby
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh