Albert Durer Part 16

Further, there is nothing foul, nothing disgraceful in his work. The thoughts of his most pure mind shunned all such things. Artist worthy of success! How like, too, are his portraits! How unerring! How true!

All these perfections he attained by reducing mere practice to art and method, in a way new at least to German painters. With Albrecht all was ready, certain, and at hand, because he had brought painting into the fixed track of rule and recalled it to scientific principles; without which, as Cicero said, though some things may be well done by help of nature, yet they cannot always be ready to hand, because they are done by chance. He first worked his principles out for his own use; afterwards with his generous and open nature he attempted to explain them in books, written to the ill.u.s.trious and most learned Wilibald Pirkheimer. And he dedicated them to him in a most elegant letter which we have not translated, because we felt it to be beyond our power to render it into Latin without, so to speak, disfiguring its natural countenance. But before he could complete and publish the books, as he had hoped, he was carried off by death--a death, calm indeed and enviable, but in our view premature. If there was anything at all in that man which could seem like a fault, it was his excessive industry, which often made unfair demands upon him.

Death, as we have said, removed him from the publication of the work which he had begun, but his friends completed the task from his own ma.n.u.script. About this, in the next place, and about our own version, we shall say a few words. The work, being founded on a sort of geometrical system, is unpolished and devoid of literary style; so it seems rather rugged. But that is easily forgiven in consideration of the excellence of the matter. He requested me himself, only a few days before his death, to translate it into Latin while he should correct it; and I willingly turned my attention and studies to the work. But death, which takes everything, took from him his power of supervision and correction.

His friends subsequently, after publishing the work, prevailed on me, by their claims rather than their requests, to undertake the Latin translation, and to complete after his death the task Durer had laid upon me in his life.

If I find that my industry and devotion in this matter meet with my readers' approval, I shall be encouraged to translate into Latin the rest of Albrecht's treatise on painting, a work at once more finished and more laborious than the present. Moreover, his writings on other subjects will also be looked for, his Geometries and Tichismatics, in which he explained the fortification of towns according to the system of the present day. These, however, appear to be all the subjects on which he wrote books. As to the promise, which I hear certain persons are making in conversation or in writing, to publish a book by Durer on the symmetry of the parts of the horse, I cannot but wonder from what source they will obtain after his death what he never completed during his life. Although I am well aware that Albrecht had begun to investigate the law of truth in this matter too, and had made a certain number of measurements, I also know that he lost all he had done through the treachery of certain persons, by whose means it came about that the author's notes were stolen, so that he never cared to begin the work afresh. He had a suspicion, or rather a certainty, as to the source whence came the drones who had invaded his store; but the great man preferred to hide his knowledge, to his own loss and pain, rather than to lose sight of generosity and kindness in the pursuit of his enemies.

We shall not, therefore, suffer anything that may appear to be attributed to Albrecht's authorship, unworthy as it must evidently be of so great an artist.

A few years ago some tracts also appeared in German, containing rules, in general faulty and inappropriate, about the same matter. On these I do not care now to waste words, though the author, unless I am much mistaken, has not once repented of his publication. But these rules above-mentioned, which are easily proved to be Albrecht's, not only because he prepared them himself for publication, but also because of their own excellence, you will, I think, obtain considerably better here than from other sources. Not that they are more finished in point of erudition and learning in the present book than elsewhere, but because those who interpret them in the author's own workshop, among the expansions and corrections of his autograph ma.n.u.scripts and the variations of his different copies, stand in the light about many points, which must of necessity seem obscure to others, however learned they may be.

This will be seen in the case of the book on Geometry, which a learned man has in hand and will shortly publish in a more elaborate form, and with more explanation of certain points than it possesses at present.

For it will be increased by no less than twenty-six [Greek: schemata]

(figures) and countless corrections or improvements of earlier editions.

The author himself on rereading had thus improved and amplified what had already been issued. As though he foresaw that he would publish no more, he had directed his future editors as to what was to be done about the letterpress and figures; and we shall take care that it is published at the earliest possible date in the German language, in which the author wrote it. It is only to be expected that this will be welcome to the public, who will thus return thanks for the author's burning desire to do something by his discoveries for the public good, and for our own labour and eagerness in publishing to all nations what appears to be written only for one.

Though these testimonies may often seem either trifling, or obscured by the pedantic affectation of the writers, they, like the signatures of well-respected men, endorse the impression produced by Durer's works and writings. As we study the character of Durer's creative gift in relation to his works, several of the phrases used by Erasmus, Camerarius, and Melanchthon should take added significance, being probably remembered from conversations with the great artist himself.[72] Durer, like Luther, was depressed and distressed at the course the Reformation had run; but, like Erasmus, though regretting and disparaging the present, he looked forward to the future, and knew "that he would be surpa.s.sed,"

and had no morbid inclination to see the end and final failure of human effort in his own exhaustion.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 70: B. 106, published in 1513. The block is in the Court Library at Vienna. Thawing says it was designed by Burgkmair or Springinklee.]

[Footnote 71: "_Caput argutum_". The phrase is from Virgil's description of the thorough-bred horse (_Georg. iii_). The above pa.s.sage is introduced (with modifications) into Melchior Adam's _Vitae Germ.

Philos._ (p.66). where this sentence runs: "The deep-thinking, serene-souled artist was seen unmistakably in his _arched_ and _lofty_ brow and in the fiery glance of his eye."]

[Footnote 72: In the foregoing quotations the sentences which seem to me most reminiscent of Durer's ideas are printed in italics.]

PART III

DuRER AS A CREATOR

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER I

DuRER'S PICTURES

I

Durer's paintings have suffered more by the malignity of fortune than any of his other works. Several have disappeared entirely, and several are but wrecks of what they once were. Others are, as he tells us, "ordinary pictures," of which "I will in a year paint a pile which no one would believe it possible for one man to do in the time," and are perhaps more the work of a.s.sistants than of the master. Others, again, have since been repainted, more or less disastrously. Yet enough remain to show us that Durer was not a painter born, in the sense that t.i.tian and Correggio or Rembrandt and Rubens are; nay, not even in the sense that a Jan Van Eyck or a Mantegna is. Mantegna is certainly the painter with whom Durer has most affinity, and whose method of employing pigment is least removed from his; but Mantegna is a born colourist--a man whose eye for colour is like a musician's ear for melody--while Durer is at best with difficulty able to avoid glaring discords, and, if we are to judge by the "ordinary pictures," did not avoid them. Again, Mantegna is not so dependent on line as Durer--nearly the whole of whose surface is produced by hatching with the brush point. These facts may, perhaps, account for the large portion of Durer's time devoted to engraving. As an engraver he early found a style for himself, which he continued to develop to the end of his life. As a painter he was for ever experimenting, influenced now by Jacopo de' Barbari, again by Bellini and the pictures he saw at Venice, and yet again by those he saw in the Netherlands. As Velasquez, after each of his journeys to Italy, returns to attempt a mythological picture in the grand style, so Durer turns to painting after his return from Venice or from the Netherlands; and his pictures divide themselves into three groups: those painted after or during his _Wanderjahre_ and before he went to Venice in 1505, those painted there and during the next five years after his return, and those painted in the Netherlands or commenced immediately on his return thence.

II

The mediums of oil and tempera lend themselves to the production of broad-coloured surfaces that merge imperceptibly into one another. There are men the fundamental unit of whose picture language is a blot or shape; as children or as savages, they would find these most capable of expressing what they saw. There are others for whom the scratch or line is the fundamental unit, for whom every object is most naturally expressed by an outline. There are, of course, men who present us with every possible blend of these two fundamental forms of picture language.

The mediums of oils and tempera are especially adapted to the requirements of those who see things rather as a diaper of shapes than as a map of lines; while for these last the point of pen, burin, or etching-needle offers the most congenial implement. Durer was very greatly more inclined to express objects by a map of lines than as a diaper of coloured shapes; and for this reason I say that he was not a painter born. If this be true, as a painter he must have been at a disadvantage. In this preponderance of the draughtsman qualities he resembles many artists of the Florentine school, as also in his theoretic pre-occupation with perspective, proportion, architecture, and technical methods. We are impressed by a coldness of approach, an austerity, a dignity not altogether justified by the occasion, but as it were carried over from some precedent hour of spiritual elevation; the prophet's demeanour in between the days of visitation, a little too consciously careful not to compromise the divinity which informs him no longer. This tendency to fall back on manner greatly acquired indeed, but no longer consonant with the actual mood, which is really too vacant of import to parade such importance, is often a fault of natures whose native means of expression is the thin line, the geometer's precision, the architect's foresight in measurement. And by allowing for it I think we can explain the contradiction apparent between the critics' continual insistence on what they call Durer's great thoughts, and the sparsity of intellectual creativeness which strikes one in turning over his engravings, so many are there of which either the occasion or the conception are altogether trivial when compared with the grandiose aspect of the composition or the impeccable mechanical performance.

Durer's literary remains sufficiently prove his mind to have been constantly exercised upon and around great thoughts, and their influence may be felt in the austerity and intensity of his n.o.blest portraits and other creations. But "great thoughts" in respect of works of art either means the communication of a profound emotion by the creation of a suitable arabesque for a deeply significant subject, as in the flowing ma.s.ses of Michael Angelo's _Creation of Man_, or it means the pictorial enhancing of the telling incidents of a dramatic situation such as we find it in Rembrandt's treatment of the Crucifixion, Deposition, or Entombment. Now it seems to me the paucity of successes on these lines in one who nevertheless occasionally entirely succeeds, is what is most striking in Durer. Perhaps when dealing with the graphic arts one should rather speak of great character than great thoughts; yet Durer, while constantly impressing us as a great character, seems to be one who was all too rarely wholly himself. The abundant felicity in expression of Rembrandt or Shakespeare is altogether wanting. The imperial imposition of mood which Michael Angelo affects is perhaps never quite certainly his, even in the _Melancholy_. Yet we feel that not only has he a capacity of the same order as those men, but that he is spiritually akin to them, despite his coldness, despite his ostentation.

But not only is Durer praised for "great thoughts," but he is praised for realism, and sometimes accused of having delighted in ugliness; or, as it is more cautiously expressed, of having preferred truth to grace.

This is a point which I consider may better be discussed in respect to his drawings than his pictures, which nearly always have some obvious conventional or traditional character, so that the word realism cannot be applied to them. Even in his portraits his signature or an inscription is often added in such a manner as insists that this is a painting, a panel;--not a view through a window, or an attempt to deceive the eye with a make-believe reality.

III

The altar-piece, consisting of a centre, the Virgin Mary adoring her baby son in the carpenter's shop at Nazareth, and two wings, St. Anthony and St. Sebastian, though the earliest of Durer's pictures which has survived, is perhaps the most beautiful of them all, at least as far as the two wings are concerned. The centre has been considerably damaged by repainting, and was probably, owing to the greater complication of motives in it, never quite so successful. Whether at Venice or elsewhere, it would seem almost necessary that the young painter had seen and been impressed by pictures by Gentile Bellini and Andrea Mantegna, both of whom have painted in the same thin tempera on fine canvas, obtaining similar beauties of colour and surface. It is hardly possible to imagine one who had seen none but German or Flemish pictures painting the St. Sebastian. The treatment of the still life in the foreground is in itself almost a proof of this. Perhaps this thin, flat tempera treatment was that most suited to Durer's native bias, and we should regret his having been tempted to overcome the more brilliant and exacting medium of oils. In any case he more than once reverted to it in portraits and studies, while the majority of the pictures painted before he went to Venice in 1506 have more or less kinship with it. The supposed portrait of Frederic the Wise is another masterpiece in this kind, and the _Hercules slaying the birds of the Stymphalian Lake_ in the Germanic Museum, Nuremberg, 1500, was probably another. For though now considerably damaged by restorations and dirt, it suggests far greater pleasures than it actually imparts. The contrast between

"The sea-worn face sad as mortality, Divine with yearning after fellowship,"

and the blond richly curling hair blown back from it, is extremely fine and entirely suited to the treatment; as is also the similar contrast between the richly inlaid bow, shield, and arrows, and the broad and flowing modulation of the energetic limbs and back.

The Paumgartner altar-piece, 1499, stands out from the "ordinary pictures" belonging to this early period. It consists of a charming and gay Nativity in the centre, and two knights in armour on the wings, probably portraits of the donors, Stephan and Lucas Paumgartner, figuring as warlike saints. Stephan, a personal friend of Durer's, figured again as St. George in the _Trinity and All Saints_ picture painted in 1511. There were originally two panels with female saints beyond these again, but no trace of them remains. Now that the landscape backgrounds have been removed from the side panels, there is no reason to suppose that any one but Durer had a hand in these works. But in writing to h.e.l.ler, he tells him that it was unheard of to put so much work into an altar-piece as he was then putting into his _Coronation of the Virgin_, and we may feel certain that Durer regarded this picture as in the altar-piece category. The two knights are represented against black grounds, and their silhouettes form a very fine arabesque, which the streamers of their lances, artificially arranged, complete and emphasise. This black ground points probably to the influence of Jacopo de' Barbari, whom Durer had met and been mystified by. (See p. 63.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. GEORGE AND ST. EUSTACE Side panels in oils of the Paumgartner Altar-piece in the Alt Pinakothek, Munich]

No doubt there was much in such a background that appealed to the draughtsman in Durer. It insisted on the outline which had probably been the starting-point of his conception. Nothing could be less painter-like, or make the modelling of figures more difficult, as Durer, perhaps, realised when he later on painted the _Adam and Eve_ at Madrid.

These two warriors are, however, most successful and imposing, and immeasurably enhanced now that the spurious backgrounds, artfully concocted out of Durer's own prints by an ingenious improver of his betters, have been removed. This person had also tinkered the centre picture, painting out two heraldic groups of donors, far smaller in scale than the actual personages of the scene, but very useful in the composition, as giving a more ample base to the ma.s.ses of broken and fretted quality; useful also now as an additional proof of how free from the fetters of an impertinent logic of realism Durer ever was. These little kneeling donors and their coats of arms emphasise the surface, and are delightful in their navety, while they serve to render the gay, almost gaudy panel more homely, and give it a place and a function in the world. For they help us to realise that it answered a demand, and was not the uncalled-for and slightly frigid excursion of the aesthetic imagination which it must otherwise appear. In the same way the brilliant _Adoration of the Magi_ (dated 1504) in the Uffizi, also somewhat gaudy and frigid, could we but see it where it originally hung in Luther's church at Wittenberg, might invest itself with some charm that one vainly seeks in it now. The failure in emotion might seem more natural if we saw the wise Elector discussing his new purchase; we might have felt what Durer meant when a year later he wrote from Venice: "I am a gentleman here and only a hanger-on at home." The expectation and prophecy of his success in those who surround a painter,--even if it be chiefly expressed by bitter rivalry, or the craft by which one greedy purchaser tries to over-reach another, even if he has to be careful not to eat at some tables for fear of being poisoned by a host whose ambition his present performance may have dashed--even expressed in this truly Venetian manner, the expectation and prophecy of his success in those about him make it easier for a painter to soar, and may touch his work with an indefinable glow that the approval of honest and astute electors or solid burghers may have been utterly powerless to impart.

IV

At Venice, perhaps the occasion for his journey thither, Durer undertook a more important work than any he had yet attempted. _The Feast of the Rose Garlands_ was painted for the high altar of the church of San Bartolommeo, belonging to the German Merchants' Exchange, and close to their Pondaco.[73] In it we find a very considerable influence of Italy in general, and Giovanni Bellini in particular; it is a splendid and pompous parade piece, and probably the portraits of the German merchants which it contained were the part of the work which was most successful, as it was certainly that most congenial to Durer's genius. The _Christ among the Doctors_, dated 1506, and now in the Barberini Palace at Rome, might seem to have been painted chiefly to justify Giovanni Bellini's astonishment at the calligraphical painting of hair. It is one of those pictures of which a literary description would please more than the work itself. Though the contrast between the sweet childish face and those of the old worldly scribes is well conceived, it is in reality so violent as to be grotesque, and the play of hands produces the effect of a diagram explanatory of a conjuring trick, or a deaf and dumb alphabet, instead of conveying the inner sense of the scene represented after Rossetti's fashion, who so often succeeded in making hands speak.

Another work, which dates from Venice, is the little _Crucifixion_ (at Dresden.) Perhaps the landscape and suffering body are just sufficiently touched with acute emotion to make the arabesque of the two floating ends of the loin-cloth appear a little out of place; for in spite of the delicacy and all but tenderness which Durer has for once attained to in the workmanship, one's satisfaction seems let and hindered.

V

Shortly after his return from Venice, Durer completed two life-size panels representing Adam and Eve; there are drawings for them dated during his stay at Venice, but as a work of art they are far less interesting than the engraving of the same subject completed three years earlier. The treatment, even the conception, has been inadequately influenced by the proposed scale of the work. Probably they were like the earlier Hercules, done to please the artist himself rather than some patron; they are an effort to prove that he could do something which was after all too hard for him. Not only had he set himself the problem which the Greeks and Michael Angelo, and Raphael with their aid alone, had solved, of finding proportions suitable to express harmoniously the infinite capacity for complex motion combined with that constancy of intention which gives dignity to men and women alone among animals; but the technical problems involved in representing life-size nude figures against a plain black ground were indeed an unconscious confession that Durer did not understand paint. There is a copy of these panels, recently attributed to Baldung Grien, in the Pitti. Animals and birds have been added from drawings made by Durer, but the picture is still farther from success, though Grien may not improbably have executed it with Durer at his elbow. Durer made one more attempt at representing a life-size nude, the _Lucretia_, finished in 1518, at a period when his powers seem to have been clouded, for the few pictures which belong to it are all inferior. However, studies for the figure exist dated 1508, so we may suppose it was a project brought back from Venice. His ill-success with this subject may remind us of Shakespeare's long pedantic exercise in rhyme on the same theme. The pictorial motive of Durer's work is beautiful and worthy of a Greek: indeed it is identical with that of Watts' _Psyche_, of which the version in private hands is very superior to that in the Tate Gallery. The position of the bed, the idea of the draperies all are parallel. No doubt the lonely feather shed from Love's wing at which Psyche gazes is both more of a poet's and of a painter's invention than the cold steel of Lucretia's dagger. And in spite of his wide knowledge of Greek and Italian art, our English master could scarcely have produced a work of such cla.s.sic dignity with the more violent motive of the dagger, which seems to call for "The torch that flames with many a lurid flake," or at least the torpid glow of smouldering embers, to light it in such a manner as would make a really pictorial treatment possible. No doubt Durer has been misled by a too tyrannous notion as to what ought to be the physical build of so chaste a matron, and in his anxiety to make chast.i.ty self-evident, has forgotten to explain the need for it by such a degree of attractiveness as might tempt a tyrant to be dangerous. Just as Shakespeare, in attempting to exhaust every possible motive which the situation comports, has forgotten that for a character that can move us a selection is needed. Another elaborate piece of frigid invention is the _Ma.s.sacre of the Ten Thousand Saints in the reign of Sapor II. of Persia_, in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna, dated 1508. However, in this case no doubt Durer could plead that the subject was not of his own choice, for he was commissioned by the Elector, Frederic the Wise, whose wisdom probably did not extend to a knowledge of what subjects lend themselves to pictorial treatment. Still, making every allowance for these facts, it cannot be admitted that Durer did the best possible with his subject. Probably it did not move him, and neither does he us. Peter Breughel and Albrecht Altdorfer would certainly have done far better so far as the conception of the picture is concerned, though neither of them had so much skill to waste on its realisation. Nevertheless, this tour _de force_ is the picture of Durer's most pleasing in surface and colour, with the exception of the Wings _of the Dresden Altar-piece_. It contains beautiful groups and figures, and is extremely well executed; so that it may amuse and delight the eye for a long time while the significance of the subject is forgotten.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MARTYRDOM OF TEN THOUSAND SAINTS UNDER SAPOR II. OF PERSIA--Oil picture. "Iste faciebat anno domini 1508 Albertus Durer Alema.n.u.s"]

VI

We now turn to the third and fourth of the half-dozen pictures of Durer, which stand out from all the rest by their elaboration and importance.

The _Coronation of the Virgin (see_ p. 97), painted as the centre panel of the altar-piece commissioned by Jacob h.e.l.ler at Frankfort, was unfortunately burnt with the palace at Munich on the night of April 9, 1674; the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria having forced or cajoled the Dominicans, to whose church h.e.l.ler had left it, to sell it to him. It is now represented by a copy made by Paul Juvenal in its original position, where the almost ruined portraits of h.e.l.ler and his wife are supposed to have been partly Durer's, though the other panels are obviously the work of a.s.sistants. This work exists for us in a series of magnificent brush drawings in black and white line on grey paper, rather than in the copy, and we can in a measure imagine its appearance by the perfectly- preserved _Trinity and All Saints_ commenced immediately after it for Matthew Landauer, and now in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna.

Nothing can surpa.s.s this last picture in elaboration and finish; the colour, if not beautiful, is rich and luminous; and though it is separate faces and draperies which chiefly delight the eye, the composition of the whole is an adequate adaptation of the traditional treatment for such themes which had been handed down through the middle ages. It invites comparison rather with the similar subjects painted by Fra Angelico than with the _Disputa_ of Raphael, to which German critics compare it; however, it possesses as little of Angelico's sweet blissfulness as the Dominican painter possessed of Durer's accuracy of hand and searching intensity of visual realisation. Both painters are interested in individuals, and, representing crowds of faces, make every one a portrait; both evince a dramatic sense of propriety in gesture, both revel in bright, clear colours, especially azure; but as the light in Durer's masterpiece has a rosy hotness, which ill bears comparison with the virginal pearliness of Angelico's heaven, so the costumes and the figures of the Florentine are doll-like, when compared with the unmistakable quality of the stuffs in which the fully-resurrected bodies of Durer's saints rumple and rustle. The wings of his angels are at least those of birds, though coloured to fancy, while Angelico's are of pasteboard tinsel and paint. But in spite of the comparative genuineness of his upholstery, as a vision of heaven there can be no hesitation in preferring that of the Florentine.

In a frame designed by Durer and carved under his supervision, this monument to thoroughness and skill was ensconced in a little chapel dedicated to All Saints, which in style approaches our Tudor buildings.

There the frame remained till lately with a poor copy of the picture and an inscription in old German to this effect: ('Matthew Landauer completed the dedication of this chapel of the twelve brethren, together with the foundation attached to it, and this picture, in the year 1511 after the birth of Christ,')