Albert Durer Part 17

Durer signed his picture with the same Latin formula as that of the _Coronation_:

"Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg did this the year from when the Virgin brought forth 1511."

VII

Of all Durer's paintings of the Madonna, there is only one which, by its superb design, deserves special notice among his masterpieces. This _Madonna with the Iris_ exists in two versions, both unfinished; one the property of Sir Frederick Cook, the other at Prague, in the Rudolphium.

This latter Mr. Campbell Dodgson considers to be a poor copy. The panel is badly cracked, and weeds and long gra.s.ses have been added, apparently with a view to masking the cracks. Judging from a photograph alone, many of these additions seem so appropriately placed and freely sketched that I feel it at least to be possibly a work by the master himself. On the other hand, Sir Frederick's picture is so sleepy and clumsy in handling, that though it is unfinished, and perhaps in part damaged by some restorer, I feel great hesitation in regarding it as Durer's handiwork.

In both cases the magnificent design is his, and that alone in either is fully representative of him. Mr. Campbell Dodgson ventures to criticise the profusion of drapery as excessive, but my feeling, I must confess, endorses Durer's in this, rather than that of his learned critic. To me this profusion, and the grandeur it gives as a ma.s.s in the design, is of the very essence of what is most peculiarly creative in Durer's imagination.

The last picture of which it is necessary to speak is that of the _Four Apostles_ or the _Four Preachers_, as they have been more appropriately called; it was perhaps the last he painted, and is in many respects the most successful. It is the only one by which the comparison with Raphael, so dear to German critics, seems at all warranted: there is certainly some kinship between Durer's St. John and St. Paul and apostolic figures in the cartoons or on the Vatican walls. The German artist's manner is less rhetorical, but his conception is hardly less grandiose; and his taste does not so closely border on over-emphasis, but neither is it so conscious or so fluent. Technically it seems to me that the chief influence is a recollection of the large canvases of Jan and Hubert Van Eyck and Hubert Van der Goes which Durer had admired in the Netherlands; these had strengthened and directed the bias of his self-culture towards simple ma.s.ses on a large scale.[74] He may very well have sought to combine what he learnt from them with hints he found in the engravings after Raphael which he obtained in Antwerp. His increasing sickness may probably account for the fact that the white mantle of St. Paul is the only portion quite finished. The a.s.sertion of the writing-master, Johann Neudorffer, who in his youth had known Durer, that the four figures are typical of the four temperaments, the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic, and the melancholic,--into which categories an amateurish psychology arbitrarily divided human characters,--is as likely to be correct as it is certain that it adds nothing to the power and beauty of the presentation. Though Durer in his work on human proportions describes the physical build of these different types, we do not know exactly what degree of precision he imagined it possible to attain in discerning them, or to what extent their names were merely convenient handles for certain types which he had chosen aesthetically. To us to-day this cla.s.sification is merely a trace of an obsolete pedantry, which it would be a vain curiosity to attempt to follow with the object of identifying its imaginary bases.

The four preachers have all the air of being striking likenesses of actual people which it is possible for work so broadly and grandly conceived to have. These panels are interesting, even more than by their actual success, as showing us what a scholar Durer was to the end; how he learned from every defeat as well as every victory, and constantly approached a conception and a rendering of human beauty which seems intimately connected with man's fullest intellectual and spiritual freedom--a conception and rendering of human beauty which Raphael himself had to learn from the Greeks and Michael Angelo. The work has suffered, it is supposed, from restorers, and also from the Munich monarch, Maximilian, who had the tremendous texts (see page 177) which Durer had inscribed beneath the two panels sawn off in order to spare the feelings of the Jesuits, who were dominant at his court, for their conception of religion did not consist with terrors to come for those who, abuse their trust as governors and directors of mankind.

Lastly, mention must be made of Durer's monochrome masterpiece, The Road to Calvary 15.27 (see illus.), in the collection of Sir Frederick Cook.

A poor copy of this work is at Dresden, a better one at Bergamo. The effect of it, and several elaborate water-colour designs of the same cla.s.s, is akin to the peculiar richness of chased metal work; glinting light hovers over crowds of little figures.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 73: The original, now in the Monastery of Strahow-Prague, is very much damaged, and in part repainted. There are copies in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna (No. 1508), and in the possession of A. W.

Miller, Esq., of Sevenoaks. It is to be regretted that the Durer Society published a photogravure of this latter work, which, though till then unknown, is far less interesting than the original, of which they only gave a reproduction in the text, an exhaustive history of its fortunes from the learned pen of Mr. Cambell Dodgson. This picture, which is so frequently referred to in the letters from Venice, contains portraits of the Emperor Maximilian and Pope Julius II., though neither of them from life, and in the background those of Durer and Pirkheimer.]

[Footnote 74: See what Melanchthon says, p. 187.]

CHAPTER II

DuRER'S PORTRAITS

I

If Durer's pictures are as a whole the least satisfactory section of his work, in his portraits he makes us abundant amends for the time he might otherwise have been reproached for wasting to obtain a vain mastery over brushes and pigment.

Unfortunately it is probable that many even of these have been lost or destroyed, while of his most interesting sitters we have nothing but drawings. He did not paint his friend, the boisterous and learned Pirkheimer; and what would we not give for a painted portrait of Erasmus, or a portrait of Kratzer, the astronomer royal, to compare with the two masterpieces by Holbein in the Louvre? Even the posthumous portrait of his Imperial patron Maximilian is less interesting than the drawings from which it was done, the eccentric sitter not having the time to spare for so sensible a monument.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST Pen drawing in dark brown ink at Erlangen (This drawing has been cut down for reproduction)]

II

However, Durer had one sitter who was perhaps the most beautiful of all the sons of men, whose features combined in an equal measure n.o.bleness of character, intellectual intensity and physical beauty; and, finding him also most patient and accessible, he painted him frequently. The two earliest portraits of himself are the drawings which show him at the ages of thirteen and nineteen(?) respectively (see ill.u.s.tration). Then, as a young man with a sprouting chin, we have the picture till recently at Leipzig of which Goethe's enthusiastic description has already been quoted (p. 62). It is probable that neither t.i.tian nor Holbein could have shown at so early an age a portrait so admirably conceived and executed. It is a masterpiece, even now that the inevitable improvements which those who lack all relish of genius rarely lack the opportunity, never the inclination, to add to a masterpiece, have confused the drawing of the eyes, and reduced the bloom and delicacy that the features traced by a master hand, even when they become an almost complete wreck, often retain; for time and fortune are not so conscientiously destructive as the imbecility of the incapable. Next we have a portrait of Durer when only five years older, in perfect preservation,--that in the Prado at Madrid. This charming picture must certainly have drawn a sonnet from the Shakespeare who wrote _Love's Labour Lost_, could he have seen it. For it presents a young dandy, the delicacy and sensitiveness of whose features seem to demand and warrant the b.u.t.terfly-like display of the white and black costume hemmed with gold, and of a cap worthy to crown those flowing honey-coloured locks.

There is a good copy of this delightful work in the Uffizi, where, in a congregation of self-painted artists, it does all but justice to the most beautiful of them all. For fineness of touch the original has never been surpa.s.sed by any hand of European or even Chinese master. Next there are the dapper little full-length portraits which Durer inserted in his chief paintings. He stands beside his friend Pirkheimer at the back of the adoring crowd in the _Feast of the Roses_, and again in the midst of the mountain slope, where on all sides of them the ten thousand saints suffer martyrdom. Durer stands alone beside an inscription in a gentle pastoral landscape beneath the vision of the Virgin's a.s.sumption seen over the heads of the Apostles, who gaze up in rapture; and again he is alone beside a broad peaceful river beneath the vision of the Holy Trinity and All Saints. I know of no parallel to these little portraits.

Rembrandt and Botticelli and many others have introduced portraits of themselves into religious pictures, but always in disguise, as a personage in the crowd or an actor in the scene. Only the master who was really most exceptional for his good looks, has had the kindness, in spite of every incongruity, to present himself before us on all important occasions, like the court beauty in whom it is charity rather than vanity to appear in public. It is expected that the very beautiful be gracious thus. Emerson tells us that two centuries ago the Town Council of Montpelier pa.s.sed a law to constrain two beautiful sisters to sit for a certain time on their balcony every other day, that all might enjoy the sight of what was most beautiful in their town. It was one of the most gracious traits of Jeanne d'Arc's character that she liked to wear beautiful clothes, because it pleased the poor people to see her thus. And Palm Sunday commemorates another historical example of such grace and truth. Durer's face had a striking resemblance to the traditional type for Jesus, adding to it just that element of individual peculiarity, the absence of which makes it ever liable to appear a little vacant and unconvincing. The perception of this would seem to have dictated the general arrangement of Durer's crowning portrait of himself, that at Munich dated 1500 (see illus.), "Before which" (Mr.

Ricketts writes in his recently published volume on the Prado) "one forgets all other portraits whatsoever, in the sense that this perfect realisation of one of the world's greatest men is equal to the occasion." The most exhaustive visual power and executive capacity meet in this picture, which would seem to have traversed the many perils to which it has been exposed without really suffering so much as their enumeration makes one expect. Thausing tells us:

The following is the story of the picture's wanderings, as told at Nuremberg. It was lent by the magistrates, after they had taken the precaution of placing a seal and strings on the back of the panel, to the painter and engraver Kugner, to copy. He, however, carefully sawed the panel in half (layer-wise) and glued to the authentic back his miserable copy, which now hangs in the Town Hall. The original he sold, and it eventually came into the possession of King Ludwig I., before Nuremberg belonged to Bavaria.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Hanfstaengl_ "I, Albert Durer of Nuremberg, painted my own portrait here in the proper colours at the age of twenty-eight"

Oil-painting. Alt Pinakothek, Munich]

He suggests that the colour was once bright and varied, and that by varnish and glazes it has been reduced to its present harmonious condition. The hair is certainly much darker than the other portraits would have led one to expect, and the almost walnut brown of the general colour scheme is unique in Durer's work. However, if some such transmogrification has been effected, it is marvellous that it should have obliterated so little of the inimitable handiwork of the master.

Thausing considered the date (1500), monogram and inscription on the back to be forgeries, and it certainly looks as if it ought to come nearer to the portrait in the _Feast of the Rose Garlands_ (1506) than to that at Madrid (1498). A genuine scalloped tablet is faintly visible under the dark glazes which cover the background; and this, no doubt, bears the original inscription and date. What may not have happened to a picture after or before it left the artist's studio? Critics are too quick to determine that such changes have been introduced by others. In this case we must remember how experimental Durer was, even with regard to his engravings on metal. He tries iron plates and etching, and finally settles on a method of commencing with etching and finishing with the burin; and this was in a medium in which he soon found himself at home. But with painting he was vastly more experimental, and never satisfied with his results, as he told Melanchthon (see p. 187). Then we must remember that this picture probably was during Durer's lifetime, if not in his own possession, at least never out of his reach; and no doubt he was aware that it was the grandest and most perfectly finished of all his portraits--therefore, as he came more and more, especially after his visit to the Netherlands, to desire and seek after simplicity, he may himself have added the dark glazes. If the original inscription contained a dedication to Pirkheimer or some other notable Nuremberger, there was every reason for the artist who stole the picture to obliterate this and add a new one: or this may have been done when it became the property of the town, for those who sold it may have wished that it should not be known that it might have been an heirloom in their family. Infinite are the possibilities, those only decide in such cases who have a personal motive for doing so; "la rage de conclure" (as Flaubert saw) is the pitfall of those who are vain of their knowledge.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OSWOLT KREL Oil portrait in the Alt Pinakothek at Munich]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _By permission_ of the "_Burlington_ Magazine" ALBERT DuRER THE ELDER, 1497 National Gallery]

III

Though fearing that it will appear but tedious, I will now attempt briefly to describe in succession the remaining master portraits which we owe to Durer, and the effect that each produces. It is by these works and not by his creative pictures that his ranks among the greatest names of painting. These might be compared with the very finest portraits by Raphael and Holbein, and the precedence would remain a question of personal predilection; since nothing reasoned, no distinguishable superiority over Durer in vision or execution could be urged for either.

Rather, if mere capacity were regarded, he must have the palm; nor did either of his compeers light upon a happier subject than was Durer's when he represented himself; nor did they achieve n.o.bler designs. In effect upon our emotions and sensations, these portraits may compete with the masterpieces of t.i.tian and Rembrandt, though the method of expression is in their case too different to render comparison possible.

Whatever in the glow of light, in the power of shadow, to envelop and enhance the features portrayed, is theirs and not his, his superiority of searching insight, united with its equivalent of unique facility in definition, seems more than to outweigh. Before he left for Venice, besides the renderings of himself already mentioned, Durer had painted his father twice, in 1494 and in 1497. The latter was the pair to and compeer of his own portrait at Madrid,; and, hitherto unknown, was lent last year by Lord Northampton to the Royal Academy, and has since been bought for the National Gallery. This beautiful work is unique even among the works of the master, and is not so much the worse for repainting as some make out. The majority of Durer's portraits stand alone. In each the Esthetic problem has been approached and solved in a strikingly different manner. This picture and its fellow, the portrait of the painter at Madrid, the _Oswolt Krel_, the portrait of a lady seen against the sea at Berlin, the _Wolgemut_, and Durer's own portrait at Munich, though seen by the same absorbing eyes, are rendered each in quite a different manner. No man has ever been better gifted for portraying a likeness than Durer; but the absence of a native comprehension of pigment made him ever restless, and it might be possible to maintain that each of these pictures presented us with a differing strategy to enforce pigment, to subserve the purposes of a draughtsman. Still this would seem to imply a greater sacrifice of ease and directness than those brilliant masterpieces can be charged with.

They none of them lack beauty of colour, of surface, or of handling, though each so unlike the other. In this portrait of his father, Durer has developed a shaken brushline, admirably adapted to suggest the wrinkled features of an old man, but in complete contrast to the rapid sweep of the caligraphic work in the _Oswolt Krel_; and it is to be noticed how in both pictures the touch seems to have been invented to facilitate the rendering of the peculiar curves and lines of the sitter's features, and further variations of it developed to express the draperies and other component parts of the picture. It is this inventiveness in handling which most distinguishes Durer from painters like Raphael and Holbein, and makes his work comparable with the masterpieces of Rembrandt and t.i.tian, in spite of the extreme opposition in aspect between their work and his.

The n.o.ble portrait of a middle-aged man, No. 557c, in the Royal Gallery at Berlin, (supposed to represent Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, Durer's first patron), gives us a master portrait, in which the technical treatment is comparable to that of the early triptych at Dresden, and which is a monument of sober power and distinction, though again very difficult to compare with the other splendid portraits by the same hand which hang beside or near it in that Gallery.

The vivid _Oswolt Krel_ at Munich shows the peculiarity of Durer's caligraphic touch better than perhaps any other of his portraits. The finish is not carried so far as in the Madrid portrait of himself, where even the texture of the gloves has been softened by touches of the thumb, and the absence of these extra refinements leaves it the most spontaneous and vigorously bold of all Durer's paintings. The concentrated energy of the sitter's features demanded such a treatment; he seems to burn with the inconsiderate atheism of a Marlowe. Young, and less surprised than indignant to be alone awake in a sleepy and bigoted world, he seems convinced of a mission to chastise, _even_ to scandalise his easy-going neighbours. Let us hope he met with better luck than the Marlowes, Sh.e.l.leys, and Rimbauds, whose tragedies we have read; for one can but regret, as one meets his glance so much fiercer than need be, that he is not known to history.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Oil Portrait of a Lady seen against the Sea In the Berlin Gallery]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Oil portrait, dated 1506, at Hampton Court]

The fine portrait of Hans Tucher, 1499, in the Grand Ducal Museum at Weimar should, judging from a photograph alone, be mentioned here. It has obvious affinities with the _Oswolt Krel_, but the caligraphic method is again modified in harmony with the character of the sitter's features. The companion piece, representing Felicitas Tucherin, would seem at some period to have been restored to the insignificance and obscurity that belonged to the sitter before Durer painted her.

IV

The portraits which Durer painted at Venice, or soon after his return, betray the influence of other masterpieces on his own. Mr. Ricketts has pointed to that of Antonello da Messina in the portraits of young men at Vienna (1505) and at Hampton Court (1506). The former of these has an allegorical sketch of Avarice, painted on the back in a thick impasto, such as seems almost a presage of after developments of the Venetian school, and may possibly show the influence of some early experiment by Giorgione which Durer wished to show that he could imitate if he liked.

The latter represents a personage who appears on the left of the _Feast of Rose Wreaths_ in exactly the same cap and with the same fastening to his jerkin, crossing his white shirt (see ill.u.s.tration opposite).

Not improbably Durer may have painted separate portraits of nearly all the members of the German Guild at Venice who appear in the _Rose Garlands_. In any case much of his work during his stay there has disappeared. It was here that he painted that beautiful head of a woman (No. 557 G in the Berlin Gallery) with soft, almost Leonardesque shadows, seen against the luminous hazy sea and sky, which remains absolutely unique in method and effect among his works, and makes one ask oneself unanswerable questions as to what might not have been the result if he could but have brought himself to accept the offered citizenship and salary, and stop on at Venice. A Durer, not only secluded from Luther and his troubling denunciations, but living to see t.i.tian and Giorgione's early masterpieces, perhaps forming friendships with them, and later visiting Rome, standing in the Sistine Chapel, seated in the Stanze between the School of Athens and the Disputa! I at least cannot console myself for these missed opportunities, as so many of his critics and biographers have done, by saying that doubtless had he stayed he would have been spoiled like those second-cla.s.s German and Dutch painters, for whom the siren art of Italy proved a baneful influence. One could almost weep to think of what has been probably lost to the world because Durer could not bring himself to stay on at Venice.

It _was_ here he painted the tiny panel representing the head of a girl in gay apparel dated 1507 (in the Berlin Gallery), that makes one think, even more than do Holbein's _Venus_ and _Lais_ at Basle, of the triumphs that were reserved for Italians in the treatment of similar subjects.

After his return the influence of Venetian methods gradually waned, till we find in the masterly and refined portrait of _Wolgemut_ (1516) (see ill.u.s.tration); something of a return to the caligraphic method so noticeable in the _Oswolt Krel_. About the same time Durer recommenced painting in tempera in a manner resembling the early Dresden _Madonna_ and the _Hercules_, as we see by the rather unpleasant heads of Apostles in the Uffizi and the tine one of an old man in a vermilion cap in the Louvre, &c. &c.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Bruckmann_--"Albrecht Durer took this likeness of his master, Michael Wolgemut, in the year 1516, and he was 82 years of age, and lived to the year 1519, and then departed on Saint Andrew's Day, very early before sunrise"--Oil-painting. Alt Pinakothek, Munich]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HANS IMHOF (?)--From the painting in the Royal Gallery at Madrid--(By permission _of Messrs. Braun, Clement & Co., Dornach (Alsace), Paris and New York_)]

V

On his arrival at Antwerp in 1521 Durer commenced the third and last group of master-portraits; foremost is the superb head and bust at Madrid, supposed to represent Hans Imhof, a patrician of Durer's native town and his banker while at Antwerp; of the same date are the triumphant renderings of the grave and youthful Bernard van Orley (at Dresden) and that of a middle-aged man--lost for the National Gallery, and now in the possession of Mrs. Gardner, of Boston. All three were probably painted at Antwerp.