Albert Durer Part 4

IV

Durer continues to speak of his childhood:

And my father took special pleasure in me, because he saw that I was diligent to learn. So he sent me to school, and when I had learnt to read and write he took me away from it, and taught me the goldsmith's craft. But when I could work neatly, my liking drew me rather to painting than to goldsmith's work, so I laid it before my father; but he was not well pleased, regretting the time lost while I had been learning to be a goldsmith. Still he let it be as I wished, and in 1486 (reckoned from the birth of Christ) on S. Andrew's day (November 30) my father bound me apprentice to Michael Wolgemut, to serve him three years long.

During that time G.o.d gave me diligence, so that I learnt well, but I had much to suffer from his lads.

When I had finished my learning my father sent me off, and I stayed away four years till he called me back again. As I had gone forth in the year 1490 after Easter (Easter Sunday was April 11), so now I came back again in 1494 as it is reckoned after Whitsuntide (Whit Sunday was May 18).

Erasmus tells us that German disorders were "partly due to the natural fierceness of the race, partly to the division into so many separate States, and partly to the tendency of the people to serve as mercenaries." That there were many swaggerers and bullies about, we learn from Durer's prints. In every crowd these gentlemen in leathern tights, with other ostentatious additions to their costume, besides poniards and daggers to emphasise the brutal male, strut straddle-legged and self-a.s.sured; and of course raw lads and loutish prentices yielded them the sincerest flattery. We can well understand that the model boy, to whom "G.o.d had given diligence," with his long hair lovely as a girl's, and his consciousness of being nearly always in the right, had much to suffer from his fellow prentices. Besides, very likely, he already consorted with Willibald Pirkheimer and his friends, who were the aristocrats of the town. And though he may have been meek and gentle, there must have appeared in everything he did and was an a.s.sertion of superiority, all the more galling for its being difficult to define and as ready to blush as the innocent truth herself.

V

It is much argued as to where Durer went when his father "sent him off."

We have the direct statement of a contemporary, Christopher Scheurl, that he visited Colmar and Basle; and what is well nigh as good, for a visit to Venice. For Scheurl wrote in 1508: _Qui quum nuper in Italiam rediset, tum a Venetis, tum a Bononiensibus artificibus, me saepe interprete cansalutatus est alter Apelles._

"When he lately _returned_ to Italy, he was often greeted as a second Apelles, by the craftsmen both of Venice and Bologna (I acting as their interpreter)."

Before we accept any of these statements it is well to remember how easily quite intimate friends make mistakes as to where one has been and when; even about journeys that in one's own mind either have been or should have been turning-points in one's life. For they will attribute to the past experiences which were never ours, or forget those which we consider most unforgettable. No one who has paid attention to these facts will consider that historians prove so much or so well as they often fancy themselves to do. In the present case what is really remarkable is, that none of these sojournings of the young artist in foreign art centres seem to have produced such a change in his art as can now be traced with a.s.surance. At Colmar he saw the masterpieces and the brothers of the "admirable Martin," as he always calls Schongauer.

At Basle there is still preserved a cut wood-block representing St.

Jerome, on the back of which is an authentic signature; there is besides a series of uncut wood-blocks, the designs on which it is easy to imagine to have been produced by the travelling journeyman that Durer then seemed to the printers and painters of the towns he pa.s.sed through.

By those processes by which anything can be made of anything, much has been done to give substantiality to the implied first visit to Venice.

There are drawings which were probably made there, representing ladies resembling those in pictures by Carpaccio as to their garments, the dressing of their hair, and the type of their faces. Of course it is not impossible that such a lady or ladies may have visited Nuremberg, or been seen by the young wanderer at Basle or elsewhere. And the resemblance between a certain drawing in the Albertina and one of the carved lions in red marble now on the Piazzetta de' Leoni does not count for much, when we consider that there is nothing in the workmanship of these heads to suggest that they were done after sculptured originals;--the manes, &c., being represented by an easy penman's convention, as they might have been whether the models were living or merely imagined. Nor is there any good reason for dating the drawings of sites in the Tyrol, supposed to have been sketched on the road, rather this year than another. Lastly, the famous sentence in a letter written from Venice during Durer's authenticated visit there, in 1506, may be construed in more than one sense. The pa.s.sage is generally rather curtailed when quoted.

He (Giovanni Bellini) is very old, but is still the best painter of them all. The thing that pleased me so well eleven years ago, pleases me now no more; if I had not seen it for myself, I should never have believed any one who told me. You must know, too, that there are many better painters here than Master Jacob (Jacopo de' Barbari) is abroad; yet Anton Kolb would swear an oath that no better painter than Jacob lives.

If "the thing that pleased so well eleven years before" was a picture or pictures by Master Jacob or by Andrea Mantegna, as is usually supposed, the phrase, "If I had not seen it for myself I should never have believed any one who told me" is extremely strange. It is not usual to expect to change one's opinion of a work of art by hearsay, or to imagine others, when they have not done so, predicting with a.s.surance that we shall change a decided opinion upon the merits of a work of art; yet one of these two suppositions seems certainly to be implied. I do not say that it is impossible to conceive of either, only that such cursory reference to such conceptions is extremely strange. Again, if work by Jacopo de' Barbari is referred to, it might very well have been seen elsewhere than at Venice eleven years ago; and indeed the last sentence in the pa.s.sage might be taken to imply as much. To me at least the truth appears to be that these hints, which we may well have misunderstood, point to something which the imagination is only too delighted to entertain. It is a charming dream--the young Durer, just of age, trudging from town to town, designing wood-blocks for a printer here, questioning the brothers of the "admirable Martin" there, or again painting a sign in yet another place, such as Holbein painted for the schoolmaster at Basle; and at last arriving in Venice--Venice untouched as yet by the conflicting ideals that were even then being brought to birth anew: Mediaeval Venice, such as we see her in the pictures of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio. One painting of real importance in the work of Durer remains to us from this period: the greatest of modern critics has described it and its effect on him in a way which would make any second attempt impertinent.

I consider as invaluable Albrecht Durer's portrait of himself painted in 1493, when he was in his twenty-second year. It is a bust half life-size, showing the two hands and the forearms. Crimson cap with short narrow strings, the throat bare to below the collar bone, an embroidered shirt, the folds of the sleeves tied underneath with peach-coloured ribbons, and a blue-grey, fur-edged cloak with yellow laces, compose a dainty dress befitting a well-bred youth. In his hand he significantly carries a blue _eryngo_, called in German "Mannstreu."

He has a serious, youthful face, the mouth and chin covered with an incipient beard. The whole splendidly drawn, the composition simple, grand and harmonious; the execution perfect and in every way worthy of Durer, though the colour is very thin, and has cracked in some places.

Such is the figure which we may imagine making its way among the crowd in Gentile Bellini's Procession of the "True Cross" before St. Mark's, with eyes all wonder and lips often consciously imprisoning the German tongue, which cannot make itself understood. How comes he so finely dressed, the son of the modest Nuremberg goldsmith? Has he won the friendship of some rich burgher prince at Augsburg, or Strasburg, or Basle? Has he been enabled to travel in his suite as far as Venice? Or has he earned a large sum for painting some lord's or lady's portrait, which, if it were not lost, would now stand as the worthy compeer of this splendid portrait of the "true man" far from home; true to that home only, or true to Agnes Frey?--for some suppose the sprig of eryngo to signify that he was already betrothed to her. Or perhaps he has joined Willibald Pirkheimer at Basle or elsewhere, and they two, crossing the Alps together, have become friends for life? Will they part here ere long, the young burgher prince to proceed to the Universities of Padua and Mantua, the future great painter to trudge back over the Alps, getting a lift now and again in waggon or carriage or on pillion?

Let the man of pretentious science say it is bootless to ask such questions; those who ask them know that it is delightful; know that it is the true way to make the past live for them; guess that would historians more generally ask them, their books would be less often dry as dust.

VI

It may be that to this period belongs the meeting with Jacopo de'

Barbari to which a pa.s.sage in his MS. books (now in the British Museum) refers: and that already he began to be exercised on the subject of a canon of proportions for the human figure. In the chapter which I devote to his studies on this subject it will be seen how the determination to work the problem out by experiment, since Jacopo refused to reveal, and Vitruvius only hinted at the secret, led to his discovering something of far more value than it is probable that either could have given him. And yet the belief that there was a hidden secret probably hindered him from fully realising the importance of his discovery, or reaping such benefit from it as he otherwise might have done. How often has not the belief that those of old time knew what is ignored to-day, prevented men from taking full advantage of the conquests over ignorance that they have made themselves! Because what they know is not so much as they suppose might be or has been known, they fail to recognise the most that has yet been known--the best foundation for a new building that has yet been discovered--and search for what they possess, and fail to rival those whose superiority over themselves is a delusion of their own hearts. So early Durer may have begun this life-long labour which, though not wholly vain, was never really crowned to the degree it merited: while others living in more fertile lands reaped what they had not sown, he could only plough and scatter seed. As Raphael is supposed to have said, all that was lacking to him was knowledge of the antique.

Perhaps many will blame me for writing, unlearned, as I am; in my opinion they are not wrong; they speak truly. For I myself had rather hear and read a learned man and one famous in this art than write of it myself, being unlearned. Howbeit I can find none such who hath written aught about how to form a canon of human proportions, save one man, Jacopo (de' Barbari) by name, born at Venice and a charming painter. He showed me the figures of a man and woman, which he had drawn according to a canon of proportions; and now I would rather be shown what he meant (_i.e._, upon what principles the proportions were constructed) than behold a new kingdom. If I had it (his canon), I would put it into print in his honour, for the use of all men. Then, however, I was still young and had not heard of such things before. Howbeit I was very fond of art, so I set myself to discover how such a canon might be wrought out. For this aforesaid Jacopo, as I clearly saw, would not explain to me the principles upon which he went. Accordingly I set to work on my own idea and read Vitruvius, who writes somewhat about the human figure. Thus it was from, or out of, these two men aforesaid that I took my start, and thence, from day to day, have I followed up my search according to my own notions.

VII

When I returned home, Hans Prey treated with my father and gave me his daughter, Mistress Agnes by name, and with her he gave me two hundred florins, and we were wedded; it was on Monday before Margaret's (July 7) in the year 1494.

The general acceptance of the gouty and irascible Pirkheimer's defamation of Frau Durer as a miser and a shrew called forth a display of ingenuity on the part of Professor Thausing to prove the contrary.

And I must confess that if he has not quite done that, he seems to me to have very thoroughly discredited Pirkheimer's ungallant abuse. Sir Martin Conway bids us notice that Durer speaks of his "dear father" and his "dear mother" and even of his "dear father-in-law," but that he never couples that adjective with his wife's name. It is very dangerous to draw conclusions from such a fact, which may be merely an accident: or may, if it represents a habit of Durer's, bear precisely the opposite significance. For some men are proud to drop such outward marks of affection, in cases where they know that every day proves to every witness that they are not needed. He also considers that her portraits show her, when young, to have been "empty-headed," when older, a "frigid shrew." For my own part, if the portrait at Bremen (see opposite) represents "mein Angnes," as its resemblance to the sketch at Vienna (see illus.) convinces me it does, I cannot accept either of these conclusions arrived at by the redoubtable science of physiognomy. The Bremen portrait shows us a refined, almost an eccentric type of beauty; one can easily believe it to have been possessed by a person of difficult character, but one certainly who must have had compensating good qualities. The "mein Angnes" on the sketch may well be set against the absent "dears" in the other mentions her husband made of her, especially when we consider that he couples this adjective with the Emperor's name, "my dear Prince Max." Of her relations to him nothing is known except what Pirkheimer wrote in his rage, when he was writing things which are demonstrably false. We know, however, that she was capable, pious, and thrifty; and on several occasions, in the Netherlands, shared in the honours done to her husband. It is natural to suppose that as they were childless, there may have existed a moral equivalent to this infertility; but also, with a man such as we know Durer to have been, and a woman in every case not bad, have we not reason to expect that this moral barrenness which may have afflicted their union was in some large measure conquered by mutual effort and discipline, and bore from time to time those rarer flowers whose beauty and sweetness repay the conscious culture of the soul? It seems difficult to imagine that a man who succeeded in charming so many different acquaintances, and in remaining life-long friends with the testy and inconsiderate Pirkheimer, should have altogether failed to create a relation kindly and even beautiful with his Agnes, whose portrait we surely have at her best in the drawing at Bremen.

Considerations as to the general position of married women in those days need not prevent us of our natural desire to think as well as possible of Durer and his circ.u.mstances. We know that for a great many men the wife was not simply counted among their goods and chattels, or regarded as a kind of superior servant. We are able to take a peep at many a fireside of those days, where the relations that obtained, however different in certain outward characters, might well shame the greater number of the respectable even in the present year of grace. We know what Luther was in these respects; and have rather more than less reason to expect from the refined and gracious Durer the creation of a worthy and kindly home. Why should we expect him to have been less successful than his parents in these respects?

[Ill.u.s.tration: AGNES FREY. DuRER'S WIFE (?)--Silver-point drawing heightened with white on a dun paper. Kunsthalle, Bremen]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MEIN ANGNES"--Pen sketch of the artist's wife, in the Albertina at Vienna]

VIII

Some time after the marriage it happened that my father was so ill with dysentery that no one could stop it. And when he saw death before his eyes he gave himself willingly to it, with great patience, and he commended my mother to me, and exhorted me to live in a manner pleasing to G.o.d. He received the Holy Sacraments and pa.s.sed away Christianly (as I have described at length in another book) in the year 1502, after midnight, before S. Matthew's eve (September 20). G.o.d be gracious and merciful to him.

The only leaf of the "other book" referred to that has survived is that which I have already quoted at length.

CHAPTER II

THE WORLD IN WHICH HE LIVED

I

Now let us consider what the world was like in which this virile, accurate and persevering spirit had grown up. Over and over again, the story of the New Birth has been told; how it began in France, and met an untimely fate at the hands of English invaders, then took refuge in Italy, where it grew to be the wonder of the world; and how the corruption of the ruling cla.s.ses and of the Church, with the indignation and rebellion that this gave rise to, combined to frustrate the promise of earlier days.

When the Roman Empire gradually became an anarchy of hostile fragments, every large monastery, every small town, girded itself with walls and tended to become the germ of a new civilisation. Popes, kings, and great lords, haunted by reminiscence of the vanished empire, made spasmodic attempts to subject such centres to their rule and tax them for their maintenance. In the first times, the Church--the See of Rome--made by far the most successful attempt to get its supremacy acknowledged, and had therefore fewer occasions to resort to violence. It was more respected and more respectable than the other powers which claimed to rule and tax these immured and isolated communities dotted over Europe; but as time went on, the Church became less and less beneficent, more and more tyrannical. Meanwhile kings and emperors, having learned wisdom by experience, found themselves in a position to take advantage of the growing bad odour of the Church; and by favouring the civil communities and creating a stable hierarchy among the cla.s.s of lords and barons from which they had emerged, were at last able to face the Church, with its _proteges,_ the religious communities, on an equal footing.

The religious communities, owing to the vow of celibacy, had become more and more stagnant, while the civil communities increased in power to adapt themselves to the age. All that was virile and creative combined in the towns; all that was inadequate, sterile, useless, coagulated in the monasteries, which thus became cesspools, and ultimately took on the character of festering sores by which the civil bodies which had at first been purged into them were endangered. Luther tells us how there was a Bishop of Wurzburg who used to say when he saw a rogue, "'To the cloister with you. Thou art useless to G.o.d or man.' He meant that in the cloister were only hogs and gluttons, who did nothing but eat and drink and sleep, and were of no more profit than as many rats." And the loathing that another of these sties created in the young Erasmus, and the difficulty he had to escape from the clutches of its inmates--never feeling safe till the Pope had intervened--show us that by their wealth and by the engine of their malice, the confessional (which they had usurped from the regular clergy), they were as formidable as they were useless. It became necessary that this antiquated system of social drainage should be superseded.

In England and Germany it was swept away. In centres like Nuremberg, the desire for reformation and the horror of false doctrine were grounded in practical experience of intolerable inconveniences, not in a clear understanding of the questions at issue. Intellectually, the leaders of the Reformation had no better foundation than those they opposed: for them, as for their opponents, the question was not to be solved by an appeal to evident truths and experience, but to historical doc.u.ments and traditions, supposed, to be infallible. For a clear intelligence, there is nothing to choose between the infallibility of oec.u.menical councils or of Popes, and that of the Bible. Both have been in their time the expression of very worthy and very human sentiments; both are incapable of rational demonstration.

II

Scattered over Europe, wherever the free intelligence was waking and had rubbed her eyes, were men who desired that nuisances should be removed and reforms operated without schism or violence. To these Erasmus spoke.

His policy was tentative, and did not proceed, like that of other parties, by declaring that a perfect solution was to hand. Luther's action divided these honest, upright souls, and would-be children of light, into three unequal camps.

As a rule the downright, headstrong, and impatient became reformers. The respectful, cautious and long-suffering, such as More, Warham, and Adrian IV., clung to the Roman establishment, were martyred for it or broke their hearts over it. Erasmus and a handful of others remained true to a tentative policy, and, compared with their contemporaries, were meek and lowly in heart--became children of light. To them we now look back wistfully, and wish that they might have been, if not as numerous as the Churchmen and Beformers, at least a sufficient body to have made their influence an effective force, with the advantage of more light and more patience that was really theirs. But, alas! they only counted as the first dissolvent which set free more corrosive and detrimental acids. The exhilaration of action and battle was for others; for them the sad conviction that neither side deserved to be trusted with a victory. Yet, beyond the world whose chief interest was the Reformation, we may be sure that such men as Charles V., Michael Angelo, Rabelais, Montaigne, and all those whom they may be taken to represent, were in essential agreement with Erasmus. Luther and Machiavelli alone rejected the Papacy as such: the latter's more stringent intellectual development led him also to discard every ideal motive or agent of reform for violent means. He was ready even to regard the pa.s.sions of men like Caesar Borgia, tyrants in the fullest sense of the word, as the engines by which civilisation, learning, art, and manners, might be maintained. Whereas Luther appealed to the pa.s.sions of common honest men, the middle cla.s.ses in fact. It is easy to let either Luther or Machiavelli steal away our entire sympathy. On the one hand, no compromise, not even the slightest, seems possible with criminal ruffians such as a Julius II. and an Alexander Borgia; on the other hand, the power swollen by the tide of minor corruption, which such men ruled by might, did come into the hands of a Leo X., an Adrian IV.; and though that power was obviously tainted through and through, it might have been mastered and wielded in the cause of reform. Erasmus hoped for this. Even Julius II. protected him from the superiors of his convent.

Even Julius II. patronised Michael Angelo and Raphael and everything that had a definite character in the way of creative power or scholarship; and could appreciate at least the respect which what he patronised commanded. He could appreciate the respect commanded by the austerity and virtue of those who rebelled against him and denounced his cynical abuse of all his powers, whether natural or official. He liked to think he had enemies worth beating. Such a ruler is a sore temptation to a keen intellect. "Everything great is formative," and this Pope was colossal--a colossal bully and robber if you like--but the good he did by his patronage was real good, was practical. Michael Angelo and Raphael could work as splendidly as they desired. Erasmus was helped and encouraged. Timid honesty is often petty, does nothing, criticises and finds fault with artists and with learning, runs after them like Sancho Panza after Don Quixote, is helpless and ridiculous and horribly in the way. Leo X. was intelligent and well-meaning; wisdom herself might hope from such a man. Be the throne he is sitting on as monstrous and corrupt a contrivance as it may, yet it is there, it does give him authority; he is on it and dominates the world. It is easy to say, "But the period of the Renascence closed, its glory died away." Suppose Luther had been as subtle as he was whole-hearted, and had added to his force of character a delicacy and charm like that of St. Francis; or suppose that Erasmus instead of his schoolfellow Adrian IV. had become Pope; what a different tale there might have been to tell! Who will presume to point out the necessity by which these things were thus and not otherwise? "Regrets for what 'might have been' are proverbially idle," cries the historian from whom I have chiefly quoted. I do not recollect the proverb, unless he refers to "It is no use crying over spilt milk;" but in any case such regrets are far from being necessarily idle. "What might have been" is even generally "what ought to have been;" and no study has been or is likely to be so pregnant for us as the study of the contrast between "what was" and "what ought to have been," though such studies are inevitably mingled with regrets. We have every reason to regret that the Reformation was so hasty and ill-considered, and that the Papacy was as purblind as it was arrogant. The plant of the Roman Church machinery, which it had taken centuries to lay down, came into the hands of men who grossly ignored its function and the conditions of its working. They used its power partly for the benefit of the human race, by patronising art and scholarship; but chiefly in self-indulgence. If honest intelligence had been given control, a man so partially equipped for his task would not have been goaded into action; but only force, moral or physical, can act at a disadvantage; light and reason must have the advantage of dominant position to effect anything immediate. If they are not on the throne, all they can do is to sow seed, and bewail the present while looking forward to a better future. Now, most educated men are for tolerance, and see as Erasmus saw. We see that Savonarola and Luther were not so right as they thought themselves to be; we see that what they condemned as arrogancy and corruption is partly excusable--is in some measure a condition of efficiency in worldly spheres where one has to employ men already bad. True, the great princes and cardinals of those days not only connived at corruption and ruled by it, but often even professed it. Still in every epoch, under all circ.u.mstances, the majority of those who have governed men have more or less cynically employed means that will not bear the light of day. While these magnificoes of the Renascence do stand alone, or almost alone, by the ample generosity of their conception of the objects that power should be exerted in furtherance of; their outlook on life was more commensurate with the variety and competence of human nature than perhaps that of any ruling cla.s.s has been before or since. As Shakespeare is the amplest of poets, so were theirs the most fruitful of courts. From the great Medicis to our own Elizabeth they all partake of a certain grandiose vitality and variety of intention.

III

Greatness demands self-a.s.sertion; self-a.s.sertion is a great virtue even in a Julius II. There is a vast deal of humbug in the use we make of the word humility. We talk about Christ's humility, but whose self-a.s.sertion has ever been more unmitigated? "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light." "Learn of Me that I am meek and lowly, and ye shall find rest to your souls." No doubt it is the quality of the self a.s.serted that justifies in our eyes the a.s.sertion; humility then is not opposed to self-a.s.sertion. When Michael Angelo shows that he thinks himself the greatest artist in the world, he is not necessarily lacking in humility; nor is Luther, a.s.serting the authority of his conscience against the Pope and Emperor; nor Durer, saying to us in those little finely-dressed portraits with which he signs his pictures, "I am that I am--namely, one of the handsomest of men and the greatest artist north of the Alps." Or when Erasmus lets us see that he thinks himself the most learned man living,--if he is the most learned, so much the better that he should know this also as well as the rest. The artist and the scholar were bound to feel grat.i.tude for the corrupt but splendid Church and courts, which gave them so much both in the way of maintenance and opportunity.

It may be asked, has all the honesty and the not always evident purity of Protestantism done so much for the world as those dissolute Popes and Princes? And the artist, judging with a hasty bias perhaps, is likely to answer no.

IV