Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

painted the Portrait of a Man now in New York- and again with

Durer making woodcuts in Nuremberg. In 1503 he settled at

Seligenstadt, and there finally he developed his own mature and

characteristic style- the graphic rendering of Biblical scenes with

passionate feeling and tragic power. Archbishop Albrecht made him

court painter at Mainz (1509), but dismissed him when Grunewald

persisted in applauding Luther (1526). He married unfortunately, and

withdrew into a melancholy solitude that may have lent some dark

shades to the chiaroscuro of his art.

His masterpiece- probably the greatest German painting- is the

complex polyptych made for a monastery at Isen in 1513. The central

panel shows the Virgin and her Child in an almost Turneresque glow

of golden color against a background of distant seas. But the

outstanding and unforgettable panel is a gruesome Crucifixion:

Christ in His final agony, the body covered with wounds and bloody

sweat, the limbs distorted with pain; Mary swooning in the arms of St.

John; Magdalen hysterical with angry and incredulous grief. Still

other panels could be major paintings by themselves: a concert of

angels in a Gothic architectural setting of brilliant reds and browns;

a macabre Temptation of St. Anthony; the same saint and a fellow

anchorite in a weird forest of decaying trees; and a Boschian

nightmare apparently symbolizing Anthony's dreams. In the predominance

of color, light, and feeling over line, form, and representation

this almost theatrical outburst of pictorial power is the

culmination of German Gothic painting on the eve of the triumph of

line and logic in a Durer who, rooted in the mysticism of medieval

Germany, stretched out hands of longing to the humanism and art of the

Italian Renaissance.

V. ALBRECHT DURER: 1471-1528

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No other nation has so unanimously chosen one of its sons as its

representative in art as Germany- Protestant and Catholic, North and

South- has chosen Durer. On April 6, 1928, the four-hundredth

anniversary of his death, the Reichstag in Berlin and the city council

in Nuremberg put aside politics and dogmas to honor the artist whom

Germany loves best. Meanwhile connoisseurs vainly offered $1,000,000

for a painting- The Feast of the Rose Garlands - for which Durer

himself received 110 guilders ($2,750?). `061547

His Hungarian father was a goldsmith settled in Nuremberg.

Albrecht was the third of eighteen children, most of whom died in

infancy. In the parental studio the boy learned to draw with pencil,

charcoal, and pen, and to engrave with the burin; he taught himself to

observe microscopically, and to represent objects and subjects in

indefatigable detail, so that in some of his portraits almost every

hair seems to have received its individual stroke of the brush. The

father had hoped that his son would be another goldsmith, but he

yielded to the youth's desire to widen his art, and sent him as an

apprentice to Wolgemut (1486). Albrecht developed slowly; his genius

lay in ambition, perseverance, patience. "God lent me industry," he

said, "so that I learned well; but I had to put up with a great deal

of annoyance from his assistants." `061548 Having little opportunity

to study the nude, he frequented the public baths, and drew such

Apollos as he could find there. He himself was something of an

Apollo in those years. A friend described him fondly:

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A body remarkable in build and stature, and not unworthy of the

noble mind it contained... face intelligent, eyes flashing... a long

neck, broad chest, narrow waist, powerful thighs, steady legs. As to

his hands, you would have said that you had never seen anything more

elegant. And of his speech the sweetness was so great that one

wished it would never end. `061549

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Attracted by Schongauer's engravings, he made his way to Colmar

(1492), only to find that that master was dead. He learned what he

could from Schongauer's brothers, then passed on to Basel, where he

absorbed from Grunewald the secret of intensely religious art. He was

already a skilled draftsman; an edition of St. Jerome's letters,

printed at Basel in 1492, bore on its title page a portrait of the

saint by Durer; and this was so acclaimed that several publishers

competed for his future work. However, his father urged him to come

home and marry; a wife had been chosen for him in his absence. He

returned to Nuremberg, and settled down to wedded life with Agnes

Frey (1494).

A year earlier he had painted himself as a youth garbed and

coiffured almost like a woman, proud yet diffident, distrusting and

defying the world. In 1498, still vain of his features, and now also

of his beard, he painted his portrait as a young patrician richly

dressed, with tasseled cap and long brown curls; this is one of the

great self-portraits of all time. In 1500 he pictured himself again,

more simply costumed, the face elongated between masses of hair

falling to the shoulders, the penetrating eyes mystically intent;

Durer seems here to have deliberately presented himself in an imagined

likeness of Christ, not in impious bravado, but presumably in his

oft-voiced opinion that a great artist is an inspired mouthpiece of

God. `061550 Vanity was the prop of his industry. He not only

multiplied self-portraits, but found room for himself in many of his

pictures. At times he could be modest, and sadly conscious of his

limitations. "When we are praised," he told Pirkheimer, "we turn up

our noses and believe it all; but perhaps a master mocker is

laughing at us behind our backs." `061551 For the rest he was

good-natured, pious, loyal, generous, and as happy as circumstances

would permit.

He could not have been infatuated with his wife, for he set out

for Italy shortly after his marriage, leaving her behind. He had heard

of what he called the "regrowth" of the arts in Italy "after they

had been in hiding for a millennium"; `061552 and though he never

intimately shared in that resurrection of classic literature,

philosophy, and art which accompanied the Renaissance, he was

anxious to see at first hand what it was that had given the Italians

their excellence in painting and sculpture, in prose and poetry. He

stayed chiefly in Venice, where the Renaissance had not yet reached

full bloom; but when he came back to Nuremberg (1495) he had somehow

received the stimulus that sparked the rapid productivity of his

next ten years. In 1507, with a loan of a hundred florins ($2,500?)

from Pirkheimer, he went again to Italy, and this time he stayed for a

year and a half. He studied the works of Mantegna and Squarcione at

Padua, copied drawings humbly, and was soon recognized by the

Bellini and other Venetians as an accomplished draftsman. The Feast

of the Rose Garlands, which he painted for a German church in Venice,

won praise even from the Italians, who still considered most Germans

to be barbarians. The Venetian Signory offered him a permanent post if

he would take up his residence there, but his wife and friends were

importuning him to come back to Nuremberg. He noted that artists had

won a much higher social standing in Italy than in Germany, and

resolved to demand a similar status on his return. "Here," he wrote,

"I am a fine gentleman; at home I am a parasite"- i.e., unproductive

of material goods. `061553

He was delighted by the excitement of art in Italy, the number and

conflicts of artists, the learned and passionate discussions of art

theories. When Jacopo de' Barbari expounded to him the principles of

Piero della Francesca and other Italians on the mathematical

proportions of a perfect human body, Durer remarked that he "would

rather have had this explained to him than to have received a new

kingdom." `061554 In Italy he became accustomed to the nude in art, if

only by studying classic statuary. While his own work remained

thoroughly Teutonic and Christian, he adopted with enthusiasm the

Italian admiration for pagan art, and in a long sequence of writings

he strove to teach his countrymen the Italian secrets of

perspective, proportion, and coloring. With these two trips of Durer

to Italy the Gothic style came to an end in German painting, and the

same German generation that rejected Rome in religion accepted Italy

in art.

Durer himself remained in a creative but confusing tension between

the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between German mysticism and

Italian worldliness; and the joy of life that he had seen in Italy

never quite overcame in his soul the medieval meditation on death.

Except for his portraits, his subjects remained almost wholly

religious, and many mystical. Nevertheless his real religion was

art. He worshiped a perfect line more than the imitation of Christ.

Even in his religious productions he showed the artist's driving

interest in all the objects of even the most common daily

experience. Like Leonardo, he drew nearly everything that he saw-

rocks, streams, trees, horses, dogs, pigs, ugly faces and figures, and

imaginary beings of marvelous or horrible form. He drew his left leg

as seen in diverse positions, and punched a pillow into seven

different shapes to be studied by his indefatigable pen. He crowded

his work with a veritable menagerie of animals, and sometimes he

drew a whole city as a background for a picture. He illustrated with

relish and humor the life and doings of country folk, He loved the

Germans, painted their enormous heads and rubicund features without

protest, and introduced them into the unlikeliest environments, always

richly robed like prosperous burghers, and wrapped and muffled, even

in Rome or Palestine, against the German cold. His drawings are an

ethnography of Nuremberg. His chief patrons were its merchant princes,

whom he rescued from death with his portraits, but he received

commissions also from dukes and Imperial electors, and at last from

Maximilian himself, As Titian loved best to portray the nobility and

royalty, Durer was most at home in the middle class, and his woodcut

of the Emperor made him look like what Louis XII had called him- the

"burgomaster of Augsburg." Once only Durer achieved nobility in a

portrait- an imaginary rendering of Charlemagne.

The thirty-six portraits are his most readily enjoyable works, for

they are simple, sensual, earthy, swelling with character. Behold

Hieronymus Holzschuher, the Nuremberg senator: a powerful head,

stern face, thinning hair on a massive forehead, a beard trimmed to

immaculate symmetry, sharp eyes as if watching politicians, yet with

the beginning of a twinkle in them; here is a man with a good heart,

good humor, good appetite. Or consider Durer's dearest friend,

Willibald Pirkheimer: the head of a bull concealing the soul of a

scholar, and suggesting the gastric needs of Gargantua. And who

would guess, behind the creased and flattened features of the

immense Frederick the Wise of Saxony, the Elector who defied a pope to

protect Luther? Nearly all the portraits are fascinating: Oswolt

Krell, whose earnest concentration shows even in the veins of his

hands; or Bernhard von Resten, with the delicate blue blouse, the

majestic overspreading hat, the meditative eyes of an absorbed artist;

or Jakob Muffel, burgomaster of Nuremberg, a brown study of earnest

devotion, shedding some light on the greatness and prosperity of the

city; or the two portraits of Durer's father, weary with toil in 1490,

quite worn out in 1497; or the Portrait of a Gentleman in the Prado-

virility incarnate, tarnished with cruelty and greed; or Elizabeth

Tucher, holding her wedding ring and gazing diffidently into marriage;

or the Portrait of a Venetian Lady - Durer had to go to Italy to find

beauty as well as strength. There is seldom refinement in his male

portraits, no elegance, only force of character. "What is not useful

in a man," he said, "is not beautiful." `061555 He was interested in

reality and its faithful transcription, rather than in beauty of

features or form. He pointed out that an artist can draw or paint a

beautiful picture of an ugly object or disagreeable subject. He was

a Teuton, all industry, duty, fidelity; he left beauty and grace to

the ladies, and concentrated on power.

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Painting was not his forte, nor much to his taste. But his visits to

Italy stirred him to seek color as well as line. For Frederick of

Saxony and his Castle Church in Wittenberg he painted a triptych later

known as the Dresden Altarpiece; here Italian modes of proportion

and perspective framed figures resolutely German: a Frau as the

Virgin, a professor as St. Anthony, a German acolyte as St. Sebastian;

the result is not irresistible. Finer is the Paumgartner Altarpiece in

Munich: a splendid St. Joseph and a Madchen Mary against an

architectural background of Roman ruins; but the foreground is

littered with absurd manikins The Adoration of the Magi, in the

Uffizi, is a triumph of color in the Virgin's blue robe and the

gorgeous vestments of the Oriental kings. Christ among the Doctors

shows a pretty Jesus with girlish curls surrounded by bearded and

wrinkled pundits- one a horrible caricature all nose and teeth. The

Feast of the Rose Garlands rivaled the greatest Italian pictures of

the time in its skillfully ordered composition, the loveliness of both

Mother and Child, the general splendor of the color; this is Durer's

greatest painting, but one must now venture all the way to Prague to

see it. Vienna and Berlin have attractive Durer Madonnas, and the

New York Madonna and Child with St. Anne presents a tender German

maiden as the Virgin, and a dark-skinned Semite as her mother.

Excellent are the Prado panels of Adam and Eve; here for a moment a

German artist has rendered the beauty of a healthy female nude.

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Discouraged by inadequate remuneration for the labor of painting,

and perhaps by the compulsion to repeat old religious themes, Durer

turned increasingly to the more gainful and original work of

woodcutting and engraving; for there one plate could make a thousand

copies easily carried to every market in Europe, and could provide the

same illustration for a thousand printed volumes. Line was Durer's

forte, drawing was his realm, wherein no man then alive surpassed him;

there even the proud Italians marveled at his finesse. Erasmus

compared him, as a draftsman, with an ancient master of line:

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Apelles was aided by color.... But Durer, though admirable also in

other respects- what does he not express in monochrome... proportions,

harmonies? Nay, he even depicts that which cannot be depicted- fire,

rays of light, thunder... lightning... all the sensations and

emotions, in fine, the whole mind of man as it reflects itself in

the behavior of the body, and almost the voice itself. These things he

places before the eyes in the most pertinent lines- black ones, yet so

that if you should spread pigments on them you would injure the

work. And is it not more wonderful to accomplish without the

blandishments of color what Apelles accomplished with their

aid? `061556

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Durer returned the compliment by engraving a portrait of Erasmus

(1526), not from the living sitter but from the painting by Massys. It

did not rival that portrait, much less Holbein's; even so it is a

masterpiece of drawing in the folds and shadows of the cloak, the

wrinkles of face and hands, the ruffled leaves of the open book.

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Durer has left us over a thousand drawings, most of them miracles of

realistic or pious or impishly fanciful design. Some are obvious

caricatures; one is age and wisdom drawn to a hair. `061557

Occasionally the subject is inanimate, as in The Wire-drawing

Mill, or just plain vegetation, like A Piece of Turf, or an animal,

like the Head of a Walrus. Usually plants and beasts crowd around

living persons, as in the complex Madonna with a Multitude of

Animals. The religious subjects are the least successful, but we must

except and honor the remarkable Hands of a Praying Apostle. And

lastly there are fine studies of classic mythology, like the

Apollo or the Orpheus.

Durer transformed some 250 of his drawings into woodcuts, and a

hundred into engravings; these two groups are the most distinctive

portions of his legacy. Until the turn of the century he incised the

designs himself; later he delegated the woodcutting to others- only by

this collaboration could he have delineated so vast an area of life.

He began by illustrating books like Der Ritter von Turn and

Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff; twenty years afterward he drew

fascinating border figures for the Prayer Book of Maximilian. He tried

his pen at nudes, and succeeded handsomely in The Men's Bath, not so

well in The Women's Bath; in both he served as a revolutionary force

in a German art that had shunned the nude as a scandal or a

disillusionment. Famous were the woodcuts that portrayed the life of

the Virgin and the Passion of Christ. Devout women could now

contemplate, by their own hearths, a print showing the betrothal of

Joseph and Mary; and practical Germans were pleased to find, in The

Sojourn of the Holy Family in Egypt, all the cozy details of Teutonic

domesticity and industry- Mary sewing, Joseph working at his bench,

and angelic children bringing in firewood without being asked.

Thirty-seven small woodcuts- the "Little Passion"- and eleven larger

ones- the "Great Passion"- brought the story of the sufferings and

death of Christ into thousands of homes, and whetted the public

appetite for Luther's translation of the New Testament. Another series

illustrated the Book of Revelation; some of these woodcuts, like

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and St. Michael Fighting the

Dragon, were so vivid that for centuries the German mind thought of

the Apocalypse in terms of Durer's prints.

From woodcuts he passed to the more painstaking art of engraving.

Now and then he tried dry point etching, as in the chiaroscuro Holy

Family; usually he worked with the burin. The Fall of Man is

sculpture on copper, in forms worthy of the Greeks, in proportion

and symmetry worthy of the Italians, with Durer's customary

profusion of fauna and flora, where nearly every item held for him and

his generation a symbolical significance. Nude females of an

excellence unprecedented in German art emerged from the metal in

The Sea Monster and The Combat of Virtue and Pleasure, with

background landscapes beautifully drawn. The sixteen engravings

constituting the "Engraved Passion" are less impressive than the

woodcut Passions. But the St. Eustace is a cornucopia of vivid

designs: five dogs, a horse, a forest, a swarm of birds, a congeries

of castles on a hill, a stag bearing a crucifix between his antlers,

and persuading the handsome hunter to leave off killing and become a

saint.

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In 1513-14 Durer reached his summit as a draftsman in three

Meisterstiche, Master Engravings. The Knight, Death, and the Devil

is a powerful version of a somber medieval theme: a stern-faced

rider in full armor on a Verrocchian steed, hemmed in by ugly

figures of death and Satan, but moving forward resolutely to the

triumph of virtue over all; it seems incredible that such plenitude

and delicacy of detail could be cut into metal. St. Jerome in His

Study shows a quieter phase of the Christian victory: the old bald

saint bent over his manuscript, writing apparently by the light of his

halo, a lion and a dog lying peacefully on the floor, a skull

sitting in silent eloquence on a window sill, and what looks for all

the world like his wife's hat hanging on the wall- the whole room

drawn in the most careful perspective, with all shadows and sun rays

meticulously drawn. Finally the engraving that Durer entitled

Melancholia I reveals an angel seated amid the chaos of an

unfinished building, with a medley of mechanical tools and

scientific instruments at her feet; a purse and keys attached to her

girdle as emblems of wealth and power; her head resting pensively on

one hand, her eyes gazing half in wonder, half in terror, about her.

Is she asking to what end all this labor, this building and demolition

and building, this pursuit of wealth and power and the mirage called

truth, this glory of science and Babel of intellect vainly fighting

inevitable death? Can it be that Durer, at the very outset of the

modern age, understood the problem faced by triumphant science, of

progressive means abused by unchanging ends? *06036

So, drawing by drawing, painting by painting, with an arduous

industry and patience so different from Leonardo's procrastination and

Raphael's ease, Durer passed into the age of Luther. About 1508 he

bought the house that made Nuremberg famous; the second World War

destroyed it; the tourist trade rebuilt it as a copy of the

original. Its two lower stories were of stone, the third and fourth of

pink stucco and half timber; and over a projecting eave two further

stories crouched under the gabled roof. Here for nineteen years

Durer lived in moderate misery with his childless wife. Agnes was a

simple Hausfrau who wondered why Albrecht spent so much time on

unremunerative studies or with bibulous friends. He moved in circles

beyond her mental reach, neglected her socially, traveled most often

without her, and when he took her to the Netherlands, dined with

celebrities or with his host, while leaving his wife to eat "in the

upper kitchen" with their maid. `061558 In 1504 his widowed mother

joined Durer's household; she persisted ten years more; his portrait

of her moves our sympathy for the wife- who was not too charming

herself. His friends considered Agnes a shrew incapable of sharing

Durer's rapt intellectual life.

In his later years the Nuremberg master enjoyed a European fame as

the leader and glory of German art. In 1515 the Emperor allotted him a

modest pension of a hundred florins a year ($2,500?). This was

irregularly paid, for Maximilian's income never caught up with his

plans. When Max died the pension stopped, and Durer decided to visit

the Netherlands and solicit its renewal from Charles V. He took with

him a large assortment of drawings and paintings to sell or exchange

in Holland or Flanders, and managed thereby to pay nearly all the cost

of the trip. The journal that he kept of his tour (July 1520- July

1521) is almost- not quite- as intimate as those that Boswell would

write two centuries later. It records his expenses, sales,

purchases, visits, and honors; it reveals the burgher's care with

financial details, and the artist's forgivable delight in the

recognition of his genius. After chasing Charles through a dozen

cities, Durer obtained the renewal of his pension, and could give

the rest of his journey to viewing the sights and heroes of the

Lowlands. He was astonished by the wealth and beauty of Ghent,

Brussels, and Bruges; by the great polyptych of the Van Eycks in St.

Bavon's, and by the Antwerp Cathedral, "the like of which I have never

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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