The Artist All Germany Chose
No nation has so unanimously chosen one of its sons to represent its art as the German nation has chosen Dürer; Catholic and Protestant, northern and southern, all have chosen him. On April 6, 1928, the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, the Reichstag in Berlin and the council of Nuremberg set politics and religious beliefs aside to honor the artist who is the best loved of German artists. Meanwhile a group of connoisseurs tried in vain to buy the painting The Feast of the Rose Garlands for $1,000,000, a picture for which Dürer himself had received 110 gulden ($2,750).
Apprentice and Self-Portraitist
His father was a goldsmith from Hungary who had settled in Nuremberg. Albrecht was the third of his eighteen children, most of whom died in infancy. In his father's workshop he learned drawing with pencil, charcoal and pen, and engraving with the burin; by his own practice he learned to look at everything with minute care and to render objects tirelessly in all their details, so that in some of his portraits every hair seems drawn separately. His father hoped he would become another goldsmith, but seeing his enthusiasm for developing his art, he yielded and in 1486 apprenticed him to Wolgemut. Albrecht advanced slowly; his genius lay in ambition, perseverance and patience. He himself said that God had given him diligence, so he learned well, but that he had to endure much hardship from his master's assistants. Having no chance to study the nude, he often went to the public baths and drew Apollos such as he saw there. He himself was in those days an Apollo in beauty and grace of body. A friend describes him with admiration: a body of fine structure and stature, worthy of his great mind; an intelligent face, shining eyes, a lifted neck, broad chest, slender waist, strong thighs and firm legs. As for his hands, if you saw them you would say you had never seen anything so delicate, and his speech was so sweet and weighty that one wished it would never end.
Schongauer's engravings charmed him, and he made his way to Colmar (1492), but alas the master was dead. He learned what he could from Schongauer's brothers, then went to Basel and there received from Grünewald the secret of religious painting. Above all he was strong in freehand drawing. One edition of the letters of St. Jerome, printed at Basel in 1492, carried on its title page a picture of the saint by Dürer, which was so well liked that several publishers competed for his later work. But his father forced him to come home and marry; a wife had been chosen for him in his absence. Dürer returned to Nuremberg and began married life with Agnes Frey (1494).
A year earlier he had painted himself as a youth with almost feminine dress and hair, proud but distrustful of himself and the world. In 1498, proud of his face and of the beard that had just grown on it, he drew himself as a young nobleman in costly clothes and a tasseled cap, with curled hair hanging down; this is one of the great self-portraits of the age. In 1500 he painted himself again, this time in plainer dress, his face narrow between long locks falling on his shoulders, and his thoughtful eyes shining with a mysterious look. It is thought that here Dürer deliberately gave himself an imaginary likeness to Christ; this was of course no boast of irreligion but apparently came from his firm belief that the artist receives inspiration from God and is his speaking mouth. Pride sustained his effort. He not only multiplied his self-portraits but made room for himself in many of his other paintings. Sometimes he grew modest and, in deep sorrow, became aware of his limits; he told Pirckheimer that when we are praised we hold our heads high and believe all the praise, but perhaps behind our backs a mocking master smiles at our credulity. Pride aside, Dürer was a good-natured, pious, loyal and generous man, and as happy as the circumstances of the age allowed.
Italy and the Honor of the Artist
It is thought he was not much attached to his wife, for soon after the wedding he set out for Italy and left her alone. He had heard something of what he called the "rebirth" of the arts in Italy "after they had lain in wait a thousand years." Although he never took an effective part in that revival of classical literature, philosophy and art, he was extremely eager to see at first hand what had given the Italians their superiority in painting, sculpture, prose and verse. He spent most of his time in Venice, where the Renaissance had not yet fully flowered; but when he returned to Nuremberg (1495), in some way unknown to us, a spark was kindled in him that drove him on ten years later. In 1507, borrowing 100 florins ($2,500) from Pirckheimer, he went again to Italy and this time stayed a year and a half. He studied the works of Mantegna and Squarcione at Padua, made drawings after them, and before long Bellini and the other Venetian painters acknowledged him as a complete draftsman. The Feast of the Rose Garlands, which Dürer painted for the German church at Venice, drew admiration even from Italians, who still thought the Germans a savage people. The Venetian gentry offered him a permanent position if he would settle there, but his wife and friends begged him to return to Nuremberg. Dürer found that an artist's social standing in Italy was much higher than in Germany and resolved to demand the same standing on his return. He wrote that here he was a gentleman, but at home a parasite, that is, useless in material production.
He delighted in the stir art had made in Italy, in the number and rivalries of the artists, and in the deep and passionate debates on artistic questions. When Jacopo de' Barbari explained to him the principles of Piero della Francesca and other Italians on the mathematical proportions of the perfect human body, Dürer remarked that to have these principles explained was truly worth more to him than a kingdom. In Italy, although only through the study of classical statues, he became acquainted with the nude in art. While his own works remained wholly Teutonic and Christian, he accepted with great eagerness the Italians' admiration for pagan classical art and, in a long series of treatises, tried to teach his countrymen the secrets of Italian art in perspective, proportion and color. Through Dürer's two journeys to Italy, the Gothic style in German painting came to an end, and the Germans of a generation that rejected Rome's rule in religion were willing to accept Italian influence in art.
Between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Dürer himself remained in the creative but bewildering tension between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between German divinity and Italian humanity, and the zest for life he had met in Italy never entirely drove the medieval thought of death from his soul. Apart from portraits, the subjects of his paintings remained religious, and often very mystical. Yet his true religion was art. He admired one perfect line in a drawing more than the imitation of Christ. Even in his religious works he showed the enthusiasm of the artist for all things, even for the trivial things of daily life. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he drew almost everything he saw: rock, brook, tree, horse, dog, pig, ugly faces and figures and imaginary creatures of astonishing or terrifying shape. He drew his own left leg as seen from different angles and beat a pillow into seven different shapes with his fist to test the power of his tireless pen. He crowded a work with countless animals, and sometimes drew a whole city as the background of a picture. He pictured the life and work of country people with taste and humor. He loved the Germans, painted their big heads and ruddy faces freely, and always showed them in costly clothes like rich burghers, wrapped in winter dress and scarves suited to German cold, in settings in which such clothing had no place at all, even in Rome or Palestine. His drawings are a treasury of the ethnology of Nuremberg.
His chief patrons were the merchant princes of the city, whom he saved from death by painting their faces, but he also received commissions from dukes, the princes who had votes in the empire, and finally from Maximilian himself. Titian preferred to portray kings and nobles, but Dürer liked to paint the faces of ordinary men, and the portrait he cut in wood of the emperor looked, as Louis XII said, like the "mayor of Augsburg." Only once did Dürer succeed in rendering aristocracy, in his imaginary portrait of Charlemagne.
Portraits and Paintings
The thirty-six portraits by Dürer that survive are, for their simplicity, feeling, reality and portrayal of character, the most pleasing of his works. Look at the portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher, senator of Nuremberg: the large head, the stern face, the thin hair on a broad forehead, the neat trimmed beard, the piercing eyes that seem to be watching politicians, yet with the shadow of a twinkle in them; it shows a good-hearted, good-natured man with a good appetite. Or look at the portrait of Dürer's dearest friend, Willibald Pirckheimer: a big, bull-like head holds the soul of a scholar and recalls the stomach needs of Gargantua. And who can behind the lined and broad face of Frederick the Wise fail to recognize the elector who would resist a pope to protect Luther? Nearly all the portraits are gripping and charming: Oswolt Krel, whose intense precision shows even in the veins of his hand; or Bernhard von Resten, with his charming blue jacket, splendid broad hat and the thoughtful eyes of an absorbed artist; or Jakob Muffel, mayor of Nuremberg, a deep example of earnest devotion and serious sacrifice that reveals the secret of the city's greatness and success; or the two portraits of Dürer's father, one tired and worried from the pain of work, painted in 1490, and one wholly worn out and unable to work, painted in 1497; or the portrait of a gentleman in the Prado, manhood itself, over which the dust of oppression and greed has settled; or Elsbeth Tucher, who holds her wedding ring in her hand and gazes doubtfully at married life; or the portrait of a Venetian lady, for Dürer had to go to Italy to gain beauty as well as power.
In the portraits he drew of men there is rarely any delicacy or refinement; there is no elegance at all; everything is power of character. He said that what is not useful to man is not beautiful either. He cared more for reality and for faithful rendering than for beauty of face or form. He said that an artist can make a beautiful drawing or picture from an ugly object or disagreeable subject. He belonged to the Teutons, who were all diligence and loyalty, and he left beauty and delicacy to women and turned all his attention to power.
Painting did not fully display his art and mastery, nor did it suit his taste, but his Italian journeys roused him to seek mastery of color as well as of line. For Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, and for the castle church at Wittenberg, he painted a three-panel picture later known as the "Dresden altarpiece": here the Italian method of proportion and perspective gave form to thoroughly German figures, a German girl in place of the Virgin, a German master in place of St. Anthony, a church servant in place of St. Sebastian; the result is an irresistible masterpiece. More beautiful is the decorative Paumgartner altarpiece in Munich: a splendid St. Joseph and a Mary like a young girl before a view of Roman ruins, though the foreground is cluttered with unreasonable figures of dwarfs. The Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi shows the grandeur and dominance of color in Mary's blue robe and the gorgeous clothes of the kings of the East. Christ among the Doctors shows a beautiful Jewish boy with curling, girlish hair among a group of bearded scholars, or wrinkled faces, a frightening caricature whose faces are all nose and teeth. The Feast of the Rose Garlands equals the greatest Italian paintings of the time in the skillful composition of its parts, in the beauty and charm of mother and child, and in the splendor of its color as a whole. It is Dürer's greatest painting, but one must endure the trouble of a long journey to Prague to see it. In Vienna and Berlin there are lovely pictures of the Virgin by Dürer, and in New York the Virgin, Child and St. Anne shows a sensitive and loving German girl as the Virgin and a dark-skinned Semitic woman as her mother. The panels of Adam and Eve in the Prado are also excellent and unmatched; here a German artist for a moment delights the eye with the beautiful, healthy nude body of a woman.
Drawings, Woodcuts and Engravings
Disappointed at the poor reward for the labor of painting, and perhaps because he was forced to repeat old religious subjects, Dürer turned more each day to woodcut and engraving, which were more original and profitable; for here thousands of copies could be taken from one block and easily sent to every market of Europe, and the same design could be supplied for printing in thousands of books. Dürer's art lay in the handling of line, and his field of display was drawing; and at that time no one equaled him. In this art even the proud Italians were amazed at his precision and skill. Erasmus compared him in drawing to the master draftsman of the ancient world. He wrote, in substance, that Apelles used the help of color, but Dürer, admirable in other things too, what is there that he cannot render with one color alone? He shows even what cannot be shown: fire, rays of light, thunder, lightning, all sensations and emotions, and the thought of man as it is reflected in the motions of the body, and even sound. He sets these things before the eye with fit and well-placed lines, black lines, and yet if you spread color over them you spoil the work. Is it not more wonderful that Dürer creates without color what Apelles made with the caress and help of color?
Dürer answered Erasmus's praise by making a woodcut portrait of him (1526), drawn from the painting of Massys and not from the sitter himself. The print does not equal Massys's painting and is far below Holbein's picture; yet in showing the shade of the clothes, the folds of face and hand, and the roughness of the book's pages, it is an unmatched masterpiece.
More than a thousand drawings by Dürer survive, most of them wonders in rendering real, religious or imagined forms. Some are plainly caricature; one is an old wise man drawn with perfect care; sometimes the subject is still life, like the "Wire-drawing Mill," or only plain plants and grass, like A Piece of Turf, or an animal, like the "Head of a Walrus." Usually plants and animals swarm around people, as in The Virgin with a Multitude of Animals; in religious subjects he had least success, but the unequaled drawing Praying Hands of an Apostle must be counted an exception; and finally there are drawings in artistic study of Greek myths and legends, such as Apollo or Orpheus.
Dürer produced about 250 of his designs as woodcuts and a hundred as copper engravings. These two groups form the most distinguished part of his legacy. Until the early sixteenth century he cut the designs himself on metal or wood; later he left the woodcutting to others, and only through such help could he produce varied works across all fields of life. He began by illustrating books such as the Knight of Turn and Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools; twenty years later he drew charming pictures with frames and borders for the Prayer Book of Maximilian, tried his pen on nude figures, succeeded in the Men's Bath but not in the Women's Bath; yet both were a revolutionary leap in German art, which had forbidden the drawing of nudity as shameful. His woodcuts of the life of the Virgin and the Passion of Christ were famous. Pious women could now meditate with all their hearts on a work showing the betrothal of Joseph and Mary; and rational Germans delighted that in the Holy Family in Egypt they saw everything that gave a Teutonic household warmth and comfort: Mary sewing, Joseph at his work, and the child angels, unasked, carrying firewood into the house. The thirty-seven woodcuts of the Small Passion and the eleven larger engravings of the Great Passion carried the story of Christ's suffering and death into thousands of homes and roused the people's desire for Luther's translation of the New Testament. Another series was devoted to the Apocalypse of St. John; some of them, like the Four Horsemen and St. Michael Fighting the Dragon, were so clear and alive that for centuries Germans thought of the Book of Revelation through Dürer's work.
From woodcut he turned to the more laborious art of engraving. Now and then he used drypoint without acid, as in the Holy Family in chiaroscuro; usually he worked with the burin. Adam and Eve is a sculpture in copper, Greek in form and Italian in proportion and balance, with many flowers, plants and animals peculiar to Dürer, almost every one of which had a familiar meaning to him and to the people of his time. Women's nude bodies, with a beauty and proportion unprecedented in German art, came to life in metal in the Sea Monster and the Struggle of Virtue and Pleasure, with beautiful natural landscapes in the backgrounds of both. The sixteen engravings that make up the Engraved Passion are not as beautiful or gripping as the woodcut Passion, but St. Eustace is full of lively details: five dogs, a horse, a forest, a flock of birds, a series of castles on a hill, and a stag bearing the crucified Christ between his antlers, who moves the handsome hunter to give up killing game and become a saint.
The Three Master Engravings
In 1513–14, in three large engravings, Dürer reached the height of his art as a master draftsman. Knight, Death and the Devil is a powerful rendering of a sad medieval theme: an armored, grim rider on a steed in the manner of Verrocchio is flanked by the ugly, misshapen figures of Death and the Devil, yet the rider goes steadily forward with firm resolve to show the victory of virtue and piety over both; it hardly seems believable that so detailed and delicate an event could be engraved on a sheet of metal. St. Jerome in His Study shows a calmer side of the triumph of Christianity: the old saint with his bald head bends over his book, apparently writing by the light of the halo about his head; a lion and a dog lie quietly on the floor; a skull gazes silently but eloquently from the windowsill; and something that, to everyone in the world, looks like the saint's hat hangs from the wall. The room is drawn with complete mastery of perspective, and the shadows and rays of the sun are rendered with wonderful care.
Finally, the engraving that Dürer called Melencolia shows a winged figure sitting amid the ruins of an unfinished building with a mixture of mechanical tools and scientific instruments at her feet; from her belt hang a purse and several keys, signs of wealth and power; she rests her head thoughtfully on one hand and gazes about with eyes half astonished, half afraid. Is this thoughtful angel not seeking to understand what will be the end of all this labor, this building and destroying, this pursuit of wealth and power, this mirage men call reality, and this splendor of science and reason that struggles in vain against inescapable death? Is it possible that Dürer, at the very beginning of the new century, had perceived the problem that the victories of science, the progress of means and the unchanged state of purposes would bring upon mankind?
The Household in Nuremberg
So Dürer drew sketch after sketch and painted picture after picture, with a hard patience and effort very different from Leonardo da Vinci's delay and Raphael's ease, until he stepped into Luther's age. In 1508 he bought a house that became a landmark of Nuremberg; the Second World War destroyed it, and the money of tourists rebuilt it as it had been. Its two lower floors were of stone, its third and fourth half timber and half plaster, and above the projecting gable two more floors crouched under the pitched roof. Here for nineteen years Dürer lived a modest life with his childless wife. Agnes was a plain housekeeper who wondered why Dürer spent so much of his time on useless studies or in talk with wine-drinking friends. Dürer moved in worlds beyond the range of her thought; in company he left her wholly forgotten and often traveled without her; when he took her to the Netherlands, he dined with the notables or his host and left his wife to eat with the maid in the kitchen. In 1504 his mother, who had been widowed, joined his household and lived ten more years. The portrait Dürer drew of her arouses our pity for his wife, who had even less charm in his eyes. Dürer's friends called Agnes a shrew who could not share in her husband's spiritual life.
The Journey to the Netherlands
In the last years of his life the master of Nuremberg was known across Europe as the leader and glory of German art. In 1515 the emperor granted him a modest pension of about 100 florins ($2,500) a year; it was paid irregularly, because Maximilian's income never matched his plans. When Max died the pension stopped, and Dürer decided to go to the Low Countries and ask Charles V to renew it. He took with him a large quantity of his various drawings and paintings to sell or exchange in the Netherlands or Flanders, and thus expected to pay nearly all the cost of the journey that way. His diary of this journey (July 1520 to July 1521) is almost, though not quite, in candor and accuracy like the travel journal Boswell wrote two centuries later. Expenses, purchases, sales, visits and honors on this trip are all recorded in it, and show his care as a citizen about financial details and his pardonable delight as an artist in discovering his own genius. After following Charles through several cities he succeeded in having his annual pension renewed, and spent the rest of the journey seeing the sights and the heroes of the Low Countries. He was amazed by the wealth and beauty of Ghent, Brussels and Bruges, by the great polyptych of the brothers van Eyck in the cathedral of St. Bavo, and by the cathedral of Antwerp, whose like he had not seen in Germany. He visited Erasmus, Lucas van Leyden, Bernard van Orley and other celebrities of the Low Countries; in the cities he was honored by the artists' guilds, and in the mosquito-ridden marshes of Zeeland he caught malaria, which ruined his health for the rest of his life.
Dürer and Luther
One entry in his diary reads: I bought Luther's tract for five silver coins, and gave one more coin for the "condemnation" of that great man. At Antwerp (May 1521) he was told that Luther had been "treacherously taken" as he left the Diet of Worms. Dürer did not know that the abduction of Luther was part of a plan to save the great reformer, and feared he had been killed. In his diary he rose to a passionate defense of the revolutionary and called on Erasmus to take his side. In substance he wrote: this man, whose heart the Holy Spirit has enlightened to follow true religion and faith, has disappeared. If he suffered injury, it was in defense of the truth of Christianity against unchristian popes who act against the freedom Christ gave us and drain our blood and sweat so that they may live in idleness while the people die of hunger. O God, never have men's lifeblood been so cruelly drained under human laws as now under the government of the pope of Rome. Everyone sees how clear and how much in accord with the holy Gospel the faith Luther declared in his books is. We must save these books from burning; rather it would be fitting to throw into the flames the books written against him. You, pure Christians, grieve with me for the loss of this great man and raise your hands in prayer to God to send someone else to lead us. O Erasmus of Rotterdam, where are you? Do you see this injustice and the senseless tyranny of those who rule us? O knight of Christ, hear me and hasten to the help of our Lord; though you are old, you have the strength to wear the crown of martyrdom. O Erasmus, let me hear your voice. May God, who is your judge, be glorified in you. (The diary passage is long and is given here in abridged paraphrase.)
The Four Apostles and the End
When Dürer returned to Nuremberg, he devoted all his efforts to religious art, with greater emphasis on the "four Evangelists." In 1526 he completed his greatest series of paintings, the Four Apostles, a name that is inexact, because Mark the Evangelist was not among the twelve apostles; but perhaps that very mistake reflects the Protestant idea of a return from the Church to the "four Gospels." Two wooden panels belong to the proud collection of the "house of art" in which war-torn Munich has gathered its famous art treasure.
One of the two shows John and Peter, the other Mark and Paul; all four are dressed in splendid, colorful robes quite unsuited to those communal-minded fisher saints; these robes show Dürer's yielding to Italian-style fancy, while the big, broad heads and faces confirm his attachment to the German environment. It is probable that these splendid pictures were designed to form the wings of a triptych in a Catholic church. But in 1525 the town council of Nuremberg answered the call of reform. Dürer gave up his plan and presented the two panels to the city, adding to each an inscription stressing the importance of the "four Gospels." In spite of the keys in Peter's hand, which usually stand for the power of the Church by divine right, these pictures must be taken as Dürer's Protestant covenant.
Only two years of his life were left. Recurrent attacks of malaria broke his spirit and body. Even in 1522 he had drawn himself as a man of great sorrow, a naked, disheveled, worn, sick man in the agony of pain, holding the scourge of Christ's Passion. Yet he never stopped work until the end.
When he died at fifty-seven (April 6, 1528), he left, besides 6,000 florins, enough drawings, woodcuts and engravings that his sad and disheartened widow lived comfortably the rest of her life. Pirckheimer, who mourned him as "the best friend I ever had," wrote a brief and simple inscription on his tomb: "What was mortal of Albrecht Dürer lies here." In sacrificing the greatest task and work of art for smaller works, Dürer lost the high rank of an artist in the world of art and creation; he was so enchanted by seeing the fleeting and impermanent forms of persons, things and places come alive and live on under his hand that he devoted most of his effort to rendering reality, beautiful and ugly, meaningful and meaningless, and only now and then fused the scattered elements of sense perception in a creative imagination and gave them form, and then, in line or color, created ideal beauties that give us a goal to pursue or grant us dreams that instruct or soothe. But he answered the call of his time. In wood and copper he engraved a biography of his own aspiring and creative generation; his pen or pencil, burin or brush brought out in their faces the hidden spirit of the powerful men who strode the stage of that age; Dürer brought that period back to life for us, across four hundred years, with all its zeal and sincerity, its fears and superstitions, its protests and dreams and wonder. Dürer was Germany.