Part 3 (1/2)

Other distinguished artists united with Durer and the designers of Maximilian's works in making this period of wood-engraving the most ill.u.s.trious in the German practice of the art. Lukas van Leyden (1494-1533), whose youthful works in copperplate were wonderful, left some woodcuts in Durer's bold, broad manner, which ill.u.s.trate the attempt of German art to acquire cla.s.sical taste, and show so much the more clearly the incapacity of the Germans in the perception of beauty.

The Cranachs, father (1472-1553) and son (1515-1586), who are interesting because of the share they had in the Reformation, produced some very striking works, such as the charming scene of the Repose in Egypt, and were the first to practise chiaro-scuro engraving in the North. Hans Baldung (1470-1552?), although his designs are sometimes characterized by exaggeration and too great violence of action, ranks with the best of the secondary artists of the time; and Hans Springinklee, who has been already mentioned, reached a high degree of excellence in his ill.u.s.trations to the Hortulus Animae, which are still valued.

The works of these men, however, were only the most important and the best of a vast number of woodcuts which, during the first half of the sixteenth century, appeared in Germany during this period of the greatest popularity of the art. Under the personal influence of Durer, or under the influence of the numerous and widely-spread prints by himself and his a.s.sociates, many other artists of merit acquired skill in engraving, both on metal and in wood, and employed it upon a great variety of subjects. The devotion of mediaeval art wholly to church decoration and to the representation of religious scenes had pa.s.sed away in all quarters of the world; in Italy the artists had come to treat the subjects of pagan imagination, the beings and scenes of cla.s.sical mythology; in Germany the people had homelier tasks, and religious art there yielded to the interest which men felt in the incidents and objects of common life; in both countries wealth took the place of religion as the patron of art; and, although art still dealt with the story of the Scriptures and the martyrs, because these filled so important a place in the imagination of the people, still it had become secularized. This change was naturally shown in the arts of engraving more than in painting, because engraving in copper and on wood had a far greater sphere of influence, and came into more intimate relations with the popular life, and because the ill.u.s.tration of books offered a greater variety of subject. In German engraving, from this time, the actual life of the town and the peasantry was represented almost as often as the history of the Saviour and the saints; the village festival, the procession of the wedding-guests, the fetes of the town, the employments and costumes of the citizens, recur with the same frequency as the pa.s.sion of the Lord and the Old Testament stories; the joy and sorrow of ordinary life, the objects of ordinary observation and thought, the humorous, the humble, and the satirical, sometimes strangely mingled with ill-understood mythology and badly-caricatured cla.s.sicism, are the constant theme of the engravers.

Chief among the successors of Durer who shared in this vast production were the group of artists known as the Little Masters, although the name is one of ill-defined and incomplete application; they were so called because they chiefly engraved small designs; but they also engraved large designs, and their number, which is usually limited to seven, excludes some whose works are on the same small scale. The first of them was Albrecht Altdorfer (1488-1538), said to have been the pupil of Durer and the inventor of engraving in this manner; in his day he was more celebrated as an architect and painter than as an engraver, but his fame now rests on his works on copper and in wood. The best known of his sixty-five woodcuts is the series of forty designs, scarcely three inches by two in size, ent.i.tled the Fall and Redemption of Man, in depicting which he had the Smaller Pa.s.sion of Durer to guide him. In these he attempted to obtain effects by the use of fine and close lines, such as were employed in copperplate-engraving; but, although his success was certainly remarkable, considering the rude mechanical processes of the time, yet his method clearly produced results of inferior artistic value in comparison with the works in the bold, broad manner of Durer. All of his woodcuts, excepting four, are representations of religious subjects; they are marked, like his other works, by an attention to landscape, that truly modern object of art, of which he probably learned the value from Durer, who was the first to treat landscape with real appreciation. In Hans Sebald Behaim (1500-1550?) the spirit of the age is revealed with great clearness and variety (Fig. 49); both his life and his art were inspired by it. In his early manhood he was banished from Nuremberg for denying the doctrines of transubstantiation and the efficacy of baptism, and for entertaining some vague socialistic and communistic opinions; but it is not clear to what extent he held them, if he held them at all. He seems to have been one of the most advanced of the religious Reformers, and he employed his art in their service, as, for example, in a book ent.i.tled The Papacy, which he ill.u.s.trated with a series of seventy-four figures of the different orders of monks in their peculiar costumes, beneath each of which satirical lines were written. He is best known by his eighty-one Bible-cuts, which were the most popular, perhaps, of the many series published in that century, not excepting the impressive Bible figures of Holbein; they pa.s.sed through many editions, and were widely copied. The first English Bible was ill.u.s.trated by them. Besides these two series, and one other in ill.u.s.tration of the Apocalypse, he designed many separate prints, both in the small manner of the Little Masters and in imitation of the large works of Maximilian, such as his Military Fete, in honor of Charles V., his Fountain of Youth, and the prints of the Marauding Soldiers, which measured four or five feet in length. His representations of peasant life are peculiarly attractive, because of the force of realism displayed in them, whether he depicted the marriage festival, or mere jollity or drunken brawl. In the breadth of his interests, in the variety of his subjects, and in his sympathy with the special movements of his age, he was as an engraver more characteristic of the civilization in which he lived than any other of the Little Masters who gave their attention to wood-engraving. Of the rest of this group none, excepting Hans Brosamer (1506-1552), left works in wood-engraving of any consequence; he designed in a free and bold manner, and his engravings are to be found in books of the third quarter of the century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 49.--Virgin and Child. From a print by Hans Sebald Behaim.]

Other artists of this period devoted their attention to wood-engraving; but as they did not mark any new progress in the art, or reflect any aspect of German civilization which has not already been ill.u.s.trated, they need not be treated in any detail. Virgil Solis (1514-1562), a very productive designer, who was employed by the Nuremberg printers to ill.u.s.trate the books by which they attempted to rival the productions of the Lyonese press; Jobst Amman (1539-1591), whose excellent engravings of costumes and trades are well known; Erhard Schon (d. 1550), Melchior Lorch (1527-1586), whose works were of little merit; and Tobias Stimmer (1539-1582), a popular designer for book ill.u.s.tration, are all who deserve mention. Their engravings are inferior to the productions of previous artists, and after their death the art in Germany fell into speedy and irretrievable decay.

The work of the wood-engravers who were imbued with the German spirit exhibits the same excellences and defects as other German work in art.

It is characterized by vigor princ.i.p.ally, and in its higher range it has great value, because of the imaginative and reflective spirit by which it was animated; in its lower range, as a portrayal of life and manners, it derives from its realism an extraordinary interest. Its great deficiency is its lack of beauty, and is due to the inborn feebleness of the sense of beauty in the German race; but, notwithstanding this deformity, German wood-engraving was invaluably useful in its day in the cities where it became so popular, because it was so widely and variously practised, and entered into the life of the people in so many ways with an effective influence of which it is difficult to form an adequate conception. It facilitated the spread of literature and helped on the progress of the Reformation to a degree which is little recognized; it disseminated ideas and standards of art, and made them common property; and, finally, it prepared the way for the great master who was to embody in wood-engraving the highest excellence of art and thought.

VI.

HANS HOLBEIN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: G FIG. 50.--From the ”Epistole di San Hieronymo.”

Ferrara, 1497.]

Germany produced one artist who freed himself from the limitations of taste and interest which the place of his birth imposed upon him, and took rank with the great masters who seem to belong rather to the race than to their native country. Hans Holbein was neither German nor Italian, neither cla.s.sical nor mediaeval. The ideal of his art was not determined by the culture of any single school, at home or abroad; far less was it a jarring compromise between the aims and methods of different schools; it grew out of a faithful study of all, and in it were rationally blended the elements which were right in each. In style, theme, and spirit he advanced so far beyond his contemporaries that he became the first modern artist--the first to clear his vision from the deceptions of religious enthusiasm, and to subdue in himself the lawlessness of the romantic spirit; the first to perceive that only the purely human interest gives lasting significance to any artistic work, and to depict humanity simply for its own sake; the first to express his meaning in a way which seems truthful and beautiful universally to all cultivated men. In this lies the peculiar and profound value of his works.

Holbein was born at Augsburg, in 1495 or 1496, into a family of artists.

In that city, then the centre of German culture, he grew up amid the stir of curiosity and thought which attended the discovery of the Western World and the first movements of the Reformation. He handled the pencil and the brush from boyhood, and produced works as wonderful for their precocious excellence as the early efforts of Mantegna; he was deeply impressed by the secular and picturesque genius of Burgkmaier, the great artist of Augsburg, who may have first opened to him the value of beauty of detail, and inculcated in him that carefulness in respect to it which afterward distinguished him; he seems, too, even at this early period, to have been touched by some Italian influence which may have reached Augsburg in consequence of the close commercial relations between that city and Venice. Holbein, however, did not arrive at any mature development until after he left Augsburg and removed to Basle, whither he went in 1515, in order to earn his bread by making designs for books--a trade which was then flouris.h.i.+ng and lucrative in that city. Basle offered conditions of life more favorable, in some respects, to the development of energetic individuality than did Augsburg; it was already the seat of humanistic literature, at the head of which was Erasmus, and it soon became the safest refuge of the persecuted Reformers. In such a city there was necessarily a vigorous intellectual life and a free and liberal spirit, which must have exerted great influence upon the young artist, who by his profession was brought into intimate relations with the most learned and advanced thinkers about him. Holbein was at once profoundly affected by the literary and reform movements which he was called upon to aid by his designs, and he threw himself into their service with energy and sympathy. His art, too, under the influence of Italy, and under the rational direction of his own thought, grew steadily more refined in ideal and more finished in execution. He soon learned the value of formal beauty, and gave evidence that the work of the last great German painter was not to be marred by German tastelessness. Hitherto the masters of German art, led by a realistic spirit which did not discriminate regularly and with certainty between the different values of the lovely and the unlovely, had expressed their thought and feeling in familiar forms, and, consequently, often in forms which shared in the grotesqueness, bordering on caricature, and in the homeliness, bordering on ugliness, that characterized much of actual German life. Holbein, whose realism was governed by cultivated taste, expressed his thought and feeling in beautiful forms. His predecessors had used a dialect of art, as it were, which could never seem perfectly natural or be immediately intelligible to any but their own countrymen; Holbein acquired the true language of art, and was as directly and completely intelligible to the refined Englishman or Italian as to the citizen of Augsburg or Basle. Holbein came, also, to an understanding of the true law of art; as he freed himself from the Gothic dulness of sight in respect to beauty, he freed himself from the Gothic license of reverie, fancy, and thought. He limited himself to the clear and forcible expression of the idea he had in mind; he admitted no details which interfered with his main purpose, and which a.s.serted a claim to be there for their own sake; he made every accessary enforce or ill.u.s.trate his princ.i.p.al design, and subordinated each minor portion of his picture to the leading conception; he had one purpose in view, and he preserved its unity. How different this was from the practice of Durer, who introduced into his work whatever came into his mind, however remotely it might be a.s.sociated with his subject, who repeated almost wearisomely the same idea in varying symbolism, and dissipated the intensity of the thought by distracting suggestion crowded into any available s.p.a.ce, need not be pointed out; in just the proportion in which Durer lost by his practice directness, simplicity, and force, Holbein gained these by his own method, which was, indeed, the method of great art, of the art which obeys reason, in distinction from the art which yields to the wandering sentiment. Holbein differed from Durer in another respect: he thoroughly understood what he meant to express; he would have nothing to do with vague dreaming or mystical contemplation; he thought that whatever could not be definitely conceived in the brain, and clearly expressed by line and color, lay outside the domain of his art; he gave up the phantoms of the enthusiast and the puzzle of the theologian to those who cared for them, and fixed his attention on human life as he saw it and understood it. He often treated religious subjects, but in no different spirit from that in which he treated secular subjects; in all it is the human interest which attracts him--the life of man as it exists within the bounds of mortality. Thus he arrived not only at the true language and the true law of art, but also at its true object. This development of his genius did not take place suddenly and at once; it was a gradual growth, and reached full maturity only in his closing years; but, while he still worked at Basle, the essential lines of his development were clearly marked, and he had advanced so far along them as to be even then the most perfect artist whom the North had produced.

Holbein began to practise wood-engraving as soon as he settled in Basle, and designed many t.i.tlepages, initial letters, and cuts for the publishers of that city. The t.i.tlepages, which are numerous, were usually in the form of an architectural frame, in which groups of figures were introduced; they show how early his taste for the forms of Italian architecture became p.r.o.nounced, and how bold and free was his power of drawing, and how highly developed was his sense of style, even in his first efforts. He ill.u.s.trated the books of the humanists, especially the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, then a new and popular work; and he designed the cuts for the biblical translations of Luther, and for other publications of the Reformers. He served the Reformation, too, in a humorous as well as in a serious way, for he was as much a master of satire as of beauty. Two cuts in ridicule of the papal party are particularly noticeable, one in which he satirizes the sale of indulgences, contrasting it with true repentance; and one in which he represents Christ as the Light of the World, with a group of sinners approaching upon one side, and a group of papal dignitaries led by Aristotle turning away on the other side. The ill.u.s.trations in which he depicts ordinary humble life, particularly the life of peasants and children, make another great department of his lesser work in wood-engraving; these scenes are sometimes separate cuts, and sometimes introduced as backgrounds of initial letters, twenty alphabets of which are ascribed to him; they represent the pastimes and sports of the country, just as Holbein may have seen them at any time upon the way-side, and are full of heartiness, humor, and reality. The sketches from the life of boys and children are especially graceful and charming, and reveal an ease and power in delineation which has seldom been rivalled. This species of _genre_ art, which had first made its appearance in wood-engraving, because it was considered beneath the dignity of the higher arts, was very popular; by his work of this sort Holbein contributed to the pleasure of the people, just as by his co-operation with the Humanists and the Reformers he served them in more important ways. Finally he produced at Basle his two great works in wood-engraving, the Dance of Death and the Figures of the Bible, which are the highest achievements of the art at any time.

The Dance of Death was an old subject. It had possessed for centuries a powerful and sometimes morbid attraction for the artistic imagination and for popular reflection. It was peculiarly the product of mediaeval Christian life, and survives as a representative of the great mediaeval ideas. That age first surrounded death with terrors, fastened the attention of man continually upon his doom, and affrighted his spirit with the dread of that unknown hour of his dissolution which should put him in danger of the second death of immortal agony. In Greece death had been the breaking of the chrysalis by the winged b.u.t.terfly, or, at least, only the extinction of the torch; here it was the gaunt and grinning skeleton always jostling the flesh of the living, however beautiful or joyous they might be. In the churches of the thirteenth century there swung a banner emblazoned upon one side with the figures of a youth and maiden before a mirror of their loveliness, and, upon the reverse, with Death holding his spade beside the worm-pierced corpse; it was the type of mediaeval Christian teaching. The fear of death was the recurring burden of the pulpit; it made the heart of every bowed wors.h.i.+pper tremble, and was taught with fearful distinctness by the pestilence that again and again suddenly struck the populations of Europe. The chord of feeling was overstrained; the elastic force of life a.s.serted itself, and, by a strange transformation, men made a jest of their terror, and played with death as they have never since done; they acted the ravages of death in pantomime, made the tragedy comic, put the figure of Death into their carnivals, and changed the object of their alarm into the theme of their sport. In the spirit of that democracy which, in spite of the aristocratic structure of mediaeval society, was imbedded in the heart of the Christian system, where every soul was of equal value before G.o.d, the people turned the universal moral lesson of death into a satire against the great; Death was not only the common executioner, he arrested the prelates and the n.o.bles, stripped them of their robes and their possessions, and tried them whether they were of G.o.d or Mammon. In these many-varied forms of terror, sport, and irony Death filled the imagination and reflection of the age; the shrouded figure or the naked skeleton was seen on the stage of the theatre, amid the games of the people, on the walls of the churches and the monasteries, throughout the whole range of art and literature. Holbein had looked on many representations of this idea: where, as in Durer's work, Death attends knight and beggar; or where, as in the Nuremberg Chronicle, the skeletons dance by the open grave; or where, as in the famous series at Basle, Death humbles every rank of life in turn. But Holbein did not look on these scenes as his predecessors had done; he was free from their spirit. He took the mediaeval idea and re-moulded it, as Shakspeare re-moulded the tradition of Denmark and Italy, into a work for all times and generations. He represented Death, but with an artistic power, an imaginative fervor, a perception of the constant element in its interest for mankind, which lifted his work out of mediaevalism into universal truth; and in doing this he not only showed the high power of his art, but he unlocked the secrets of his character.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 51.--The Nun. From Holbein's ”Images de la Mort.”

Lyons, 1547.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 52.--The Preacher. From Holbein's ”Images de la Mort.” Lyons, 1547.]

This work is, in the first edition (1538), a series of forty-one small cuts, in each of which is depicted the triumph of Death over some person who is typical of a whole cla.s.s. Each design represents with intense dramatic power some scene from daily life; Death lays his summons upon all in the midst of their habitual occupations: the trader has escaped s.h.i.+pwreck, and ”on the beach undoes his corded bales;” Death plucks him by the cloak; the weary, pack-laden peddler, plodding on in his unfinished journey, turns questioningly to the delaying hand upon his shoulder; the priest goes to the burial of the poor, Death carries the candle in a lantern before him, and rings the warning bell; the drunkard gulps his liquor, the judge takes his bribe, the miser counts his gold--Death interrupts them with a sneer. What poetic feeling, what dramatic force, there is in the picture of the Nun! (Fig. 51.) She kneels with head averted from the altar of her devotions toward the youth who sits upon the bed playing the lute to her sleeping soul, and at the moment Death stands there to put out the light of the taper which shall leave her in darkness forever. What sharp satire there is in the representation of the Preacher (Fig. 52), dilating, perhaps, in his accustomed, half-mechanical way, upon the terrors of that very Death already at his elbow! What justness of sight, what grimness of reality, there is in the representation of the Ploughman (Fig. 53); how directly does Holbein bring us face to face with the human curse--in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn death! George Sand, looking out on the spring fields of her remote province and seeing the French peasants ploughing up the soft and smoking soil, remembered this type of peasant life as Holbein saw it, and described this cut in words that vivify the concentrated meaning of the whole series. ”The engraving,” she says, ”represents a farmer guiding the plough in the middle of a field. A vast plain extends into the distance, where there are some poor huts; the sun is setting behind a hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The peasant is old, thickset, and in tatters; the team which he drives before him is lean, worn out by fatigue and scanty food; the ploughshare is buried in a rugged and stubborn soil. In this scene of sweat and habitual toil there is only one being in good spirits and light of foot, a fantastic character, a skeleton with a whip, that runs in the furrow beside the startled horses and beats them--as it were, a farmer's boy.

It is Death.” She takes up the story again, after a while. ”Is there much consolation,” she asks, ”in this stoicism, and do devout souls find their account therein? The ambitious, the knave, the tyrant, the sensualist, all the proud sinners who abuse life, and whom Death drags away by the hair, are on their way to a reckoning, no doubt; but the blind, the beggar, the fool, the poor peasant, is there any amends for their long wretchedness in the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! an inexorable melancholy, a dismaying fatality, weighs upon the artist's work. It is like a bitter curse launched on the universal human lot.”[40]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 53.--The Ploughman. From Holbein's ”Images de la Mort.” Lyons, 1547.]

Certainly the artist's work is a bold and naked statement of man's mortality, of the close of life contrasted with the worth of its career; but the melancholy of his work is not more inexorable, its fatality is not more dismaying, than the reality he saw. He did not choose for his pencil what was unusual, extraordinary, or abnormal in life; he depicted its accustomed course and its fixed conclusion in fear, folly, or dignity. He took almost every character among men, almost every pa.s.sion or vice of the race, almost every toil or pursuit in which his contemporaries engaged, and confronted them with their fate. The king is at his feast, Death pours the wine; the poor mother is cooking her humble meal at the hearth, Death steals her child; the bridal pair walk on absorbed, while Death beats their wedding-march with glee. Throughout the series there is the same dramatic insight, the same unadorned reality, the same humanity. Here and there the spirit of the Reformer reveals itself: the Pope in the exercise of his utmost worldly power crowns the emperor, but behind is Death; a devil lurks in the shadow, and over the heads of the cardinals are other devils; the monk, abbot, and prioress--how they resist and are panic-stricken! There can be no doubt at what Holbein reckoned these men and their trade. Holbein showed here, too, his sympathy with the humbler cla.s.ses in those days of peasant wars, of the German Bible, and of books in the vulgar tongue--the days when the people began to be a self-conscious body, with a knowledge of the opportunities of life and the power to make good their claim to share in them; as Holbein saw life, it was only the humble to whom Death was not full of scorn and jesting, they alone stood dignified in his presence. Beneath this sympathy with the Reformers and the people need we look farther, as Ruskin does, to find scepticism hidden in the shadows of Holbein's heart? Holbein saw the Church as Avarice, trading in the sins of its children; as Cruelty, rejoicing in the blood of its enemies; as Ignorance, putting out the light of the mind. There was no faltering in his resolute, indignant denial of that Church. Did he find any refuge elsewhere in such hope and faith as remain to man in the suggestions of his own spirit? He saw Death's triumph, and he made men see it with his eyes; if he saw more than that, he kept silence concerning it. He did not menace the guilty with any peril save the peril of Death's mockery; he spoke no word of consolation for the good; for the inevitable sorrow of the child's loss there is no cure, for the ploughman's faithful labor there is no reward except in final repose by the shadow of the distant spire. He did not open the heavens to let through one gleam of immortal life upon the human lot, unless it be in the Judgment, where only the saved have risen; nevertheless, the purport of that scene, even if it be interpreted with the most Christian realism, cannot destroy the spirit of all others.

”Inexorable melancholy, dismaying fatality”--these, truly, are the burden of his work.

The series holds high rank, too, merely as a product of artistic skill.

It shows throughout the designer's ease, simplicity, and economy in methods of work, his complete control of his resources, and his unerring correctness in choosing the means proper to fulfil his ends; few lines are employed, as in the Italian manner, and there is little cross-hatching; but, as in all great art, every line has its work to do, its meaning, which it expresses perfectly, with no waste of labor and no ineffectual effort. In sureness of stroke and accuracy of proportion the drawing is unsurpa.s.sed; you may magnify any of the designs twelve times, and even the fingers will show no disproportion in whole or in part. It is true that there is no anatomical accuracy; no single skeleton is correctly drawn in detail, but the shape of Death, guessed at as a thing unknown, is so expressed that in the earliest days of the work men said that in it ”Death seemed to live, and the living to be truly dead.” The correctness, vigor, and economy of line in the drawing of these cuts made them a lesson to later artists like Rubens, merely as an example of powerful and truthful effects perfectly obtained at the least expense of labor. In this respect they were in design a triumph of art, as much as they were in conception a triumph of imagination.

Holbein made the original drawings for the Dance of Death before he left Basle in 1526; but, although some copies were printed in that city, the work did not become known until it was published in 1538 by the Trechsels at Lyons, where it appeared without Holbein's name. This latter circ.u.mstance, in connection with a pa.s.sage in the preface of this edition, led some writers to question Holbein's t.i.tle to be considered the designer of the series, although his friend, Nicolas Bourbon de Vandoeuvre, the poet, calls him the author of it in a book published at Lyons in 1538, while Karl van Mander, of Holland, in 1548, and Conrad Gesner, of Zurich, in 1549, ascribe it to him, and their statements were unhesitatingly accepted until doubt was expressed in our own time. The pa.s.sage in the preface of the first Lyons edition, on which the sceptics rely, mentions the death ”of him who has here imaged (_imagine_) for us such elegant designs as much in advance of all hitherto issued as the paintings of Apelles or Zeuxis surpa.s.s those of the moderns;” but this is generally considered to refer to the engraver, Hans Lutzelburger, who cut the designs in wood after Holbein's drawing, and deserves all the praise for their extraordinarily skilful technical execution. This is the most satisfactory explanation which can be framed; but, if it is not accepted, the balance of evidence in favor of Holbein is so great as to be conclusive. The original drawings, made with a pen and touched with bistre, are in the cabinet of the Czar, and show the excellence of the draughtsmans.h.i.+p more clearly than the woodcuts; the engraver omitted some striking details, but in general his fidelity and correctness of rendering were remarkable. The first edition at Lyons contained only forty-one of the original designs, of which there are forty-six at St.