Part 16 (1/2)

Further, there is nothing foul, nothing disgraceful in his work. The thoughts of his most pure mind shunned all such things. Artist worthy of success! How like, too, are his portraits! How unerring! How true!

All these perfections he attained by reducing mere practice to art and method, in a way new at least to German painters. With Albrecht all was ready, certain, and at hand, because he had brought painting into the fixed track of rule and recalled it to scientific principles; without which, as Cicero said, though some things may be well done by help of nature, yet they cannot always be ready to hand, because they are done by chance. He first worked his principles out for his own use; afterwards with his generous and open nature he attempted to explain them in books, written to the ill.u.s.trious and most learned Wilibald Pirkheimer. And he dedicated them to him in a most elegant letter which we have not translated, because we felt it to be beyond our power to render it into Latin without, so to speak, disfiguring its natural countenance. But before he could complete and publish the books, as he had hoped, he was carried off by death--a death, calm indeed and enviable, but in our view premature. If there was anything at all in that man which could seem like a fault, it was his excessive industry, which often made unfair demands upon him.

Death, as we have said, removed him from the publication of the work which he had begun, but his friends completed the task from his own ma.n.u.script. About this, in the next place, and about our own version, we shall say a few words. The work, being founded on a sort of geometrical system, is unpolished and devoid of literary style; so it seems rather rugged. But that is easily forgiven in consideration of the excellence of the matter. He requested me himself, only a few days before his death, to translate it into Latin while he should correct it; and I willingly turned my attention and studies to the work. But death, which takes everything, took from him his power of supervision and correction.

His friends subsequently, after publis.h.i.+ng the work, prevailed on me, by their claims rather than their requests, to undertake the Latin translation, and to complete after his death the task Durer had laid upon me in his life.

If I find that my industry and devotion in this matter meet with my readers' approval, I shall be encouraged to translate into Latin the rest of Albrecht's treatise on painting, a work at once more finished and more laborious than the present. Moreover, his writings on other subjects will also be looked for, his Geometries and Tichismatics, in which he explained the fortification of towns according to the system of the present day. These, however, appear to be all the subjects on which he wrote books. As to the promise, which I hear certain persons are making in conversation or in writing, to publish a book by Durer on the symmetry of the parts of the horse, I cannot but wonder from what source they will obtain after his death what he never completed during his life. Although I am well aware that Albrecht had begun to investigate the law of truth in this matter too, and had made a certain number of measurements, I also know that he lost all he had done through the treachery of certain persons, by whose means it came about that the author's notes were stolen, so that he never cared to begin the work afresh. He had a suspicion, or rather a certainty, as to the source whence came the drones who had invaded his store; but the great man preferred to hide his knowledge, to his own loss and pain, rather than to lose sight of generosity and kindness in the pursuit of his enemies.

We shall not, therefore, suffer anything that may appear to be attributed to Albrecht's authors.h.i.+p, unworthy as it must evidently be of so great an artist.

A few years ago some tracts also appeared in German, containing rules, in general faulty and inappropriate, about the same matter. On these I do not care now to waste words, though the author, unless I am much mistaken, has not once repented of his publication. But these rules above-mentioned, which are easily proved to be Albrecht's, not only because he prepared them himself for publication, but also because of their own excellence, you will, I think, obtain considerably better here than from other sources. Not that they are more finished in point of erudition and learning in the present book than elsewhere, but because those who interpret them in the author's own workshop, among the expansions and corrections of his autograph ma.n.u.scripts and the variations of his different copies, stand in the light about many points, which must of necessity seem obscure to others, however learned they may be.

This will be seen in the case of the book on Geometry, which a learned man has in hand and will shortly publish in a more elaborate form, and with more explanation of certain points than it possesses at present.

For it will be increased by no less than twenty-six [Greek: schemata]

(figures) and countless corrections or improvements of earlier editions.

The author himself on rereading had thus improved and amplified what had already been issued. As though he foresaw that he would publish no more, he had directed his future editors as to what was to be done about the letterpress and figures; and we shall take care that it is published at the earliest possible date in the German language, in which the author wrote it. It is only to be expected that this will be welcome to the public, who will thus return thanks for the author's burning desire to do something by his discoveries for the public good, and for our own labour and eagerness in publis.h.i.+ng to all nations what appears to be written only for one.

Though these testimonies may often seem either trifling, or obscured by the pedantic affectation of the writers, they, like the signatures of well-respected men, endorse the impression produced by Durer's works and writings. As we study the character of Durer's creative gift in relation to his works, several of the phrases used by Erasmus, Camerarius, and Melanchthon should take added significance, being probably remembered from conversations with the great artist himself.[72] Durer, like Luther, was depressed and distressed at the course the Reformation had run; but, like Erasmus, though regretting and disparaging the present, he looked forward to the future, and knew ”that he would be surpa.s.sed,”

and had no morbid inclination to see the end and final failure of human effort in his own exhaustion.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 70: B. 106, published in 1513. The block is in the Court Library at Vienna. Thawing says it was designed by Burgkmair or Springinklee.]

[Footnote 71: ”_Caput argutum_”. The phrase is from Virgil's description of the thorough-bred horse (_Georg. iii_). The above pa.s.sage is introduced (with modifications) into Melchior Adam's _Vitae Germ.

Philos._ (p.66). where this sentence runs: ”The deep-thinking, serene-souled artist was seen unmistakably in his _arched_ and _lofty_ brow and in the fiery glance of his eye.”]

[Footnote 72: In the foregoing quotations the sentences which seem to me most reminiscent of Durer's ideas are printed in italics.]

PART III

DuRER AS A CREATOR

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER I

DuRER'S PICTURES

I

Durer's paintings have suffered more by the malignity of fortune than any of his other works. Several have disappeared entirely, and several are but wrecks of what they once were. Others are, as he tells us, ”ordinary pictures,” of which ”I will in a year paint a pile which no one would believe it possible for one man to do in the time,” and are perhaps more the work of a.s.sistants than of the master. Others, again, have since been repainted, more or less disastrously. Yet enough remain to show us that Durer was not a painter born, in the sense that t.i.tian and Correggio or Rembrandt and Rubens are; nay, not even in the sense that a Jan Van Eyck or a Mantegna is. Mantegna is certainly the painter with whom Durer has most affinity, and whose method of employing pigment is least removed from his; but Mantegna is a born colourist--a man whose eye for colour is like a musician's ear for melody--while Durer is at best with difficulty able to avoid glaring discords, and, if we are to judge by the ”ordinary pictures,” did not avoid them. Again, Mantegna is not so dependent on line as Durer--nearly the whole of whose surface is produced by hatching with the brush point. These facts may, perhaps, account for the large portion of Durer's time devoted to engraving. As an engraver he early found a style for himself, which he continued to develop to the end of his life. As a painter he was for ever experimenting, influenced now by Jacopo de' Barbari, again by Bellini and the pictures he saw at Venice, and yet again by those he saw in the Netherlands. As Velasquez, after each of his journeys to Italy, returns to attempt a mythological picture in the grand style, so Durer turns to painting after his return from Venice or from the Netherlands; and his pictures divide themselves into three groups: those painted after or during his _Wanderjahre_ and before he went to Venice in 1505, those painted there and during the next five years after his return, and those painted in the Netherlands or commenced immediately on his return thence.

II