The Mentor: Two Early German Painters, Dürer and Holbein, Vol. 1, Num. 48, Serial No. 48

By FRANK JEWETT MATHER, Jr.
Marquand Professor of Art and Archeology, Princeton University
THE MENTOR
SERIAL No. 48
DEPARTMENT OF FINE ARTS
MENTOR GRAVURES
A great painter gives us much more than skilfully arranged lines and colors. These are only the symbols by which we may share his vision of the world. What we must try to find in any work of art is the soul of a great man. This is particularly true of so serious an artist as Albrecht Dürer (doo´-rer) of Nuremberg, who was born in 1471, a little before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation. In that movement he shared heartily, but without bitterness for the Catholic Church, in which he had been bred. He was a broad-minded Christian, a thoughtful and thorough craftsman. In the little drawing he did of himself at thirteen we see the serious, worried lad already a competent draftsman. We may see him again in the Madrid portrait, the confident young painter of twenty-seven; at Munich, the mature and dignified artist of thirty-six; and finally, in the haggard woodcut profile, as a man grown old with unabated ardor of spirit.
The accent of study and concentration is present at every stage. He painted so carefully that such work did not pay him. The engravings, of which he did about 100 with his own hand, brought him in a comfortable fortune. They are marvels of faithful observation and of minute execution. When old age and illness made painting and engraving difficult, he wrote books on the proportions of the human body and the art of fortification. We must not expect a man of such stern and high ideals to be charming. He may, however, have many true things to tell about life and character that it behooves us to know.
MICHAEL WOHLGEMUTH
By Dürer
At fifteen Dürer was apprenticed to the painter and woodcutter, Michael Wohlgemuth. The lad saw the advantages of the new process of woodcutting and copperplate engraving, by which a design might be multiplied. Then the good wife Agnes, whom he married by parental arrangement at twenty-three, came to be a thrifty saleswoman for the prints. The work was of the most taxing kind, being all done under a magnifying lens. When the firm lines had been graven in the copper they were filled with ink, which under heavy pressure from a roller press was transferred to paper. The lines of Dürer were so fine and closely spaced that the whole print got a charming pearly quality which is well represented in our reproductions. Bible stories, the life of Christ and the Virgin, popular customs, portraits of his learned friends, and a strange series of plates having a moral meaning may be specially noted. In 1513 and 1514 he engraved what are called the four master plates, two of which are reproduced.