THE ENGRAVINGS
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.
THE KNIGHT, DEATH, AND THE DEVIL, by Dürer
The Knight, Death, and the Devil. Upon a splendid steed an armored knight rides through a rocky defile, high above which is seen his goal, an imposing castle. Forms of horror beset the traveler. The horse sniffs impatiently at a skull in the road. King Death himself, mounted on a jaded nag, holds up an hourglass. The Knight’s hours are measured. Behind the horse stalks a swinelike form, which may represent the lower temptations that assail a warrior of the Lord. Regardless of these nightmare shapes, the Knight holds his restive horse in the road. Fortitude has overcome sin and fear of death. Such seems the large, informing idea of a picture which would be exquisite if regarded merely as minute delineations of forms of rocks and trees, and textures of hair and armor.
SAINT JEROME IN HIS STUDY, by Dürer
Saint Jerome in His Study. In depicting the Cardinal Saint, who in the late fourth century translated the Holy Scriptures into eloquent Latin, Dürer may well have wished to emphasize the enviable serenity of the scholar’s lot in contrast with the perilous course of the Knight. Everything in this study speaks of peace and steady, satisfactory endeavor. The light shimmers upon wall, floor, and ceiling like a blessing. It seems as if no sight or sound of troublous or unworthy sort could enter this scholar’s sanctuary. The skull and hourglass are no longer symbols of dread. The saint is oblivious of the passage of time, and looks forward to death as the opening of fuller knowledge. The elaborate and beautiful details of the room assure us that this is no mere dream of an idealist, but an actual place that a student of the divine mysteries might inhabit. A different kind of peacefulness pervades the small engraving of the Hermit Saint, Anthony of Egypt, behind whom rise the picturesque walls and roofs of Dürer’s own Nuremberg.
THE ARTIST’S FATHER
By Dürer