IV
At Venice, perhaps the occasion for his journey thither, Dürer undertook a more important work than any he had yet attempted. The Feast of the Rose Garlands was painted for the high altar of the church of San Bartolommeo, belonging to the German Merchants' Exchange, and close to their Pondaco.[[73]] In it we find a very considerable influence of Italy in general, and Giovanni Bellini in particular; it is a splendid and pompous parade piece, and probably the portraits of the German merchants which it contained were the part of the work which was most successful, as it was certainly that most congenial to Dürer's genius. The Christ among the Doctors, dated 1506, and now in the Barberini Palace at Rome, might seem to have been painted chiefly to justify Giovanni Bellini's astonishment at the calligraphical painting of hair. It is one of those pictures of which a literary description would please more than the work itself. Though the contrast between the sweet childish face and those of the old worldly scribes is well conceived, it is in reality so violent as to be grotesque, and the play of hands produces the effect of a diagram explanatory of a conjuring trick, or a deaf and dumb alphabet, instead of conveying the inner sense of the scene represented after Rossetti's fashion, who so often succeeded in making hands speak. Another work, which dates from Venice, is the little Crucifixion (at Dresden.) Perhaps the landscape and suffering body are just sufficiently touched with acute emotion to make the arabesque of the two floating ends of the loin-cloth appear a little out of place; for in spite of the delicacy and all but tenderness which Dürer has for once attained to in the workmanship, one's satisfaction seems let and hindered.