VI
But we have been led a long way from Kaiser Max and his portable monument. The reader will re-picture how the court arrived at Nuremberg like a troop of actors, whose performance was really their life, and was taken quite seriously and admired heartily by the good and solid burghers. This old comedy, often farce, entitled "The Importance of Authority," is no longer played with such a telling make-up, or with such showy properties as formerly, but is still as popular as ever; as we Londoners know, since the last few years have given us perhaps an over-dose of processions, illuminations, &c. &c. In this case the chief actors in the show piece were men of mark of an exceptionally entertaining character; with many of them Dürer and Pirkheimer were soon on the best of terms.
Foremost, Johann Stabius, the companion of the Emperor for sixteen years without intermission in war and in peace, who was associated with Dürer to provide the written accompaniment for the monument; a literary jack-of-all-trades of ready wit and lively presence. A contemporary records: "The emperor took constant pleasure in the strange things which Stabius devised, and esteemed him so highly that he instituted a new chair of Astronomy and Mathematics for him at Vienna," in the Collegium Poetarum et Mathematicorum founded in the year 1501, under the presidency of Conrad Celtes.
In all probability there would have been besides the learned protonotary of the supreme court, Ulrich Varenbuler, often mentioned as a friend in the letters of Erasmus and Pirkheimer, and the subject of the largest of Dürer's portrait woodcuts, which shows him to us some ten years later, still a handsome trenchant personality, with a liking for fine clothes, and the self-reliant expression of a man who is conscious that the thought he takes for the morrow is not likely to be in vain.
It may be that Dürer then met for the first time too the Imperial architect, Johannes Tscherte, for whom he afterwards drew two armillary spheres, to take the place of those on which he had cast ridicule; for Pirkheimer wrote to Tscherte: "I wish you could have heard how Albert Dürer spoke to me about your plate, in which there is not one good stroke, and laughed at me. What honour it will do us when it makes its appearance in Italy, and the clever painters there see it!" To which Tscherte replied: "Albert Dürer knows me well, he is also well aware that I love art, though I am no expert at it; let him if he likes despise my plate, I never pretended it was a work of art." And in a later letter he speaks "of the armillary spheres drawn by our common friend Albert Dürer." He was one of those who helped Dürer in his mathematical and geometrical studies; and he, like Pirkheimer, dedicated books to him. Although the mathematics of those times are hardly considered seriously nowadays, they then ranked with verse-making as a polite accomplishment, and had all the charm of novelty. Dürer, no doubt, had some gift that way, as he seems to have made a hobby of them during many years. Besides those who came in the Imperial troop, Dürer had many opportunities of meeting men of this kind, for such were constantly passing through Nuremberg. Dürer has left us what are evidently portraits of some whose names are lost: of others we have both name and likeness, among them the English ambassador, Lord Morley.
In 1515 "Rafahel de' Urbin, who is held in such high esteem by the Pope, he made these naked figures and sent them to Albrecht Dürer at Nuremberg to show him his hand." This shows us that travellers through Nuremberg sometimes brought with them something of the breath of the great Renaissance in Italy. The drawing, which bears the above inscription in Dürer's own handwriting on the back, is a fine one in red sanguine, representing the same male model in two different poses, in the Albertina. Raphael had, we are told by Lodovico Dolce, drawings, engravings, and woodcuts of Dürer's hanging in his studio; and Vasari tells us he said: "If Dürer had been acquainted with the antique he would have surpassed us all." The Nuremberg master, in return for the drawing, sent a portrait of himself to Raphael, which has unfortunately been lost. There appears to have been quite a rage for Dürer's work in Italy, and above all at Rome: we know that it provoked Michael Angelo to remonstrate; probably on many lips it was merely a vaunt of superior knowledge or taste, as rapture over the conjectural friends or aids of a great quatrocentist is to-day. The tokens of esteem which he won from distinguished travellers, and this drawing which reached him testifying to the interest and friendship felt for him by the Italian whose fame was most widespread, must have been full of encouragement, and have compensated in some measure for the feeling he had that he was only a hanger-on at Nuremberg, though he might still have been "a gentleman" in Venice. Yet Nuremberg itself furnished many desirable or notable acquaintances. There was Dürer's neighbour, the jurist, Lazarus Spengler; later the most prominent reformer in Nuremberg, who in 1520 dedicated to him his "Exhortation and Instruction towards the leading of a virtuous life," addressing him as "his particular and confidential friend and brother," whom he considers, "without any flattery, to be a man of understanding, inclined to honesty and every virtue, who has often in our daily familiar intercourse been to me in no common degree a pattern and an example to a more circumspect way of life;" whom, finally, he asks to improve his little book to the best of his ability. Dürer had before this rendered him service in designing his coat of arms for a woodcut and furnishing a frontispiece to his translation of Eusebius' "Life of St. Jerome." He was, moreover, a poet, author of "an often-translated song"; he wrote verses to discourage Dürer from spending his time in producing the doggerel rhymes which at one time he was moved to attempt,--framing poems of didactic import, and publishing one or two on separate sheets with a woodcut at the top, in spite of the inappreciative reception given to them by Spengler and Pirkheimer. Besides Spengler, there were "Christopher Kress, a soldier, a traveller, and a town councillor;" and Caspar Nützel, of one of the oldest families, and Captain-general of the town bands. Both of these went with Dürer to the Diet at Augsburg in 1518. The martial Paumgartners were two brothers for whom Dürer painted the early triptych at Munich (see page 204). One of them is supposed to figure as St. George in the All Saints picture. Lastly, there were the Imhoffs, the merchant princes of Nuremberg, as the Fuggers were at Augsburg. A son of the family married Felicitas, Pirkheimer's favourite daughter, in 1515, and Dürer stood godfather to their little Hieronymus in 1518. It is easy to imagine that there was many a supper and dinner, when a thousand strange subjects were even more strangely discussed; when Pirkheimer now made them roar with a hazardous joke, or again dumbfounded them with Greek quotations pompously done into German, or made their flesh creep and the superstitions of their race stir in them by mysteriously enlarging on his astrological lore,--for to his many weaknesses he added this, which was then scarcely recognised as one.