245. PORTRAIT OF A SENATOR.
Hans Baldung (German-Swabian: 1476-1545).
This portrait is dated 1514, and signed with the monogram of Albert Dürer, to whom it was formerly ascribed. But the monogram is now said to be a forgery, and the picture is identified as the work of Dürer's friend Baldung. On the death of Dürer (in 1528) Baldung received a lock of his hair (now preserved in the Library of the Academy of Arts at Vienna), and Dürer, in his Journal in the Low Countries, records having sold several of Baldung's engravings. Baldung, painter, engraver, and designer, was a native of Gmünd in Swabia, and his earliest works show the influence of Martin Schongauer (see 658). He lived at Freiburg-in-the-Breisgau (in the monastery at which place is his greatest work, a "Coronation of the Virgin"), and also at Strassburg, of which latter city he became a senator shortly before his death. Baldung's portraits, says the Official Catalogue, "are highly individual and full of character. When unsigned they have sometimes passed for the work of Dürer, but they want his searching modelling." Baldung acquired and adopted the name of Green or Grün, either from his habit of dressing in that colour or from his fondness for a peculiarly brilliant tint of green often found in his pictures.
The influence of Dürer was strong on Hans Baldung, and a similar spirit is discernible in the works of both painters. This old man, strong and yet melancholy, is precisely true to Dürer's favourite type of human strength founded on labour and sorrow. And the choice of this type is characteristic of his mind. With the Reformation came, says Mr. Ruskin, "the Resurrection of Death. Never, since man first saw him face to face, had his terror been so great." Nothing shows the character of men of that time so clearly as the way in which they severally meet the King of Terror. "It haunted Dürer long; and the answer he gave to the question of the grave was that of patient hope; and twofold, consisting of one design in praise of Fortitude, and another in praise of Labour.... The plate of 'Melancholia' is the history of the sorrowful toil of the earth, as the 'Knight and Death' is of its sorrowful patience under temptation" (Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv.).