Whatever one's final estimate of his art, Dürer's personality is at once so imposing and so attractive, and has been so endeared to us by familiarity, that something of this personal attachment has been transferred to our aesthetic judgment. The letters from Venice and the Diary of his journey in the Netherlands, which form the contents of this volume, are indeed the singularly fortunate means for this pleasant intercourse with the man himself. They reveal Dürer as one of the distinctively modern men of the Renaissance: intensely, but not arrogantly, conscious of his own personality; accepting with a pleasant ease the universal admiration of his genius-a personal admiration, too, of an altogether modern kind; careful of his fame as one who foresaw its immortality. They show him as having, though in a far less degree, something of Leonardo da Vinci's scientific interest, certainly as possessing a quick, though naive curiosity about the world and a quite modern freedom from superstition. It is clear that his dominating and yet kindly personality, no less than his physical beauty and distinction, made him the center of interest wherever he went. His easy and humorous good- fellowship, of which the letters to Pirkheimer are eloquent, won for him the admiring friendship of the best men of his time.
To all these characteristics we must add a deep and sincere religious feeling, which led him to side with the leaders of the Reformation, a feeling which comes out in his passionate sense of loss when he thinks that Luther is about to be put to death, and causes him to write a stirring letter to Erasmus, urging him to continue the work of reform. For all that, there is no trace in him of either Protestantism or Puritanism. He was perhaps fortunate—certainly as an artist he was fortunate—to live at a time when the line of cleavage between the reformers and the Church was not yet so marked as to compel a decisive action.
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CAST OF [SOME OF THE] CHARACTERS:
Agnes: Dürer's wife
Wilibald Pirkheimer: Dürer's best friend
Wolgemut: The master painter to whom Dürer began formal
training as an apprentice. Later, Dürer painted a richly
detailed self-portrait of him.
Giovanni Bellini: Famous Renaissance painter and
contemporary of Dürer.
Jan van Eyk: Famous Renaissance painter.
Imhof: Hans Imhof, the elder, at Nuremberg; the younger
Imhof was in Venice.
Schott: Kunz Schott, an enemy of the town of Nuremberg.
Weisweber: A Nuremberg general.
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FORMS OF MONEY REFERRED TO IN THE LETTERS:
Marcelli: A Venetian coin worth 10 soldi.
Stiver: A Netherlandish coin worth about 80 pfennigs.
Philip's: A Netherlandish coin worth rather less than a
Rhenish florin.
Crown: A Netherlandish coin worth 6.35 marks.
Noble: The Rosennobel = 8 marks, 20 pfennigs. The Flemish
noble = 9 marks, 90 pfennigs.
Blanke: A silver coin = 2 stivers.
Angel: An English coin = 2 florins, 2 stivers Netherlandish.
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