“Just a year after she had fallen ill, my mother died in a Christian manner, after having received full absolution. Before dying she gave me her blessing, and with many pious words invoked upon me the peace of God, recommending me above all to keep myself from all sin. She had much fear of death, but, she said, she had no fear of appearing before the Lord. She suffered when she died, and I observed that she saw before her something which terrified her, for she asked for holy water, although she had not uttered a word for a long time. At last her eyes grew fixed and I saw Death deal her two great blows to the heart. Then she closed her eyes and mouth and died suffering. I betook myself to reciting prayers at her side, and experienced such paroxysms of anguish as I cannot express to you. May God have mercy on my mother! It was always her greatest joy to speak to us of God, and she saw with gladness everything that could increase the glory of the Lord. She was sixty-three years of age when she died, and I had her interred honourably according to my means. May our Lord give me grace to die a holy death even as she died! May God with all the heavenly host, my father, my mother, my relatives and my friends, be present at my end! May God Almighty grant us the life everlasting! Amen. And after my mother was dead her face became more beautiful than it had been during her life.”
Sorrow is the source of most great works of art. In his sorrow Durer produced his three most famous, best-wrought engravings, works full of imagination and of thought, works in which, expressed in exquisite draughtsmanship, lies his whole philosophy. Through St. Jerome in his Library, The Knight, Death and the Devil, and Melencolia, Durer has more than elsewhere revealed himself to us and shown us his outlook upon things, his manner of regarding the world, his criticism of life.
On the death of Maximilian Durer travelled to the Court of Charles V. in order to get his pension confirmed. He succeeded in his object, and, after travelling through the Netherlands, where he was accorded a great reception, he returned to Nuremberg in 1521, having refused the pressing invitation of the Council of Antwerp that he should take up his residence in their city. When he returned he received another commission from the Rat—to design decorative paintings for the great hall of the Council-house. But Durer’s health was broken and his prolific imagination was flagging. He seems to have taken little interest in this commission. He chose the time-worn subject of the Calumny of Apelles for one design, and used his unfinished sketch of Maximilian’s Triumphal Car for the other. The painting was carried out by Georg Pencz and others of his pupils. Durer’s last great imaginative effort was the painting of the Four Preachers, two large upright panels with figures of St. Peter and St. John on the one, and St. Mark and St. Paul on the other. These, as his final message to his native town, he presented in 1526 to his gunstigen und gnädigen Herren, the Council of Nuremberg.
Painter, designer, engraver, mathematician, Durer was also an author. The year before he died, he published his “Instructions how to Use the Compass” and “Instructions how to Fortify Towns, Castles, and Villages,” and after his death appeared the four books of his life-long work on “The Human Proportions.”
His life had been passed in a strenuous endeavour to perfect his art: he died amid a universal chorus of regret, on April 6th, 1528. His grave is in St. John’s Churchyard (No. 649). A plain bronze plate on the headstone bears his well-known monogram and the following inscription:—
Me(ister) Al(brecht) Du(rer)
Quicquid Alberti Dvreri Mortale
Fuit, Svb Hoc Conditur Tumulo.
Emigravit, viii, Idus Aprile,
M., D. XXVIII.
“I can truthfully say,” wrote Durer to the Council, “that in the thirty years I have stayed at home, I have not received from people in this town work worth 500 gulden—truly an absurd and trifling sum—and not a fifth part of that has been profit.” After his death his fellow-citizens became more fully alive to the value of his works, and the worthy shopkeepers began those transactions which gradually stripped Nuremberg of almost all the master’s drawings and paintings. I borrow the following account from Mr Lionel Cust’s excellent monograph on “The Paintings and Drawings of Albert Durer”:—
“The greater part of his drawings, which were made for his own use, appear to have passed into the possession of his life-long friend, Pirkheimer, perhaps handed over by Durer’s widow to redeem the many financial obligations under which Durer lay to his friend. The sketch-books used by Durer in the Netherlands seem to have passed into the possession of the Pfinzing family, and were dispersed by their next owner. At Pirkheimer’s death the whole of his collections, including the paintings and drawings by Durer, became the property of the Imhoff family, the bankers and usurers of Nuremberg. The Imhoffs, as befits a good, steady, money-making firm, seem to have regarded Durer’s works as a marketable commodity. At the end of the sixteenth century, when the Emperor Rudolph II. was forming his great collection of works of art and curiosities, the Imhoffs, knowing his intense admiration for the works of Durer, pressed upon him the collection of paintings and drawings which they possessed. The Town Council of Nuremberg seem to have followed suit with the paintings which were immediately under their control, if not actually in their possession. In a short time Rudolph became possessed of the bulk of Durer’s paintings and drawings at Prague or Vienna. Several of the paintings remain in the Imperial collection to this day, and a large portion of the drawings now forms the nucleus of what is known as the ‘Albertina’ collection at Vienna. Another portion of the Imhoff collection found its way through a collector in the Netherlands, perhaps through one of the Austrian governors, into that of Sir Hans Sloane, and is now in the print-room at the British Museum. These two collections, together with the great collection, which official industry and acumen have brought together at Berlin, are the best field for the study of Durer’s work as a draughtsman, although in some of the smaller public or private collections some of the most remarkable examples are to be found.
“The good citizens of Nuremberg continued their work of converting Durer’s works into hard cash whenever the opportunity occurred. In 1585 the Town Council persuaded or compelled the governors of the Landauer almshouses to sell to the Emperor Rudolph their great painting of All Saints, replacing it by a copy which, by way of carrying out the deception, was inserted in the original frame designed by Durer. The Adam and Eve also appear to have passed into the same Imperial hands. In 1627 the Council sold to the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria the two great panels of the Four Preachers, Durer’s last gift to his native town, and replaced them by copies. The long inscriptions from the Bible were cut off from the original panels and added on below the copies. A few years before, in 1613, they had presented the same Elector with the beautiful Baumgärtner altar-piece, which was torn from its place in St. Catherine’s Church at Nuremberg. The two Descents from the Cross followed in the same channel: and the Praun collection at Nuremberg yielded up the portrait of Wolgemut and the portrait of Hans Durer. Worst of all, the portrait of their beloved and honoured citizen, the world-famous portrait of Durer by himself, which had become actually the property of the Town Council, was lent by them to a local painter to copy; this ingenious craftsman sawed the panel in half, and glued his copy on to the back, on which were the town seal and other marks of ownership, and sold the original to King Ludwig of Bavaria. The worthy magistrates never discovered the fraud, or pretended not to, and this copy hangs to-day at Nuremberg a monument of dishonour and fraud. Gradually Nuremberg divested itself of every work by Durer which it could, and rejoiced in its copies and its cash. Ludwig I. of Bavaria took pity on its denuded condition, and gave back to it as a gift the Descent from the Cross, known as the Peller altar-piece, and also apparently returned from Schleissheim the Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds. With the overdaubed paintings of Charlemagne and Sigismund, these appear to be the only authenticated paintings by Durer in his native town at the present day. Three hundred years after Durer’s death, a statue was erected to him in Nuremberg, and his house is now preserved and shown as a national relic. Yet little more than fifty years after the erection of this statue, in 1884, the citizens allowed the famous ‘Holzschuher’ portrait, the last great work by Durer which the town possessed, to be sold by the family, to whom it still belonged, to the Munich Gallery. Truly a prophet hath little honour in his own country!”