Art in Germany and the Netherlands may be considered as beginning about the middle of the fourteenth century. There is, however, no name of importance in the German school of artists until the time of Albrecht Dürer. Before him painters had shown little or no originality in their work. They had followed the Byzantine models largely, and had been influenced by the servile and narrow influences of the middle ages. With the new intellectual and spiritual life which sprang up in the fifteenth century, artistic life awoke in Germany. Dürer was the first and greatest master of the school. He was born in Nuremberg on the 21st of May, 1471.
His father was a Hungarian, who settled in Nuremberg as a goldsmith. Albrecht Dürer was taught his father’s trade, but fortunately his talent for art was observed, and he was sent, in 1484, a boy of thirteen years, to Schongauer. In 1486 he was apprenticed to Michael Wolgemut for three years. From the studio of his master, Albrecht Dürer passed, in the year 1490, to a new world—he traveled; and in those “wander-years,” which lasted till 1494, he was doubtless laying in stores of learning for the after-time; but unfortunately we know nothing of those years, except that he had a glimpse of Venice, the first sight of the Italian paradise which, in his case, though seen again, never made him unfaithful to the art of his fatherland. In 1494, Albrecht Dürer returned to Nuremberg, and married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a singer. He received two hundred florins with his wife for her dowry, and it has been said that with her he found more than two thousand unhappy days. In 1506, Dürer again traveled to Italy, and found a warm welcome from the painters at Venice, a city which he now beheld for the second time. Doubtless he learned much from the works which he saw, and the criticism which he heard, but, fortunately for his country, he could go to Italy without becoming a copyist. Giovanni Bellini paid him especial honor, and Dürer tells us that he considered Bellini “the best painter of them all.”
Between the years 1507 and 1520, Dürer produced many of his most famous works. In 1509, he bought a house for himself in the Zisselgasse, at Nuremberg. In 1515 Raphael sent a sketch from his own pencil to his great brother, who has been well styled the “Raphael of Germany.” The sketch is in red chalk, and is preserved in the collection of the Archduke Charles, at Vienna. In 1520 we find Dürer appointed court-painter to the emperor, Charles V., a position which he had already held under Maximilian. His own countrymen seem to have been niggardly in their reward of genius, for the court-painter had only a salary of one hundred florins a year, and painted portraits for a florin (about twenty English pence). In the same year Dürer, accompanied by his wife, visited the Netherlands, and at Antwerp, then the most important town of the Low Countries, both he and his wife were entertained at a grand supper; the master has recorded in his journal his pleasure at the honor bestowed upon him. At Ghent and Bruges all were delighted to show their respect for his genius. At Brussels, Dürer was summoned to the court of Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, to whom he presented several engravings. Either through jealous intrigues, or from some other cause, his court favor was of short duration. In Brussels he painted several portraits which were never paid for, and for a time he was in straitened circumstances. Just at this time, however, Christian II., king of Denmark, became acquainted with him, and having shown every mark of honor to the painter, sat to him for his portrait. Soon afterward he returned to Germany.
Once more at home in his beloved Nuremberg, Dürer wrote to remind the Town Council that whilst the people of Venice and Antwerp had offered him liberal sums to dwell among them, his own city had not given him five hundred florins for thirty years of work. But we must pass to the end. Whether the health of Albrecht Dürer had been injured by home cares and the tongue of Agnes Frey, we know not, though many passages in his letters and journal seem to point to this fact. He died on the 6th of April, 1528, and was buried in the cemetery of St. John, at Nuremberg.
Most of Dürer’s works are to be found in Germany. In the Louvre there are only three or four drawings. The Museum of Madrid possesses several of his paintings—a “Crucifixion” (1513), showing the maturity of his genius, two “Allegories” of the same type as the “Dance of Death,” so favorite a subject at this period, and a “Portrait of Himself,” bearing the date 1496. At Munich we may trace, in a series of seventeen pictures, the dawn, the noonday, and the evening of Albrecht Dürer’s art. The “Portrait of his Father,” 1497, is one of his earliest works. His father was then seventy years old. The color is warm and harmonious. The masterpiece of Dürer’s art is the painting of the four apostles—“St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Mark.” This wonderful work is clearly the production of his later years; it bears no date, but the absence of the hardness, which Michael Wolgemut’s workshop had imparted to his early style, is gone, and the whole work shows the influence of his travels and unflagging study. It is usually assigned to the year 1526. The picture has been supposed to represent the “Four Temperaments,” but there is no satisfactory proof that Dürer intended this.
Vienna possesses some of the finest specimens of his art. In the legend of “The Ten Thousand Martyrs,” who were slain by the Persian king Shahpour II., Dürer has described on a panel of about a foot square every conceivable kind of torture. These horrors are witnessed by two figures which represent the painter himself, and his friend Pirkheimer.
The “Adoration of the Trinity” is one of the most famous of Dürer’s works. It is a vast allegorical picture, representing the Christian Religion.
Of his wood-cuts the best known are the “Apocalypse,” 1498; the “Life of the Virgin,” 1511; and the “History of Christ’s Passion.” Of his copper-plate engravings, “St. Hubert,” “St. Jerome,” and “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” bearing the date 1513, in which we see what Kugler calls “the most important work which the fantastic spirit of German art has ever produced.” The weird, the terrible, and the grotesque look forth from this picture like the forms of some horrible nightmare. Another famous engraving, called “Melancholy,” is full of mystic poetry; it bears the date 1514. To these may be added a series of sixteen drawings in pen and ink on gray paper, heightened with white, representing “Christ’s Passion,” which he never engraved. They are in his best style, and among the finest of his works.