On his return to Nuremberg in the autumn of 1521 he lived entirely for his art and remote from all else, clinging to the opinions he had already embraced, or at least suspending his judgment. How greatly the real or imaginary abuses in Catholic practice were capable of exciting him, especially where avarice appeared to play a part, is proved by his indignant inscription in 1523 to an Ostendorfer woodcut, representing the veneration of a picture of our Lady at Ratisbon: “This spectre has risen up against Holy Scripture at Regenspurg ... out of greed of gain”; his wish is that Mary should be rightly venerated “in Christ.” In 1526 he presented his picture of the four Apostles, now the ornament of the Munich Pinacothek, to the Nuremberg bench of magistrates who had just established Protestantism in the city, exhorting them “to accept no human inventions in place of the Word of God, for God will not allow His Word to be either added to or detracted from.” The “warnings,” in the form of texts, afterwards removed, which he placed in the mouths of Peter, John, Paul and Mark in his celebrated picture, also refer to religious seducers and false prophets, more particularly those who seize on the possessions of the poor through avarice and greed. We can hardly do otherwise than apply these texts to the abuses which met with his disapproval, and alleged false teaching of the Catholic Church. It is plain that the Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria understood them in this sense when he ordered their removal. This view is also supported by Dürer’s letter in 1524 to Nicholas Kratzer, in which he says: “We are derided as heretics,” but this must be endured. At a later date Pirkheimer seems to have regarded him as merely “on the way to becoming a Lutheran” (p. 40). It cannot be affirmed with certainty that, when he died suddenly at Nuremberg, on April 6, 1528, he was either entirely convinced of the justice of Luther’s cause or had reverted to Catholicism.[106] At any rate, his art grew up on the soil of the Church.
Luther himself spoke of him after his death, on the strength of the reports received, and, perhaps, also from a desire to reckon him amongst his followers, in a letter to the Nuremberg Humanist Eobanus Hessus, as “the best of men,” and one to be congratulated “for that Christ allowed him to die so happily after such preparation” (“tam instructum et beato fine”), sparing him the sight of the evil days to come. “Therefore may he rest in peace with his fathers, Amen.”[107] Melanchthon says a few words of regret on the death of the great artist, but from them nothing definite can be gathered. Venatorius, the Lutheran preacher at Nuremberg, preached his panegyric.[108] In his letter to Tschertte, in 1530, on the other hand, Pirkheimer counts him, like himself, among those who were at first good Lutherans, but were afterwards disappointed in their hopes. “The close friendship which united Dürer to this passionate and conceited scholar, who could not brook the slightest contradiction, is, in fact, a proof which we must not undervalue, of a certain affinity in their views with regard to the cardinal question of faith and religious belief.”[109] It is not impossible that Dürer, like Pirkheimer, began to have doubts, and withdrew at last the open support he had previously given the Reformers.
The spiritual experiences of Pirkheimer and Dürer help to bring before our eyes typical instances of the false paths followed by many of their contemporaries and the struggles through which they went.
CHAPTER XII
EXCOMMUNICATION AND OUTLAWRY SPIRITUAL BAPTISM IN THE WARTBURG
1. The Trial. The Excommunication (1520) and its Consequences
On June 15, 1520, Leo X promulgated the Bull condemning forty-one Propositions of Luther’s teaching, and threatening the person of their author with excommunication.[110]
The Bull was the result of a formal suit instituted at Rome on the details of which light has been thrown in recent times by Karl Müller, Aloys Schulte and Paul Kalkoff.[111]