Again that monster Ignorance stirs. For as I speak of colour, as I dogmatise on Titian, I am aware that colour may mean so many different things, and any one who wished to contradict me would be justified in doing so, not because I am wrong and he is right, but because of my difficulty in explaining colour, and his natural wish to aim at my vulnerable spot. Because I am well-nigh daily breaking bread with painters who unconsciously reveal the workings of their mind to me, I know that all the glibly used technical terms of their Art are as fixed as the colour of a chameleon. Different temperaments take on different hues. There is colour in Van Eyck and Crivelli, in Bellini and Botticelli, but deliberate colour harmonies, though arbitrary in choice, belong to Titian.
Dürer is no colourist, because, as we have already said, painting was the problem, not the joy of expression—in that he is Mantegna's equal, and Beato Angelico's inferior.
Thus looking on the "Madonna mit dem Zeisig" at Berlin, we may realise its beauty with difficulty. For whatever it may have been to his contemporaries, to us it means little, by the side of the splendid Madonnas from Italy, or even compared with his own engraved work.
This "Madonna with the Siskin" is a typical Dürer. In midst of the attempted Italian repose and "beauty" of the principal figures, we have the vacillating, oscillating profusion of Gothic detail. The fair hair of the Madonna drawn tightly round the head reappears in a gothic mass of crimped curls spread over her right shoulder. On her left hangs a piece of ribbon knotted and twisted. The cushion on which the infant Saviour sits is slashed, laced, and tassled. The Infant holds a prosaic "schnuller" or baby-soother in His right hand, whilst the siskin is perched on the top of His raised forearm. Of the wreath-bearing angels, one displays an almost bald head, and the background is full of unrest. Even the little label bearing the artist's name, by which old masters were wont to mark their pictures, and which in Bellini's case, for instance, appears plain and flatly fixed, bends up, like the little films of gelatine, which by their movements are thought to betray the holder's temperament.
One of the tests of great Art is its appearance of inevitableness: in that the artist vies with the creator:
"The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line."
There are a good many "lines" in the "Siskin" Madonna which bear cancelling: not one in the Madonna of the title-page of the "Marieenleben," which for that reason is a work of greater Art.
The fact is, that whilst his engraved and black and white work reaches at times monumental height, great in saecula saeculorum, there are too few of his painted pictures that have the power to arrest the attention of the student of Art, who must not be confounded with the student of Art-history.
As a painter he is essentially a primitive; as a graver he overshadows all ages.
Thus we see his great pictures one after the other: his Paumgaertner altar-piece, his "Deposition"—both in Munich; "The Adoration of the Magi" in the Uffizi; the much damaged but probably justly famed "Rosenkranz fest" in Prague, with his own portrait and that of his friend Pirckheimer in the background, and Emperor Max and Pope Julius II. in the foreground; the Dresden altar-piece, or the "Crucifixion," with the soft body of the crucified Christ and the weirdly fluttering loin-cloth; the strangely grotesque "Christ as a Boy in the Temple" in the Barberini Palace; the "Adam and Eve"; the "Martyrdom of the 10,000 Christians"—thus, I say, we see them one after the other pass before us, and are almost unmoved.