People are always talking of his Knight and Death, and his Melancholia, as if those were his principal works. They are his characteristic ones, and show what he might have been without his anatomy; but they were mere by-play compared to his Greater Fortune, and Adam and Eve. Look at these. Here is his full energy displayed; here are both male and female forms drawn with perfect knowledge of their bones and muscles, and modes of action and digestion,—and I hope you are pleased.
But it is not anatomy only that Master Albert studies. He has a taste for optics also; and knows all about refraction and reflection. What with his knowledge of the skull inside, and the vitreous lens outside, if any man in the world is to draw an eye, here's the man to do it, surely! With a hand which can give lessons to John Bellini, and a care which would fain do all so that it can't be done better, and acquaintance with every crack in the cranium, and every humor in the lens,—if we can't draw an eye, we should just like to know who can! thinks Albert.
So having to engrave the portrait of Melanchthon, instead of looking at Melanchthon as ignorant Holbein would have been obliged to do,—wise Albert looks at the room window; and finds it has four cross-bars in it, and knows scientifically that the light on Melanchthon's eye must be a reflection of the window with its four bars—and engraves it so, accordingly; and who shall dare to say, now, it isn't like Melanchthon?
Unfortunately, however, it isn't, nor like any other person in his senses; but like a madman looking at somebody who disputes his hobby. While in this drawing of Holbein's, where a dim gray shadow leaves a mere crumb of white paper,—accidentally it seems, for all the fine scientific reflection,—behold, it is an eye indeed, and of a noble creature.
170. What is the reason? do you ask me; and is all the common teaching about generalization of details true, then?
No; not a syllable of it is true. Holbein is right, not because he draws more generally, but more truly, than Dürer. Dürer draws what he knows is there; but Holbein, only what he sees. And, as I have told you often before, the really scientific artist is he who not only asserts bravely what he does see, but confesses honestly what he does not. You must not draw all the hairs in an eyelash; not because it is sublime to generalize them, but because it is impossible to see them. How many hairs there are, a sign painter or anatomist may count; but how few of them you can see, it is only the utmost masters, Carpaccio, Tintoret, Reynolds, and Velasquez, who count, or know.
171. Such was the effect, then, of his science upon Dürer's ideal of beauty, and skill in portraiture. What effect had it on the temper and quantity of his work, as compared with poor ignorant Holbein's! You have only three portraits, by Dürer, of the great men of his time, and those bad ones; while he toils his soul out to draw the hoofs of satyrs, the bristles of swine, and the distorted aspects of base women and vicious men.
What, on the contrary, has ignorant Holbein done for you? Shakespeare and he divide between them, by word and look, the Story of England under Henry and Elizabeth.
172. Of the effect of science on the art of Mantegna and Marc Antonio, (far more deadly than on Dürer's,) I must tell you in a future lecture;—the effect of it on their minds, I must partly refer to now, in passing to the third head of my general statement—the influence of new Theology. For Dürer and Mantegna, chiefly because of their science, forfeited their place, not only as painters of men, but as servants of God. Neither of them has left one completely noble or completely didactic picture; while Holbein and Botticelli, in consummate pieces of art, led the way before the eyes of all men, to the purification of their Church and land.
173. III. But the need of reformation presented itself to these two men last named on entirely different terms.