On the three excellent engravers representative of the first, middle, and late schools.
XII.
The Coronation in the Garden.
247. I have given opposite a photograph, slightly reduced from the Dürer Madonna, alluded to often in the text, as an example of his best conception of womanhood. It is very curious that Dürer, the least able of all great artists to represent womanhood, should of late have been a very principal object of feminine admiration. The last thing a woman should do is to write about art. They never see anything in pictures but what they are told, (or resolve to see out of contradiction,)—or the particular things that fall in with their own feelings. I saw a curious piece of enthusiastic writing by an Edinburgh lady, the other day, on the photographs I had taken from the tower of Giotto. She did not care a straw what Giotto had meant by them, declared she felt it her duty only to announce what they were to her; and wrote two pages on the bas-relief of Heracles and Antæus—assuming it to be the death of Abel.
248. It is not, however, by women only that Dürer has been over-praised. He stands so alone in his own field, that the people who care much for him generally lose the power of enjoying anything else rightly; and are continually attributing to the force of his imagination quaintnesses which are merely part of the general mannerism of his day.
The following notes upon him, in relation to two other excellent engravers, were written shortly for extempore expansion in lecturing. I give them, with the others in this terminal article, mainly for use to myself in future reference; but also as more or less suggestive to the reader, if he has taken up the subject seriously, and worth, therefore, a few pages of this closing sheet.
249. The men I have named as representative of all the good ones composing their school, are alike resolved their engraving shall be lovely.
But Botticelli, the ancient, wants, with as little engraving, as much Sibyl as possible.