Some time after his marriage with Agnes Frey, Dürer moved into the new house near the Thiergärtner Gate, which had perhaps been bought with the dowry of his bride. Here he labored until his death, and executed his most famous works. It is a spacious house, with a lower story of stone, wide portals, a paved interior court, and pleasant upper rooms between thick half-timber walls, whose mullioned windows look out on lines of quaint Gothic buildings and towers, and on the broad paved square at the foot of the Zisselgasse (now Albrecht-Dürer-Strasse). Just across the square was the so-called “Pilate’s House,” whose owner, Martin Koetzel, had made two pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and brought back measurements of the Dolorous Way. The artist’s house is now carefully preserved as public property, and contains the gallery of the Dürer Art-Union. In 1828, on the third centennial of his death, the people erected a bronze statue of the master, designed by Rauch, on the square before the house.
In 1509-10 Dürer derived pleasure and furnished much amusement to his friends from verse-making, in which he suffered a worse failure even than Raphael had done. It seems that Pirkheimer ridiculed a long-drawn couplet which he had made, upon which the master composed a neat bit of proverbial philosophy, of which the following is a translation:—
“Strive earnestly with all thy might,
That God should give thee Wisdom’s light;
He doth his wisdom truly prove,
Whom neither death nor riches move;
And he shall also be called wise,
Who joy and sorrow both defies;
He who bears both honor and shame,
He well deserves the wise man’s name;
Who knows himself, and evil shuns,
In Wisdom’s path he surely runs;
Who ’gainst his foe doth vengeance cherish,
In hell-flame cloth his wisdom perish;
Who strives against the Devil’s might,
The Lord will help him in the fight;
Who keeps his heart forever pure,
He of Wisdom’s crown is sure;
And who loves God with all his heart,
Chooses the wise and better part.”
But Pirkheimer was not more pleased with this; and the witty Secretary Spengler sent Dürer a satirical poem, applying the moral of the fable of the shoemaker who criticised a picture by Apelles. He answered this in a song of sixty lines, closing with,—
“Therefore I will still make rhymes,
Though my friend may laugh at times:
So the Painter with hairy beard
Says to the Writer who mocked and jeered.”
“1510, this have I made on Good and Bad Friends.” Thus the master prefaces a platitudinous poem of thirty lines; which was soon followed by “The Teacher,” of sixty lines. Later in the year he wrote the long Passion-Song, which was appended to the print of Christus am Kreuz. It is composed of eight sections, of ten lines each, and is full of quaint mediæval tenderness and reverence, and the intense prayerfulness of the old German faith. The sections are named Matins, the First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours, Vespers, Compline, and Let Us Pray, the latter of which is redolent with earnest devotion:—
“O Almighty Lord and God,
Who the martyr’s press hast trod;
Jesus, the only God, the Son,
Who all this to Thyself hast done,
Keep it before us to-day and to-morrow,
Give us continual rue and sorrow;
Wash me clean, and make me well,
I pray Thee, like a soul from hell.
Lord, Thou hast overcome: look down;
Let us at last to share the crown.”
The marvellous high-relief of “The Birth of St. John the Baptist” was executed in 1510, and shows Dürer’s remarkable powers as a sculptor. It is cut in a block of cream-colored lithographic stone, 7½ × 5½ inches in size, and is full of rich and minute pictorial details. Elizabeth is rising in bed, aided by two attendants; and the old nurse brings the infant to Zacharias, who writes its name on a tablet, while two men are entering at the doorway. The room is furnished with the usual utensils and properties of a German bedroom. This wonderful and well-preserved work of art was bought in the Netherlands about eighty years ago, for $2,500, and is now in the British Museum. The companion-piece, “St. John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness,” is now in the Brunswick Museum, and is carved with a similar rich effect. This museum also contains a carving in wood, representing the “Ecce Homo.”
Space would fail to tell of the many beautiful little pieces of sculpture which Dürer executed in ivory, boxwood, and stone, or of the numerous excellently designed medals ascribed to him. Chief among these was the exquisite “Birth of Christ,” and the altar of agate, formerly at Vienna; Adam and Eve, in wood, at Gotha; reliefs of the Birth and the Agony of Christ, in ivory; the Four Evangelists, in boxwood, lately at Baireuth; several carvings on ivory, of religious scenes, at Munich; a woman with padlocked mouth, sitting in the stocks, cut in soapstone; a delicate relief of the Flight into Egypt; busts of the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy; and the Love-Fountain, now at Dresden, with figures of six persons drinking the water.