Vision and Design

by Roger Fry

The letters from Venice and the Diary of his journey in the Netherlands, which form the matter of this volume, are indeed the singularly fortunate means for this pleasant discourse with the man himself. They reveal Dürer as one of the distinctively modern men of the Renaissance: intensely, but not arrogantly, conscious of his own personality; accepting with a pleasant ease the universal admiration of his genius—a personal admiration, too, of an altogether modern kind; careful of his fame as one who foresaw its immortality. They show him as having, though in a far less degree, something of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific interest, certainly as having a quick, though naïve curiosity about the world and a quite modern freedom from superstition. It is clear that his dominating and yet kindly personality, no less than his physical beauty and distinction, made him the centre of interest wherever he went. His easy and humorous good-fellowship, of which the letters to Pirkheimer are eloquent, won for him the admiring friendship of the best men of his time. To all these characteristics we must add a deep and sincere religious feeling, which led him to side with the leaders of the Reformation, a feeling that comes out in his passionate sense of loss when he thinks that Luther is about to be put to death, and that prompted him to write a stirring letter to Erasmus, in which he urged him to continue the work of reform. For all that, there is no trace in him of either Protestantism or Puritanism. He was perhaps fortunate—certainly as an artist he was fortunate—in living at a time when the line of cleavage between the Reformers and the Church was not yet so marked as to compel a decisive choice. The symbolism of the Church still had for him its old significance, as yet quickened and not discredited by the reformer’s energy. But intense as Dürer’s devotion was, his religious feeling found its way to effective artistic expression only upon one side, namely, the brooding sense which accompanied it, of the imminence and terror of death. How much more definite is the inspiration in the drawing of “Death on a Horse” (in the British Museum), in the “Knight, Death and the Devil,” and in the allied “Melancholia,” than it is in his renderings of the Virgin or indeed of any of the scenes of Christian legend! It is this feeling, too, which gives to his description of his mother’s death its almost terrible literary beauty and power. Nor in the estimate of Dürer’s character must one leave out the touching affection and piety which the family history written by him in 1524 reveals.

So much that is attractive and endearing in the man cannot but react upon our attitude to his work—has done so, perhaps, ever since his own day; and it is difficult to get far enough away from Dürer the man to be perfectly just to Dürer the artist. But if we make the attempt, it becomes clear, I think, that Dürer cannot take rank in the highest class of creative geniuses. His position is none the less of great importance and interest for his relation on the one hand to the Gothic tradition of his country, and on the other to the newly perceived splendours of the Italian Renaissance.

Much must depend on our estimate of his last work, the “Four Apostles,” at Munich. In that he summed up all that the patient and enthusiastic labour of a lifetime had taught him. If we regard that as a work of the highest beauty, if we can conscientiously put it beside the figures of the Sistine Chapel, beside the Saints of Mantegna, or Signorelli, or Piero della Francesca, then indeed Dürer’s labour was crowned with success; but if we find in it rather a careful exposition of certain theoretical principles, if we find that the matter is not entirely transfused with the style, if we find a conflict between a certain naïve crudity of vision and a straining after the grand manner, then we have to say that Dürer’s art was the outcome of a magnificent and heroic but miscalculated endeavour.

It is one of the ironies of history that the Romans, the only Philistine people among Mediterranean races, should have been the great means of transmitting to the modern world that culture which they themselves despised, and that the Germans should have laboured so long and hard to atone for the heroism of their ancestors in resisting that beneficent loss of liberty. Nuremberg of the fifteenth century was certainly given over to the practice of fine art with a pathetic enthusiasm, and it remains as a sad but instructive proof of how little good-will and industry avail by themselves in such matters. The worship of mere professional skill and undirected craftsmanship is there seen pushed to its last conclusions, and the tourist’s wonder is prompted by the sight of stone carved into the shapes of twisted metal, and wood simulating the intricacies of confectionery, his admiration is canvassed by every possible perversion of technical dexterity. Not “What a thing is done!” but, “How difficult it must have been to do it!” is the exclamation demanded.

Of all that perverted technical ingenuity which flaunts itself in the wavering stonework of a Kraft or the crackling woodwork of a Storr, Dürer was inevitably the heir. He grew up in an atmosphere where the acrobatic feats of technique were looked on with admiration rather than contempt. Something of this clung to him through life, and he is always recognised as the prince of craftsmen, the consummate technician. In all this side of Dürer’s art we recognise the last over-blown efflorescence of the mediæval craftsmanship of Germany, of the apprentice system and the “master” piece; but that Gothic tradition had still left in it much that was sound and sincere. Drawing still retained something of the blunt, almost brutal frankness of statement, together with the sense of the characteristic which marked its earlier period. And it is perhaps this inheritance of Gothic directness of statement, this Gothic realism, that accounts for what is ultimately of most value in Dürer’s work. There exists in the Kunsthistorisches Akademie at Vienna a painting of a man, dated 1394, which shows how much of Dürer’s portraiture was already implicit in the Nuremberg school. In this remarkable work, executed, if we may trust the date, nearly a century before Dürer, there is almost everything that interests us in Dürer’s portraits. Indeed, it has to an even greater extent that half-humorous statement of the characteristic, that outrageous realism that makes the vivid appeal of the Oswold Krell, and the absence of which in Dürer’s last years makes the Holtschuer such a tiresome piece of brilliant delineation.

Dürer was perhaps the greatest infant prodigy among painters, and the drawing of himself at the age of twelve shows how early he had mastered that simple and abrupt sincerity of Gothic draughtsmanship. One is inclined to say that in none of his subsequent work did he ever surpass this in all that really matters, in all that concerns the essential vision and its adequate presentment. He increased his skill until it became the wonder of the world and entangled him in its seductions; his intellectual apprehension was indefinitely heightened, and his knowledge of natural appearances became encyclopædic.

What, then, lies at the root of Dürer’s art is this Gothic sense of the characteristic, already menaced by the professional bravura of the late Gothic craftsman. The superstructure is what Dürer’s industry and intellectual acquisitiveness, acting in the peculiar conditions of his day, brought forth. It is in short what distinguishes him as the pioneer of the Renaissance in Germany. This new endeavour was in two directions, one due mainly to the trend of native ideas, the other to Italian influence. The former was concerned mainly with a new kind of realism. In place of the older Gothic realism with its naïve and self-confident statement of the salient characteristic of things seen, this new realism strove at complete representation of appearance by means of perspective, at a more searching and complete investigation of form, and a fuller relief in light and shade.

To some extent these aims were followed also by the Italians, and with even greater scientific ardour: all the artists of Europe were indeed striving to master the complete power of representation. But in Italy this aim was never followed exclusively; it was constantly modified and controlled by the idea of design, that is to say, of expression by means of the pure disposition of contours and masses, and by the perfection and ordering of linear rhythm. This notion of design as something other than representation was indeed the common inheritance of European art from the mediæval world, but