Albert Dürer

by T. Sturge Moore

IV

At Venice, perhaps the occasion for his journey thither, Dürer undertook a more important work than any he had yet attempted. The Feast of the Rose Garlands was painted for the high altar of the church of San Bartolommeo, belonging to the German Merchants' Exchange, and close to their Pondaco.[^[73]] In it we find a very considerable influence of Italy in general, and Giovanni Bellini in particular; it is a splendid and pompous parade piece, and probably the portraits of the German merchants which it contained were the part of the work which was most successful, as it was certainly that most congenial to Dürer's genius. The Christ among the Doctors, dated 1506, and now in the Barberini Palace at Rome, might seem to have been painted chiefly to justify Giovanni Bellini's astonishment at the calligraphical painting of hair. It is one of those pictures of which a literary description would please more than the work itself. Though the contrast between the sweet childish face and those of the old worldly scribes is well conceived, it is in reality so violent as to be grotesque, and the play of hands produces the effect of a diagram explanatory of a conjuring trick, or a deaf and dumb alphabet, instead of conveying the inner sense of the scene represented after Rossetti's fashion, who so often succeeded in making hands speak. Another work, which dates from Venice, is the little Crucifixion (at Dresden.) Perhaps the landscape and suffering body are just sufficiently touched with acute emotion to make the arabesque of the two floating ends of the loin-cloth appear a little out of place; for in spite of the delicacy and all but tenderness which Dürer has for once attained to in the workmanship, one's satisfaction seems let and hindered.

V

Shortly after his return from Venice, Dürer completed two life-size panels representing Adam and Eve; there are drawings for them dated during his stay at Venice, but as a work of art they are far less interesting than the engraving of the same subject completed three years earlier. The treatment, even the conception, has been inadequately influenced by the proposed scale of the work. Probably they were like the earlier Hercules, done to please the artist himself rather than some patron; they are an effort to prove that he could do something which was after all too hard for him. Not only had he set himself the problem which the Greeks and Michael Angelo, and Raphael with their aid alone, had solved, of finding proportions suitable to express harmoniously the infinite capacity for complex motion combined with that constancy of intention which gives dignity to men and women alone among animals; but the technical problems involved in representing life-size nude figures against a plain black ground were indeed an unconscious confession that Dürer did not understand paint. There is a copy of these panels, recently attributed to Baldung Grien, in the Pitti. Animals and birds have been added from drawings made by Dürer, but the picture is still farther from success, though Grien may not improbably have executed it with Dürer at his elbow. Dürer made one more attempt at representing a life-size nude, the Lucretia, finished in 1518, at a period when his powers seem to have been clouded, for the few pictures which belong to it are all inferior. However, studies for the figure exist dated 1508, so we may suppose it was a project brought back from Venice. His ill-success with this subject may remind us of Shakespeare's long pedantic exercise in rhyme on the same theme. The pictorial motive of Dürer's work is beautiful and worthy of a Greek: indeed it is identical with that of Watts' Psyche, of which the version in private hands is very superior to that in the Tate Gallery. The position of the bed, the idea of the draperies all are parallel. No doubt the lonely feather shed from Love's wing at which Psyche gazes is both more of a poet's and of a painter's invention than the cold steel of Lucretia's dagger. And in spite of his wide knowledge of Greek and Italian art, our English master could scarcely have produced a work of such classic dignity with the more violent motive of the dagger, which seems to call for "The torch that flames with many a lurid flake," or at least the torpid glow of smouldering embers, to light it in such a manner as would make a really pictorial treatment possible. No doubt Dürer has been misled by a too tyrannous notion as to what ought to be the physical build of so chaste a matron, and in his anxiety to make chastity self-evident, has forgotten to explain the need for it by such a degree of attractiveness as might tempt a tyrant to be dangerous. Just as Shakespeare, in attempting to exhaust every possible motive which the situation comports, has forgotten that for a character that can move us a selection is needed. Another elaborate piece of frigid invention is the Massacre of the Ten Thousand Saints in the reign of Sapor II. of Persia, in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna, dated 1508. However, in this case no doubt Dürer could plead that the subject was not of his own choice, for he was commissioned by the Elector, Frederic the Wise, whose wisdom probably did not extend to a knowledge of what subjects lend themselves to pictorial treatment. Still, making every allowance for these facts, it cannot be admitted that Dürer did the best possible with his subject. Probably it did not move him, and neither does he us. Peter Breughel and Albrecht Altdorfer would certainly have done far better so far as the conception of the picture is concerned, though neither of them had so much skill to waste on its realisation. Nevertheless, this tour de force is the picture of Dürer's most pleasing in surface and colour, with the exception of the Wings of the Dresden Altar-piece. It contains beautiful groups and figures, and is extremely well executed; so that it may amuse and delight the eye for a long time while the significance of the subject is forgotten.

[Illustration: THE MARTYRDOM OF TEN THOUSAND SAINTS UNDER SAPOR II. OF PERSIA--Oil picture. "Iste faciebat anno domini 1508 Albertus Dürer Alemanus">[

VI

We now turn to the third and fourth of the half-dozen pictures of Dürer, which stand out from all the rest by their elaboration and importance. The Coronation of the Virgin (see p. 97), painted as the centre panel of the altar-piece commissioned by Jacob Heller at Frankfort, was unfortunately burnt with the palace at Munich on the night of April 9, 1674; the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria having forced or cajoled the Dominicans, to whose church Heller had left it, to sell it to him. It is now represented by a copy made by Paul Juvenal in its original position, where the almost ruined portraits of Heller and his wife are supposed to have been partly Dürer's, though the other panels are obviously the work of assistants. This work exists for us in a series of magnificent brush drawings in black and white line on grey paper, rather than in the copy, and we can in a measure imagine its appearance by the perfectly-preserved Trinity and All Saints commenced immediately after it for Matthew Landauer, and now in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. Nothing can surpass this last picture in elaboration and finish; the colour, if not beautiful, is rich and luminous; and though it is separate faces and draperies which chiefly delight the eye, the composition of the whole is an adequate adaptation of the traditional treatment for such themes which had been handed down through the middle ages. It invites comparison rather with the similar subjects painted by Fra Angelico than with the Disputa of Raphael, to which German critics compare it; however, it possesses as little of Angelico's sweet blissfulness as the Dominican painter possessed of Dürer's accuracy of hand and searching intensity of visual realisation. Both painters are interested in individuals, and, representing crowds of faces, make every one a portrait; both evince a dramatic sense of propriety in gesture, both revel in bright, clear colours, especially azure; but as the light in Dürer's masterpiece has a rosy hotness, which ill bears comparison with the virginal pearliness of Angelico's heaven, so the costumes and the figures of the Florentine are doll-like, when compared with the unmistakable quality of the stuffs in which the fully-resurrected bodies of Dürer's saints rumple and rustle. The wings of his angels are at least those of birds, though coloured to fancy, while Angelico's are of pasteboard tinsel and paint. But in spite of the comparative genuineness of his upholstery, as a vision of heaven there can be no hesitation in preferring that of the Florentine.

In a frame designed by Dürer and carved under his supervision, this monument to thoroughness and skill was ensconced in a little chapel dedicated to All Saints, which in style approaches our Tudor buildings. There the frame remained till lately with a poor copy of the picture and an inscription in old German to this effect: ('Matthew Landauer completed the dedication of this chapel of the twelve brethren, together with the foundation attached to it, and this picture, in the year 1511 after the birth of Christ,')

Dürer signed his picture with the same Latin formula as that of the Coronation:

"Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg did this the year from when the Virgin brought forth 1511."