[Illustration: DÜRER'S ARMORIAL BEARINGS Woodcut, B. 160]
CHAPTER VI
DÜRER'S INFLUENCES AND VERSES
I
Before closing this part of my book something must be said of Dürer's influence on other artists. It is one of the foibles of modern criticism to please itself by tracing influences, a process of the same nature as that of tracing resemblances to ferns and other growths on a frosted pane. No one would deny that resemblances are there; it is to distinguish them and estimate their significance without yielding to fancifulness, which is the well-nigh hopeless task. It is often forgotten that similar circumstances produce similar effects, and that coincidences from this cause are very rife. Then, too, it is forgotten that the influence that produces rivalry is stronger, more important, and less easily estimated, than that which is expressed by imitation or plagiarism; besides, it affects more original and fertile natures. The stimulus of a great creative personality often is more potent where discernible resemblances are few and vague, than where they are many and obvious. In Dürer's day the study and imitation of antique art which had brought about the Renascence in Italy was the fashion that in successive waves was passing over Europe and moulding the future. He himself felt it, and welcomed it now as an authority not to be gainsaid, and again as an example to be competed against and surpassed. This fashion, this trend of opinion and hope, was the significance behind the effect produced on him by Jacopo de' Barbari, whose charming but ineffectual originality succeeded merely in creating an eddy in that stream. It was the tide behind him which so powerfully stirred and stimulated Dürer. The resemblances traceable between certain still life studies by the two men, or even in figures of their engravings, is insignificant compared with the fact that through Jacopo Dürer probably first felt the energy and true direction of the great tidal waves which were then rolling forth from Italy. Even Mantegna's influence was probably less the effect of a personal affinity than that through him a power streamed direct from the antique dawn. This great and master influence of those days was more one of hope, indefinite, incomprehensible, visionary, than one of knowledge and assured discovery. Raphael may have received it from Dürer, as well as Dürer from Bellini. Figures and incidents from Dürer's engravings are supposed to have been adapted in certain works, if not of his own hand at least proceeding from his immediate pupils. For Raphael, Dürer was a proof of the excellence of human nature in respect to the arts, even when it could not form itself on the immediate study and contemplation of antiques, and thus added to the zest and expectation with which he improved himself in that direction. These great men did not distinguish clearly between pregnancy due to their own efforts, that of their contemporaries and immediate predecessors, and that due to their more mystic passion for antiquity. Michael Angelo, Titian, and Correggio were destined to be the signets by which this great power was to be most often and clearly stamped on the work of future artists. From the unhappy location of his life Dürer was debarred from any such obvious and overwhelming effect on after generations. The influences which helped to shape him were no doubt at work on all the more eminent artists, his fellow-countrymen; on Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach, or Baldung Grien, to mention only the elect. What the stimulus of his achievements, of his renown, meant for these men we have no means of computing; yet we may feel sure that it was vastly more important and significant than any actual traces of imitation or plagiarism from his works, which can with difficulty and for the more part very doubtfully be brought home to them;--vastly more important and significant too we may be sure than his effect upon his pupils and other more or less obscure painters, engravers, and block designers, in whose work actual imitation or adaption of his creations is more certain and more abundant. His pictures, plates, and woodcuts were copied both in Italy and in the North, both as exercises for the self-improvement of artists and to supply a demand for even secondhand reflections of his genius and skill. He was not destined to lend the impress of his splendid personality to the tide of fashion like the great Italians; their influence was to supersede his even in the North.
This is obvious: but who shall compare or estimate the accession of force which the tide as a whole gained from him, or that more latent power which begins to be disengaged from the reserve and lack of proper issue from which he evidently suffered, now that the great tide of the Renaissance has spent its mighty onrush and become merged in the constant movement of life--that power by which he moves us to commiserate his circumstances and to feel after the more and better, which we cannot doubt that he might have given us had he been more happily situated?
[Illustration: THE LAST SUPPER Woodcut, p. 53]