CHAPTER VI
DÜRER'S JOURNEY TO THE NETHERLANDS
I
It is even more the case with Dürer's journal written in the Netherlands than with the letters from Venice that, like life itself, it is full of repetitions and over-insistence on what is insignificant. I quote the most interesting passages, and as there is never a good reason for doing again what has already been well done; I am happy to quote Sir Martin Conway's excellent notes, having found occasion to add only one. Dürer set out on July 12, 1520, with his wife and her maid Susanna. It was probably this Susanna who three years later married Georg Penz, one of "the three godless painters." Dürer took a great many prints and woodcuts, books both to sell and to give as presents; and besides he took a sketch book in which he made silver-point sketches and portraits. A good number of its pages have come down to us, and a great many of the portraits he mentions having taken were done in it, and then cut out to give to the sitter. All these drawings are on the same sized paper. We reproduce one of them here (see page 156). Besides this sketch-book he evidently had a memorandum-book in which he recorded what he did, what he spent, whom he saw, and occasionally what he felt or what he wished. The original is lost, but an old copy of it is in the Bamberg Library.
July 12.--On Thursday after Kilian's, I, Albrecht Dürer, at my own charges and costs, took myself and my wife (and maid Susanna) away to the Netherlands. And the same day, after passing through Erlangen, we put up for the night at Baiersdorf and spent there 3 pounds less 6 pfennigs.
July 13.--Next day, Friday, we came to Forchheim, and there I paid 22 pf. for the convoy.
Thence I journeyed to Bamberg, where I presented the Bishop (Georg III. Schenk von Limburg[[24]]) with a Madonna painting, a Life of our Lady, an Apocalypse, and a Horin's worth of engravings. He invited me as his guest, gave me a Toll-pass[[25]] and three letters of introduction, and paid my bill at the inn, where I had spent about a florin.
I paid six florins in gold to the boatman who took me from Bamberg to Frankfurt.