Dürer. Portrait of Albert Dürer, aged 56
The rare second state (of 3 states) before the monogram of
Dürer and the date 1527
Size of the original woodcut, 12¾ × 10 inches
Dürer. The Four Riders of the Apocalypse
From “The Apocalypse”
Size of the original woodcut, 15¼ × 11 inches
What was the state of things when Dürer appeared upon the scene? He did so long before the close of the fifteenth century, for his first authenticated woodcut is an illustration to St. Jerome’s Epistles, printed at Basle in 1492. Whether he or an unknown artist is responsible for a large number of other illustrations produced at Basle about 1493-95, is a question about which no consensus of opinion has been formed, and this is not the place to discuss it. All the woodcuts that the world knows and esteems as Dürer’s were produced at Nuremberg after his return from the first Venetian journey (1495). Let us see, for a moment, how they stand comparison with what had gone before them. The older woodcuts are nearly all anonymous, and if they bear any signature, it is that of a woodcutter (Formschneider or Briefmaler) who was a craftsman allied to the joiner, rather than the painter. Just before Dürer’s time the painter begins to make his appearance on the scene as a designer of woodcuts. There are a few isolated cases in which the almost universal rule of anonymity is broken, and we learn from the preface to a book the name of the artist who designed the illustrations. Breydenbach’s “Travels to the Holy Land” (Mainz, 1486) was illustrated by woodcuts after Erhard Reuwich, or Rewich, a native of Utrecht, who had accompanied the author on his journey, and the immense number of woodcuts in the “Nuremberg Chronicle” by Hartmann Schedel (1493) were the work of the painters Wohlgemuth and Pleydenwurff; to whom the much finer illustrations of the “Schatzbehalter” (1491) may also safely be attributed. It is now almost universally believed that the “Master of the Hausbuch,” one of Dürer’s most gifted predecessors in the art of engraving on copper, was also a prolific illustrator, the principal work assigned to him being the numerous illustrations in the “Spiegel der menschlichen Behaltnis” printed by Peter Drach at Speyer about 1478-80. There are speculations, more or less ill-founded, about the illustrators of a few other woodcut books of the fifteenth century, but I believe it is true that the first book after those already named in which the artist’s name is settled beyond doubt is Dürer’s “Apocalypse” of 1498.
Dürer. The Whore of Babylon, Seated upon the Beast with Seven
Heads and Ten Horns
From “The Apocalypse”
Size of the original woodcut, 15¼ × 11 inches