Dürer. Christ Bearing His Cross
From “The Great Passion”
Size of the original woodcut, 15¼ × 11⅛ inches
Dr. Naumann, the editor of a recent facsimile of the cuts in the Speyer book just mentioned, claims for the “Hausbuchmeister” that he was the first painter, or painter-engraver, who attempted to get the most out of the craftsmen employed in cutting blocks from his designs. That is rather a speculative opinion, and the woodcuts in question are not, from the technical point of view, superior to many other contemporary illustrations. But there can be no question that Dürer effected an immense reform in this respect, and carried the technique of wood-engraving to a perfection unparalleled in its previous history. Not by his own handiwork, for there is no reason to suppose that Dürer ever cut his blocks himself. All the evidence points, on the contrary, to his having followed the universal practice of the time, according to which the designer drew the composition in all detail upon the wood block, and employed a professional engraver to cut the block, preserving all the lines intact, and cutting away the spaces between them, so that the result was a facsimile of the drawing as accurate as the craftsman was capable of making it. Dürer set his engravers, we may be sure, a harder task than they had ever had to grapple with before, and he must have succeeded in gradually training a man, or group of men, on whom he could rely to preserve his drawing in all its delicacy and intricate complexity. This was a work of time, and perfection was not reached till after Dürer’s return from his second journey to Venice, when a great increase of refinement on the technical side becomes noticeable, culminating in that extraordinary performance, the Holy Trinity woodcut of 1511. But even in the large fifteenth-century blocks, the “Apocalypse,” the earlier portion of the “Great Passion” and the contemporary single subjects, much cross-hatching is used and the space is filled with detail to an extent hitherto unknown. Without ever losing sight of the general decorative effect, the telling pattern of black and white, Dürer put in a vast amount of interesting little things, with the conscientiousness and care that characterized everything that he did, and every detail of the leaves of a thistle or fern, or of the elaborate ornament, birds and flowers and foliage and rams’ heads, on the base of a Gothic candle-stick, had to be reproduced so that the crisp clearness of the original pen-drawing lost nothing of its precision. The result was a work so perfectly complete in black and white, as it stood, that nobody ever thought of coloring it, and that in itself was a great innovation and advance. The fifteenth-century “Illuminirer,” or the patron who gave him his orders, seems to have had an instinctive respect for excellent and highly finished work in black and white, which made him leave it alone. Line-engravings of the fifteenth century are very frequently found colored, but they are usually quite second-rate specimens, and prints by the great men, such as the “Master E. S.” and Schongauer, were respected and left alone. But such consideration was not often shown to woodcuts, which were frequently colored, especially when used as illustrations, well into the sixteenth century. It was very rarely, however, that any illuminator laid profane hands on anything of Dürer’s, woodcut or engraving, and when he did so the result is stupid and disagreeable, for it is always the work of a later generation, out of touch with Dürer’s genius.
Dürer. The Resurrection
From “The Great Passion”
Size of the original woodcut, 15⅜ × 10⅞ inches
Dürer. Samson and the Lion
Size of the original woodcut, 15 × 10⅞ inches