Dürer. The Holy Family
St. Anne, attended by St. Joseph and St. Joachim, receiving from
His Mother the Infant Jesus
Size of the original woodcut, 9¼ × 6⅛ inches
The years 1510 and 1511 were the most prolific of all, and witnessed the publication of other connected pieces, the Beheading of John the Baptist and Salome bringing the Baptist’s Head to Herod, and then the three little woodcuts, Christ on the Cross, Death and the Soldier, and The Schoolmaster, which Dürer brought out on large sheets at the head of his own verses, signed with a large monogram at the end of all. The single sheets of 1511 include, besides the marvelous Trinity already mentioned, the large Adoration of the Magi, the Mass of St. Gregory, a St. Jerome in his Cell, which is the best, after the celebrated engraving of 1514, of Dürer’s repeated versions of that delightful subject; the Cain and Abel, which is one of the great rarities; two rather unattractive Holy Families; and the beautiful square Saint Christopher, of which many fine impressions are extant to bear witness to its technical virtues. The average level of all the work of the year 1511 is so astonishingly high, that it must be regarded as the culminating period of the woodcuts, just as a slightly later time, the years 1513-14, witnesses the climax of the engravings. In the next few years Dürer’s time was much taken up with carrying out the emperor’s important but rather tiresome commissions for the Triumphal Arch and two Triumphal Cars, the small one which forms part of the Procession, and the much bigger affair, with the twelve horses and allegorical retinue, which did not appear till 1522. All this group offers a rich field of research to the antiquary, but is simply unintelligible without a learned commentary, and appeals much less than the sacred subjects to the average collector and lover of art, who cannot unearth the heaps of pedantic Latin and German literature in which the motives by which Dürer was inspired, if I may use the word, lie buried. Inspiration certainly flagged under the influence of Wilibald Pirkheimer and other learned humanists who encouraged Maximilian in his penchant for allegory, and compelled Dürer, probably somewhat against his will, to use a multitude of symbols, intelligible only to the learned, instead of speaking directly to the populace in the familiar pictorial language derived from old tradition but enriched and ennobled by his own matchless art.
The later woodcuts are comparatively few in number. They include a few that are primarily of scientific interest, such as the celestial and terrestrial globes and the armillary sphere, besides the numerous illustrations to Dürer’s own works on Measurement, Proportion, and Fortification. But among them are the two splendid portraits made from drawings now in the Albertina, the Emperor Maximilian of 1518 and the Ulrich Varnbüler of 1522. Of the former several varieties exist, from no less than four different blocks, and it is now established that the only original version is the very rare one in which the letters “ae” of the word “Caesar” are distinct, not forming a diphthong, and placed within the large “C.” The other cuts are all copies, produced probably at Augsburg, the fine large one, with an ornamental frame and the imperial arms supported by griffins, being indisputably the work of Hans Weiditz. Only three impressions of the original are known, in the British Museum, the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, and the Hofbibliothek at Vienna, in addition to which the École des Beaux-Arts at Paris possesses a fragment damaged by fire at the time of the Commune, when it was still in private hands. It is more generally known that the handsome chiaroscuro impressions of the Varnbüler date, like those of the Rhinoceros, from the seventeenth century, the color blocks having been added in Holland. The brown and green varieties belong to different editions, distinguished by the wording of the publisher’s address at the foot, which in the majority of cases has been cut off.
Dürer. Saint Christopher
Size of the original woodcut, 8⁵⁄₁₆ × 8¼ inches
