The most superficial acquaintance with Dürer's drawings will have prepared us for the sight of his simple, unpretentious house and its contents. In his "Birth of the Virgin" he gives us a picture of the German home of his day, where there were few superfluous knick-knacks, but everything which served for daily use was well and strongly made and of good design. Ceilings, windows, doors and door-handles, chests, locks, candlesticks, banisters, waterpots, the very cooking utensils, all betray the fine taste and skilled labor, the personal interest of the man who made them. So in Dürer's house, as it is preserved to-day, we can still see and admire the careful simplicity of domestic furniture, which distinguishes that in the "Birth of the Virgin." The carved coffers, the solid tables, the spacious window-seats, the well-fitting cabinets let into the walls, the carefully wrought metal-work we see there are not luxurious; their merit is quite other than that. In workmanship as in design, how utterly do they put to shame the contents of the ordinary "luxuriously furnished apartments" of the present day!
And what manner of man was he who lived in this house that nestles beneath the ancient castle? In the first place a singularly loveable man, a man of sweet and gentle spirit, whose life was one of high ideals and noble endeavor. In the second place an artist who, both for his achievements and for his influence on art, stands in the very front rank of artists, and of German artists is "facile princeps." At whatever point we may study Dürer and his works we are never conscious of disappointment. As painter, as author, as engraver, or simple citizen, the more we know of him the more we are morally and intellectually satisfied. Fortunately, through his letters and writings, his journals and autobiographical memoirs we know a good deal about his personal history and education.
Dürer's grandfather came of a farmer race in the village of Eytas in Hungary. The grandfather turned goldsmith, and his eldest son, Albrecht Dürer the elder, came to Nuremberg in 1455 and settled in the Burgstrasse (No. 27). He became one of the leading goldsmiths of the town; married and had eighteen children, of whom only three, boys, grew up. Albrecht, or as we call him Albert Dürer, was the eldest of these. He was born May 21, 1471, in his father's house, and Anthoni Koberger, the printer and bookseller, the Stein of those days, stood godfather to him. The maintenance of so large a family involved the father, skilful artist as he was, in unremitting toil.
His father, who was delighted with Albert's industry, took him from school as soon as he had learned to read and write and apprenticed him to a goldsmith. "But my taste drew me toward painting rather than toward goldsmithry. I explained this to my father, but he was not satisfied, for he regretted the time I had lost." Benvenuto Cellini has told us how his father, in like fashion, was eager that he should practise the "accurst art" of music. Dürer's father, however, soon gave in and in 1486 apprenticed the boy to Michael Wolgemut. That extraordinary beautiful, and, for a boy of that age, marvelously executed portrait of himself at the age of thirteen (now at Vienna) must have shown the father something of the power that lay undeveloped in his son. So "it was arranged that I should serve him for three years. During that time God gave me great industry so that I learned many things; but I had to suffer much at the hands of the other apprentices."
When in 1490 his apprenticeship was completed Dürer set out on his Wanderjahre, to learn what he could of men and things, and, more especially, of his own trade. Martin Schongauer was dead, but under that master's brothers Dürer studied and helped to support himself by his art at Colmar and at Bâsle. Various wood-blocks executed by him at the latter place are preserved there. Whether he also visited Venice now or not is a moot point. Here or elsewhere, at any rate, he came under the influence of the Bellini, of Mantegna, and more particularly of Jacopo dei Barbari—the painter and engraver to whom he owed the incentive to study the proportions of the human body—a study which henceforth became the most absorbing interest of his life.
"I was four years absent from Nuremberg," he records, "and then my father recalled me. After my return Hans Frey came to an understanding with my father. He gave me his daughter Agnes and with her 200 florins, and we were married." Dürer, who writes so lovingly of his parents, never mentions his wife with any affection; a fact which to some extent confirms her reputation as a Xantippe. She, too, in her way, it is suggested, practised the art of cross-hatching. Pirkheimer, writing after the artist's death, says that by her avariciousness and quarreling nature she brought him to the grave before his day. She was probably a woman of a practical and prosaic turn, to whom the dreamy, poetic, imaginative nature of the artist-student, her husband, was intolerably irritating. Yet as we look at his portraits of himself—and no man except Rembrandt has painted himself so often—it is difficult to understand how any one could have been angry with Albert Dürer. Never did the face of man bear a more sweet, benign, and trustful expression. In those portraits we see something of the beauty, of the strength, of the weakness of the man so beloved in his generation. His fondness for fine clothes and his legitimate pride in his personal beauty reveal themselves in the rich vestments he wears and the wealth of silken curls, so carefully waved, so wondrously painted, falling proudly over his free neck.
From "The Story of Nuremberg." Published by E.P. Dutton & Co.