Albert Durer

T >> T. Sturge Moore >> Albert Durer

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We say a "spirited sketch" as we say "a spirited horse"; but works of
art are instinct with a vast variety of spirits and exert manifold
influences. It is a poverty of language which has confined the use of
this word to one of the most obvious and least estimable. It can be
never too much insisted on that a work of art is something that exerts
an influence, and that its whole merit lies in the quality and degree of
the influence exerted; for those who are not moved by it, it is no more
than a written sentence to one who cannot read.

II

Many people in turning over a collection of Duerer's drawings would be
constantly crying, "How marvellously realistic!" and would glow with
enthusiasm and smile with gratitude for the perception which these words
expressed. Others would say "merely realistic"; and the words would
convey, if not disapprobation for something shocking, at least
indifference. In both cases the word "realistic" would, I take it, mean
that the objects which the pen, brush, or charcoal strokes represented
were described with great particularity. And in the first case delight
would have been felt at recognising the fulness of detailed information
conveyed about the objects drawn--that each drawing represented not a
generalisation, but an individual. In the other case the mind would have
been repelled by the infatuated insistence on insignificant or
negligible details, the absence of their classification and
subordination to ideas. The first of these two frames of mind is that of
Paul Pry, who is delighted to see, to touch, or behold, for whom
everything is a discovery; and there are members of this class of
temperament who in middle life continue to make the same discoveries
every day with zest and a wonder equal to that which they felt when
children. The second of these frames of mind is that of the man with a
system or in search of a system, who desires to control, or, if he
cannot do that, at least to be taken into the confidence of the
controller, or to gain a position from which he can oversee him, and
approve or disapprove. Now neither of these judgments is in itself
aesthetic, or implies a comprehension of Duerer as an artist.

[Illustration: ME-ENTO MEI, 1505. From the drawing in the British
Museum]

The man who cries out: "Just look how that is done!" "Who could have
believed a single line could have expressed so much?" judges as an
artist, a craftsman. The man who, like Jean Francois Millet, exclaims:
"How fine! How grand! How delicate! How beautiful!" judges as a creator.
He sees that "it is good." An artist--a creator--may possess either or
even both the two former temperaments; but as an artist he must be
governed by the latter two, either singly or combined. Duerer, doubtless,
had a considerable share in all four of these points of view. He
delighted in objects as such, in the new and the strange as new and
strange, in the intricate as intricate, in the powerful as powerful. And
above all in his drawings does he manifest this direct and childish
interest and curiosity. He was also in search of a system, of an
intellectual key or plan of things; and in the many drawings he devoted
to explaining or developing his ideas of proportion, of perspective, of
architecture, he shows this bias strongly. But nearly every drawing by
him, or attributed to him, manifests the third of these temperaments.
The never-ceasing economy and daring of the invention displayed in his
touch, or, as he would have said, "in his hand," is almost as signal as
his perfect assurance and composure. And when one reflects that he was
not, like Rembrandt, an artist who made great or habitual use of the
spaces of shade and light, but that his workmanship is almost entirely
confined to the expressive power of lines, wonder is only increased. Of
the fourth character that creates and estimates value, though in certain
works Duerer rises to supreme heights, though in almost all his important
works he appeases expectation, yet often where he could surely have done
much better he seems to have been content not to exert his rarest
gifts, but rather to play with or parade those that are secondary. Not
only is this so in drawings like the _Dance of Monkeys_ at Basle, done
to content his friend the reformer Felix Frey (see page 168), and in the
borders designed to amuse Maximilian during the hours that custom
ordained he should pretend to give to prayer; but there are drawings
which were not apparently thrown as sops to the idleness of others, but
done to content some half-vacant mood of his own (see Lippmann, 41, 83,
394, 4.20, 333).

In such drawings the economy and daring of the strokes is always
admirable, can only be compared to that in drawings by Rembrandt and
Hokusai; but the occasion is often idle, or treated with a condescension
which well-nigh amounts to indifference. There is no impressiveness of
allure, no intention in the proportions or disposition on the paper such
as Erasmus justly praised in the engravings on copper, probably
recollecting something which Duerer himself had said (see page 186).

Yet in his portrait heads the right proportions are nearly always found;
and in many cases I believe it is no one but the artist himself who has
cut down such drawings after they were completed, to find a more
harmonious or impressive proportion (see illustration opposite). And
often these drawings are as perfect in the harmony between the means
employed and the aspect chosen, and in the proportion between the head
and the framing line and the spaces it encloses, as Holbein himself
could have made them; while they far surpass his best in brilliancy and
intensity.

[Illustration: Drawing in black chalk heightened with white on reddish
ground Formerly in the collection at Warwick Castle]

[Illustration: Silver-point drawing on prepared grey ground, in the
collection of Frederick Locker, Esq.]

III

Something must be said of Duerer's employment of the water-colours,
pen-and-ink, silver-point, charcoal, chalk, &c., with which he made his
drawings. He is a complete master of each and all these mediums, in so
far as the line or stroke may be regarded as the fundamental unit; he is
equally effective with the broad, soft line of chalk (see illustration,
page I.), or the broad broken charcoal line (see illustration, page
II.), as with the fine pen stroke (see illustration, page III.), the
delicate silver-point (see illustration, page IV.), or the supple and
tapering stroke produced by the camel's hair brush (see illustration,
page V.). But when one comes to broad washes, large masses of light and
shade, the expression of atmosphere, of bloom, of light, he is wanting
in proportion as these effects become vague, cloudy, indefinite,
mist-like. His success lies rather in the definite reflections on
polished surfaces; he never reproduces for us the bloom on peach or
flesh or petal. He does not revel, like Rembrandt, in the veils and
mysteries of lucent atmosphere or muffling shadow. The emotions for
which such things produce the most harmonious surroundings he hardly
ever attempts to appeal to; he is mournful and compassionate, or
indignant, for the sufferings, of his Man of Sorrows; not tender,
romantic, or awesome. Only with the tapering tenuity and delicate spring
of the pure line will he sometimes attain to an infantile or virginal
freshness that is akin to the tenderness of the bloom on flowers, or the
light of dawn on an autumn morning.[75]

In the same way, when he is tragic, it is not with thick clouds rent in
the fury of their flight, or with the light from shaken torches cast and
scattered like spume-flakes from the angry waves; nor is it with the
accumulated night that gives intense significance to a single tranquil
ray. Only by a Rembrandt, to whom these means are daily present, could a
subject like the _Massacre of the Ten Thousand_ have been treated with
dramatic propriety; unless, indeed, Michael Angelo, in a grey dawn,
should have twisted and wrung with manifold pain a tribe of giants,
stark, and herded in some leafless primeval valley. With Duerer the
occasion was merely one on which to coldly invent variations, as though
this human suffering was a motive for _an_ arabesque. Yet even from the
days when he copied Andrea Mantegna's struggling sea-monsters, or when
he drew the stern matured warrior angels of his Apocalypse fighting,
with their historied faces like men hardened by deceptions practised
upon them, like men who have forbidden salt tears and clenched their
teeth and closed their hearts, who see, who hate; even from these early
days, the energy of his line was capable of all this, and his
spontaneous sense of arabesque could become menacing and explosive.
There are two or three drawings of angry, crying cupids (Lipp., 153 and
446, see illustration opposite), prepared for some intended picture of
the Crucifixion, where he has made the motive of the winged infants
head, usually associated with bliss and scattered rose-leaves, become
terrible and stormy. And the _Agony in the Garden_, etched on iron,
contains a tree tortured by the wind (see illustration), as marvellous
for rhythm, power, and invention as the blast-whipped brambles and naked
bushes that crest a scarped brow above the jealous husband who stabs his
wife, in Titian's fresco at Padua. Again, the unspeakable tragedy of the
stooping figure of Jesus, who is being dragged by His hair up the steps
to Annas' throne, in the _Little Passion_, is rendered by lines instinct
with the highest dramatic power. These are a draughtsman's creations;
though they are less abundant in Duerer's work than one could wish, still
only the greatest produce such effects; only Michael Angelo, Titian, and
Rembrandt can be said to have equalled or surpassed Duerer in this kind,
rarely though it be that he competes with them.

[Illustration: CHERUB FOR A CRUCIFIXION Black chalk drawing heightened
with white on a blue-grey paper In the collection of Herr Doctor
Blasius, Brunswick]

It is for the intense energy of his line, combined with its unique
assurance, that Duerer is most remarkable. The same amount of detail, the
same correctness in the articulation and relation between stem and leaf,
arm and hand, or what not, might be attained by an insipid workmanship
with lifeless lines, in patient drudgery. It is this fact that those who
praise art merely as an imitation constantly forget. There is often as
much invention in the way details are expressed by the strokes of pen or
brush, as there could be in the grouping of a crowd; the deftness, the
economy of the touches, counts for more in the inspiriting effect than
the truth of the imitation. A photograph from nature never conveys this,
the chief and most fundamental merit of art. Reynolds says:

Rembrandt, in older to take advantage of an accident, appears often to
have used the pallet-knife to lay his colours on the canvas instead of
the pencil. Whether it is the knife or any other instrument, _it
suffices, if it is something that does not follow exactly the will.
Accident, in the hands of_ an artist _who knows horn to take the
advantage of its hints, will often produce bold and capricious beauties
of handling_, and facility such as he would not have thought of or
ventured with his pencil, under the regular restraint of his hand.[76]

In such a sketch as the _Memento Mei_, 1505, (_Death_ riding on
horseback,) all those who have sense for such things will perceive how
the rough paper, combined with the broken charcoal line, lends itself to
qualities of a precisely similar nature to those described by Reynolds
as obtained by Rembrandt's use of the pallet-knife. Yet, just as, in the
use of charcoal, the "something that does not follow exactly the will"
is infinitely more subtle than in the use of the palette-knife to
represent rocks or stumps of trees, so in the pen or silver-point line
this element, though reduced and refined till it is hardly perceptible,
still exists, and Duerer takes "the advantage of its hints." And not only
does he do' this, but he foresees their occurrence, and relies on them
to render such things as crumpled skin, as in the sketches for Adam's
hand holding the apple. (Lipp. 234). The operation is so rapid, so
instantaneous, that it must be called an instinct, or at least a habit
become second nature, while in the instance chosen by Reynolds, it is
obvious and can be imagined step by step; but in every case it is this
capacity to take advantage of the accident, and foresee and calculate
upon its probable occurrences, that makes the handling of any material
inventive, bold, and inimitable. It is in these qualities that an artist
is the scholar of the materials he employs, and goes to school to the
capacities of his own hand, being taught both by their failure to obey
his will here, and by their facility in rendering his subtlest
intentions there. And when he has mastered all they have to teach him,
he can make their awkwardness and defects expressive; as stammerers
sometimes take advantage of their impediment so that in itself it
becomes an element of eloquence, of charm, or even of explicitness;
while the extra attention rendered enables them to fetch about and dare
to express things that the fluent would feel to be impossible and
never attempt.

[Illustration: APOLLO AND DIANA--Pen drawing in the British Museum,
supposed to show the influence of the Belvedere Apollo]

IV

Lastly, it is in his drawings, perhaps, even more than in his copper
engravings, that Duerer proves himself a master of "the art of seeing
nature," as Reynolds phrased it; and the following sentence makes clear
what is meant, for he says of painting "perhaps it ought to be as far
removed from the vulgar idea of imitation, as the refined, civilised
state in which we live is removed from a gross state of nature";[77] and
again: "If we suppose a view of nature, represented with all the truth
of the camera obscura, and the same scene represented by a great artist,
how little and how mean will the one appear in comparison of the other,
where no superiority is supposed from the choice of the subject."[78]
Not only is outward nature infinitely varied, infinitely composite; but
human nature--receptive and creative--is so too, and after we have gazed
at an object for a few moments, we no longer see it the same as it was
revealed to our first glance. Not only has its appearance changed for
us, but the effect that it produces on our emotions and intelligence is
no longer the same. Each successful mind, according to its degree of
culture, arrives finally at a perception of every class of objects
presented to it which is most in agreement with its own nature--that is,
calls forth or nourishes its most cherished energies and efforts, while
harmonising with its choicest memories. All objects in regard to which
it cannot arrive at such a result oppress, depress, or even torment it.
At least this is the case with our highest and most creative moods; but
every man of parts has a vast range of moods, descending from this to
the almost vacant contemplation of a cow--the innocence of whose eye,
which perceives what is before it without transmuting it by recollection
or creative effort, must appear almost ideal to the up-to-date critic
who has recently revealed the innocent confusion of his mind in a
ponderous tome on nineteenth-century art. The art of seeing nature,
then, consists in being able to recognise how an object appears in
harmony with any given mood; and the artist must employ his materials to
suggest that appearance with the least expenditure of painful effort.
The highest art sees all things in harmony with man's most elevated
moods; the lowest sees nature much as Dutch painters and cows do. Now we
can understand what Goethe means when he says that "Albrecht Duerer
enjoyed the advantages of a profound realistic perception, and an
affectionate human sympathy with all present conditions." The man who
continued to feel, after he had become a Lutheran, the beauty of the art
that honoured the Virgin, the man who cannot help laughing at the most
"lying, thievish rascals" whenever they talk to him because "they know
that their knavery is no secret, but 'they don't mind,'" is
affectionate; he is amused by monkeys and the rhinoceros; he can bear
with Pirkheimer's bad temper; he looks out of kindly eyes that allow
their perception of strangeness or oddity to redeem the impression that
might otherwise have been produced by vice, or uncouthness, or
sullen frowns.

I have supposed that a realistic perception was one which saw things
with great particularity; and the words "a profound realistic
perception" to Goethe's mind probably conveyed the idea of such a
perception, in profound accord with human nature, that is where the
human recognition, delight and acceptance followed the perception even
to the smallest details, without growing weary or failing to find at
least a hope of significance in them. If this was what the great critic
meant, those who turn over a collection of Duerer's drawings will feel
that they are profoundly realistic (realistic in a profoundly human
sense), and that their author enjoyed an affectionate human sympathy
with all present conditions; and by these two qualities is infinitely
distinguished from all possessors of so-called innocent eyes, whether
quadruped or biped.

It is well to notice wherein this notion of Goethe's differs from the
conventional notions which make up everybody's criticism. For instance,
"In all his pictures he confined himself to facts," says Sir Martin
Conway,[79] and then immediately qualifies this by adding, "He painted
events as truly as his imagination could conceive them." We may safely
say that no painter of the first rank has ever confined himself to
facts. Nor can we take the second sentence as it stands. Any one who
looks at the _Trinity_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna will see at
once that the artist who painted it did not shut his eyes and try to
conjure up a vision of the scene to be represented; the ordering of the
picture shows plainly throughout that a foregone conventional
arrangement, joined with the convenience of the methods of
representation to be employed, dictated nearly the whole composition,
and that the details, costumes, &c., were gradually added, being chosen
to enhance the congruity or variety of what was already given. Perhaps
it was never a prime object with Duerer to conceive the event, it was
rather the picture that he attempted to conceive; it is Rembrandt who
attempts to conceive events, not Duerer. He is very far from being a
realist in this sense: though certain of his etchings possess a
considerable degree of such realism, it is not what characterises him as
a creator or inventor. But a "profound realistic perception" almost
unequalled he did possess; what he saw he painted not as he saw it, not
where he saw it, but as it appeared to him to really be. So he painted
real girls, plain, ugly or pretty as the case might be, for angels, and
put them in the sky; but for their wings he would draw on his fancy.
Often the folds of a piece of drapery so delighted him that they are
continued for their own sake and float out where there is no wind to
support them, or he would develop their intricacies beyond every
possibility of conceivable train or other superfluity of real garments;
and it is this necessity to be richer and more magnificent than
probability permits which brings us to the creator in Duerer; not only
had he a profound realistic perception of what the world was like, but
he had an imagination that suggested to him that many things could be
played with, embroidered upon, made handsomer, richer or more
impressive. When Goethe adds that "he was retarded by a gloomy fantasy
devoid of form or foundation," we perceive that the great critic is
speaking petulantly or without sufficient knowledge. Duerer's gloomy
fantasy, the grotesque element in his pictures and prints, was not his
own creation, it is not peculiar to him, he accepted it from tradition
and custom (see Plate "Descent into Hell"). What is really
characteristic of him is the richness displayed in devils' scales and
wings, in curling hair or crumpled drapery, or flame, or smoke, or
cloud, or halo; and, still more particularly, his is the energy of line
or fertility of invention with which all these are displayed, and the
dignity or austerity which results from the general proportion of the
masses and main lines of his composition.

V

For the illustration of this volume I have chosen a larger proportion of
drawings than of any other class of work; both because Duerer's drawings
are less widely known than his engravings on metal, and because, though
his fame may perhaps rest almost equally on these latter, and they may
rightly be considered more unique in character, yet his drawings show
the splendid creativeness of his handling of materials in greater
variety. One engraving on copper is like another in the essential
problem that it offered to the craftsman to resolve; but every different
medium in which Duerer made drawings, and every variety of surface on
which he drew, offered a different problem, and perhaps no other artist
can compare with him in the great variety of such problems which he has
solved with felicity. And this power of his to modify his method with
changing conditions is, as we have seen, from the technical side the
highest and greatest quality that an artist can possess. It only fails
him when he has to deal with oil paintings, and even there he shows a
corresponding sense of the nature of the problems involved, if he shows
less felicity on the whole in solving them; and perhaps could he have
stayed at Venice and have had the results of Giorgione's and Titian's
experiments to suggest the right road, we should have been scarcely able
to perceive that he was less gifted as a painter than as draughtsman. As
it is, he has given us water-colour sketches in which the blot is used
to render the foliage of trees in a manner till then unprecedented.
(Lipp. 132, &c.) He can rival Watteau in the use of soft chalk, Leonardo
in the use of the pen, and Van Eyck in the use of the brush point; and
there are examples of every intermediate treatment to form a chain
across the gulf that separates these widely differing modes of graphic
expression. There can be no need to point the application of these
remarks to the individual drawings here reproduced; those who are
capable of recognising it will do so without difficulty.

[Illustration: AN OLD CASTLE Body-dour drawing at Bremen]

VI

In conclusion, Duerer appears as a draughtsman of unrivalled powers. And
when one looks on his drawings as what they most truly were, his
preparation for the tasks set him by the conditions of his life, there
is room for nothing but unmixed admiration. It is only when one asks
whether those tasks might not have been more worthy of such high gifts
that one is conscious of deficiency or misfortune. And can one help
asking whether the Emperor Max might not have given Duerer his Bible or
his Virgil to illustrate, instead of demanding to have the borders of
his "Book of Hours" rendered amusing with fantastic and curious
arabesques; whether Duerer's learned friends, instead of requiring from
him recondite or ceremonious allegories, might not have demanded
title-pages of classic propriety; or whether the imperial bent of his
own imagination might not have rendered their demands malleable, and bid
them call for a series of woodcuts, engravings or drawings, which could
rival Rembrandt's etchings in significance of subject-matter and
imaginative treatment, as they rival them in executive power? In his
portraits--the large majority of which have come down to us only as
drawings, the majority of which were never anything else--the demand
made upon him was worthy; but even here Holbein, a man of lesser gift
and power, has perhaps succeeded in leaving a more dignified, a more
satisfying series; one containing, if not so many masterpieces, fewer on
which an accidental or trivial subject or mood has left its impress.
Yet, in spite of this, it is Duerer's, not Rembrandt's, not Holbein's
character, that impresses us as most serious, most worthy to be held as
a model. It is before his portrait of himself that Mr. Ricketts "forgets
all other portraits whatsoever, in the sense that this perfect
realisation of one of the world's greatest men is worthy of the
occasion." So that we feel bound to attribute our dissatisfaction to
something in his circumstances having hindered and hampered the flow of
what was finest in his nature into his work. From Venice he wrote: "I am
a gentleman here, but only a hanger-on at home." Germany was a better
home for a great character, a great personality, than for a great
artist: Duerer the artist was never quite at home there, never a
gentleman among his peers. The good and solid burghers rated him as a
good and solid burgher, worth so much per annum; never as endowed with
the rank of his unique gift. It was only at Venice and Antwerp that he
was welcomed as the Albert Duerer whom we to-day know, love, and honour.

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