portrait of himself, very finely dressed and in the first bloom of his admirable manly beauty, dated 1493 and originally painted on vellum but since transferred to canvas (this is the portrait of the Felix Goldschmid collection); a miniature painting on vellum at Vienna (a small figure of the Child-Christ); and some half a dozen drawings, of which the most important are the characteristic pen portrait of himself at Erlangen, with a Holy Family on the reverse much in the manner of Schongauer; another Holy Family in nearly the same style at Berlin; a study from the female nude in the Bonnat collection; a man and woman on horseback in Berlin; a man on horseback, and an executioner about to behead a young man, at the British Museum, &c. These drawings all show Dürer intent above all things on the sternly accurate delineation of ungeneralized individual forms by means of strongly accented outline and shadings curved, somewhat like the shadings of Martin Schongauer’s engravings, so as to follow their modellings and roundness.
Within a few weeks of his return (July 7th, 1494) Dürer was married, according to an arrangement apparently made between the parents during his absence, to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant of the city. By the autumn of the same year, probably feeling the incompleteness of the artistic training that could be obtained north of the Alps, he must have taken advantage of some opportunity, we know not what, to make an excursion of some months to Italy, leaving his lately married wife at Nuremberg. The evidences of this travel (which are really incontestable, though a small minority of critics still decline to admit them) consist of (1) some fine drawings, three of them dated 1494 and others undated, but plainly of the same time, in which Dürer has copied, or rather boldly translated into his own Gothic and German style, two famous engravings by Mantegna, a number of the “Tarocchi” prints of single figures which pass erroneously under that master’s name, and one by yet another minor master of the North-Italian school; with another drawing dated 1495 and plainly copied from a lost original by Antonio Pollaiuolo, and yet another of an infant Christ copied in 1495 from Lorenzo di Credi, from whom also Dürer took a motive for the composition of one of his earliest Madonnas; (2) several landscape drawings done in the passes of Tirol and the Trentino, which technically will not fit in with any other period of his work, and furnish a clear record of his having crossed the Alps about this date; (3) two or three drawings of the costumes of Venetian courtesans, which he could not have made anywhere but in Venice itself, and one of which is used in his great woodcut Apocalypse series of 1498; (4) a general preoccupation which he shows for some years from this date with the problems of the female nude, treated in a manner for which Italy only could have set him the example; and (5) the clear implication contained in a letter written from Venice in 1506 that he had been there already eleven years before; when things, he says, pleased him much which at the time of writing please him no more. Some time in 1495 Dürer must have returned from this first Italian journey to his home in Nuremberg, where he seems to have lived, without further change or removal, in the active practice of his art for the next ten years.
The hour when Dürer, the typical artist of the German nation, attained maturity was one of the most pregnant in the history of his race. It was the crisis, in northern Europe, of the transition between the middle ages and our own. The awakening of Germany at the Renaissance was not, like the awakening of Italy a generation or two earlier, a movement almost exclusively intellectual. It was indeed from Italy that the races of the north caught the impulse of intellectual freedom, the spirit of science and curiosity, the eager retrospect towards the classic past; but joined with these in Germany was a moral impulse which was her own, a craving after truth and right, a rebellion against spiritual tyranny and corruption—the Renaissance was big in the north, as it was not in the south, with a Reformation to come. The art of printing had been invented in good time to help and hasten the new movement of men’s minds. Nor was it by the diffusion of written ideas only that the new art supplied the means of popular enlightenment. Along with word-printing, or indeed in advance of it, there had sprung into use another kind of printing, picture-printing, or what is commonly called engraving. Just as books were the means of multiplying, cheapening and disseminating ideas, so engravings on copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening and disseminating images which gave vividness to the ideas, or served, for those ignorant of letters, in their stead. Technically one of these arts, that of line-engraving on copper, sprang from the craft of the goldsmith and metal-chaser; while that of wood-engraving sprang from the craft of the printers of pattern-blocks and playing cards. The engraver on metal habitually cut his own designs, and between the arts of the goldsmith and the painter there had always been a close alliance, both being habitually exercised by persons of the same family and sometimes by one and the same person; so that there was no lack of hands ready-trained for the new craft which required of the man who practised it that he should design like a painter and cut metal like a goldsmith. Designs intended to be cut on wood, on the other hand, were usually drawn by the artist on the block and handed over for cutting to a class of workmen—Formschneider or Briefmaler—especially devoted to that industry. Both kinds of engraving soon came to be in great demand. Independently of the illustration of written or printed books, for which purpose woodcuts were almost exclusively used, separate engravings or sets of engravings in both kinds were produced, the more finely wrought and more expensive, appealing especially to the more educated classes, on copper, the bolder, simpler and cheaper on wood; and both kinds found a ready sale at all the markets, fairs and church festivals of the land. Subjects of popular devotion predominated. Figures of the Virgin and Child, of the apostles and evangelists, the fathers of the Church, the saints and martyrs, with illustrations of sacred history and the Apocalypse, were supplied in endless repetition to satisfy the cravings of a pious and simple-minded people. But to these were quickly added subjects of allegory, of classical learning, of witchcraft and superstition and of daily life; scenes of the parlour and the cloister, of the shop, the field, the market and the camp; and lastly portraits of famous men, with scenes of court life and princely pageant and ceremony. Thus the new art became a mirror of almost all the life and thoughts of the age. The genius of Albrecht Dürer cannot be rightly estimated without taking into account the position which the arts of engraving on metal and on wood thus held in the culture of this time. He was indeed professionally and in the first place a painter; but throughout his career a great, and on the whole the most successful, part of his industry was devoted to drawing on the block for the woodcutter or engraving with his own hand on copper. The town of Nuremberg in Franconia, in the age of Dürer’s early manhood, was a favourable home for the growth and exercise of his powers. Of the free imperial cities of central Germany, none had a greater historic fame or a more settled and patriotic government. None was more the favourite of the emperors, nor the seat of a more active and flourishing commerce. Nuremberg was the chief mart for the merchandise that came to central Europe from the east through Venice and over the passes of Tirol. She held not only a close commercial intercourse, but also a close intellectual intercourse, with Italy. Without being so forward as the rival city of Augsburg to embrace the architectural fashions of the Italian renaissance—continuing, indeed, to be profoundly imbued with the old and homely German burgher spirit, and to wear, in a degree which time has not very much impaired even yet, the quaintness of the old German civic aspect—she had imported before the close of the 15th century a fair share of the new learning of Italy, and numbered among her citizens distinguished humanists like Hartmann Schedel, Sebald Schreier, Willibald Pirkheimer and Conrad Celtes. From associates like these Dürer could imbibe the spirit of Renaissance culture and research; but the external aspects and artistic traditions which surrounded him were purely Gothic, and he had to work out for himself the style and form-language fit to express what was in him. During the first seven
