Dürer. We have evidence that after her husband’s death Agnes Dürer behaved with generosity to his brothers.
The thirteen or fourteen years of Dürer’s life between his return from Venice and his journey to the Netherlands (spring 1507–midsummer 1520) can best be divided according to the classes of work with which, during successive divisions of the period, he was principally occupied. The first five years, 1507–1511, are pre-eminently the painting years of his life. In them, working with infinite preliminary pains, as a vast number of extant drawings and studies testify, he produced what have been accounted his four capital works in painting, besides several others of minor importance. The first is the “Adam and Eve” dated 1507, in which both attitudes and proportions are as carefully calculated, though on a somewhat different scheme, as in the engraving of 1504. Two versions of the picture exist, one in Florence at the Pitti palace, the other, which is generally allowed to be the original, at Madrid. To 1508 belongs the life-sized “Virgin with the Iris,” a piece remarkable for the fine romantic invention of its background, but plainly showing the hand of an assistant, perhaps Hans Baldung, in its execution: the best version is in the Cook collection at Richmond, an inferior one in the Rudolphinum at Prague. In 1508 Dürer returned to a subject which he had already treated in an early woodcut, the “Massacre of the Ten Thousand Martyrs of Nicomedia.” The picture, painted for the elector Frederick of Saxony, is now in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna; the overcrowded canvas (into which Dürer has again introduced his own portrait as a spectator alongside of the elector) is full of striking and animated detail, but fails to make any great impression on the whole, and does not do justice to the improved sense of breadth and balance in design, of clearness and dignity in composition, which the master had undoubtedly brought back with him from his second visit to Italy. In 1509 followed the “Assumption of the Virgin” with the Apostles gathered about her tomb, a rich altarpiece with figures of saints and portraits of the donor and his wife in the folding wings, executed for Jacob Heller, a merchant of Frankfort, in 1509. This altarpiece was afterwards replaced at Frankfort (all except the portraits of the donors, which remained behind) by a copy, while the original was transported to Munich, where it perished by fire in 1674. The copy, together with the many careful and highly finished preparatory studies for the heads, limbs and draperies which have been preserved, shows that this must have been the one of Dürer’s pictures in which he best combined the broader vision and simpler habits of design which had impressed him in the works of Italian art with his own inherited and ingrained love of unflinchingly grasped fact and rugged, accentuated character. In 1511 was completed another famous painting, multitudinous in the number of its figures though of very moderate dimensions, the “Adoration of the Trinity by all the Saints,” a subject commissioned for a chapel dedicated to All Saints in an almshouse for decayed tradesmen at Nuremberg, and now at the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. Nothing can exceed the fulness and variety of invention, or the searching force and precision of detail in this picture; nor does it leave so much to desire as several of the master’s other paintings in point of colour-harmony and pleasurable general effect.
In the meantime Dürer had added a few to the number of his line-engravings and had completed the two woodcut series of the Great Passion, begun about 1498–1499, and the Life of the Virgin. The new subjects compared with the old show some falling off in dramatic stress and intensity of expression, but on the other hand a marked gain in largeness of design and clearness of composition. In 1511 these two works were brought out for the first time, and the Apocalypse series in a second edition; and for the next three years, 1511–1514, engraving both on wood and copper, but especially the latter, took the first place among Dürer’s activities. Besides such fine single woodcuts as the “Mass of St Gregory,” the “St Christopher,” the “St Jerome,” and two Holy Families of 1511, Dürer published in the same year the most numerous and popularly conceived of all his woodcut series, that known from the dimensions of its thirty-seven subjects as the “Little Passion” on wood; and in the next year, 1512, a set of fifteen small copper-engravings on the same theme, the “Little Passion” on copper. Both of these must represent the labour of several preceding years: one or two of the “Little Passion” plates, dating back as far as 1507, prove that this series at least had been as long as five years in his mind. In thus repeating over and over on wood and copper nearly the same incidents of the Passion, or again in rehandling them in yet another medium, as in the highly finished series of drawings known as the “Green Passion” in the Albertina at Vienna, Dürer shows an inexhaustible variety of dramatic and graphic invention, and is never betrayed into repeating an identical action or motive.
In 1513 and 1514 appeared the three most famous of Dürer’s works in copper-engraving, “The Knight and Death” (or simply “The Knight,” as he himself calls it, 1513), the “Melancolia” and the “St Jerome in his Study” (both 1514). These are the masterpieces of the greatest mind which ever expressed itself in this form of art. Like other masterpieces, they suggest much more than they clearly express, and endless meanings have been, rightly or wrongly, read into them by posterity. Taken together as a group, they have been supposed to be three out of an uncompleted series designed to illustrate the four “temperaments” and complexions of men. Again, more reasonably, they have been taken as types severally of the moral, the intellectual and the theological virtues. The idea at the bottom of the “Knight and Death” seems to be a combination of the Christian knight of Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis Christiani with the type, traditional in medieval imagery, of the pilgrim on his way through the world. The imaginative force of the presentation, coming from a man of Dürer’s powers, is intense; but what consciously occupied him most may well have been the problem how to draw accurately the proportions and action of a horse in motion. This problem he here solves for the first time, with the help of an Italian example: at least his design so closely repeats that of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous and early destroyed equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza that we must certainly suppose him to have seen either the model itself or such a drawing of it as is still preserved by Leonardo’s own hand. The face of the rider seems to recall that of the statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni at Venice; for the armour Dürer had recourse to an old drawing of his own, signed and dated in 1498. The “Melancolia,” numbered “1” as though intended to be the first of a series, with its brooding winged genius sitting dejectedly amidst a litter of scientific instruments and symbols, is hard to interpret in detail, but impossible not to recognize in general terms as an embodiment of the spirit of intellectual research (the student’s “temperament” was supposed to be one with the melancholic), resting sadly from its labours in a mood of lassitude and defeat. Comparatively cheerful beside these two is the remaining subject of the student saint reading in his chamber, with his dog and domestic lion resting near him, and a marvellous play of varied surface and chequered light on the floor and ceiling of his apartment and on all the objects which it contains. Besides these three masterpieces of line-engraving, the same years, 1512–1515, found Dürer occupied with his most important experiments in etching, both in dry-point (“The Holy Family and Saints” and the “St Jerome in the Wilderness”) and with the acid bath. At the same time he was more taken up than ever, as is proved by the contents of a sketch-book at Dresden, with mathematical and anatomical studies on the proportions and structure of the human frame. A quite different kind of study, that of the postures of wrestlers in action, is illustrated by a little-known series of drawings, still of the same period, at Vienna. Almost the only well-authenticated painting of the time is a “Virgin and Child” in the Imperial Museum at Vienna. The portraits of the emperors Charles the Great and Sigismund (1512), in their present state at any rate, can hardly be recognized as being by the master’s hand. An interval of five years separates the Vienna “Madonna” from the two fine heads of the apostles Philip and James in the Uffizi at Florence, the pair of boys’ heads painted in tempera on linen in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, the “Madonna with the Pink” at Augsburg, and the portrait of Wolgemut at Munich, all of 1516. Among
