engravings of the same time are three Madonnas, the apostles Thomas and Paul, a bagpiper and two peasants dancing, and three or four experiments in etching on plates of iron and zinc. In wood-engraving his energies were almost entirely given to bearing a part—which modern research has proved to have been not nearly so large as was traditionally supposed—in the great decorative schemes commanded by the Emperor Max in his own honour, and devised and carried out by a whole corps of men of letters and artists: namely, the Triumphal Gate and the Triumphal March or Procession. A third and smaller commemorative design, the Triumphal Car, originally designed to form part of the second but in the end issued separately, was entirely Dürer’s own work. A far more successful and attractive effort of his genius in the same service is to be found in the marginal decorations done by him in pen for the emperor’s prayer-book. This unequalled treasure of German art and invention has in later times been broken up, the part executed by Dürer being preserved at Munich, the later sheets, which were decorated by other hands, having been transported to Besançon. Dürer’s designs, drawn with the pen in pale lilac, pink and green, show an inexhaustible richness of invention and an airy freedom and playfulness of hand beyond what could be surmised from the sternness of those studies which he made direct from life and nature. They range from subjects of the homeliest and most mirthful realism to others serious and devout, and from literal or almost literal transcripts of natural form to the most whimsically abstract combinations of linear pattern and tendril and flourish.
All these undertakings for his imperial friend and patron were stopped by the emperor’s death in 1519. A portrait-drawing by the master done at Augsburg a few months previously, one of his finest works, served him as the basis both of a commemorative picture and a woodcut. Other paintings of this and the succeeding year we may seek for in vain; but in line engravings we have four more Madonnas, two St Christophers, one or two more peasant subjects, the well-known St Anthony with the view of Nuremberg in the background, and the smaller of the two portraits of the Cardinal-Elector of Mainz; and in wood-engraving several fine heraldic pieces, including the arms of Nuremberg.
In the summer of 1520 the desire of Dürer to secure from Maximilian’s successors a continuance of the patronage and privileges granted during his lifetime, together with an outbreak of sickness in Nuremberg, gave occasion to the master’s fourth and last journey from home. Together with his wife and her maid he set out in July for the Netherlands in order to be present at the coronation of the young emperor Charles V., and if possible to conciliate the good graces of the all-powerful regent Margaret. In the latter part of his aim Dürer was but partially successful. His diary of his travels enables us to follow his movements almost day by day. He journeyed by the Rhine, Cologne, and thence by road to Antwerp, where he was handsomely received, and lived in whatever society was most distinguished, including that of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Besides his written notes, interesting traces of his travels exist in the shape of the scattered leaves of a sketch-book filled with delicate drawings in silver-point, chiefly views of places and studies of portrait and costume. Several of his finest portrait-drawings in chalk or charcoal, including those of his brother artists Lucas Van Leyden and Bernard Van Orley, as well as one of two fine portrait paintings of men, belong to the period of this journey. So does a magnificent drawing of a head of a nonagenarian with a flowing beard who sat to him at Antwerp, together with a picture from the same head in the character of St Jerome; the drawing is now at Vienna, the picture at Lisbon. Dürer’s interest and curiosity, both artistic and personal, were evidently stimulated by his travels in the highest degree. Besides going to Aachen for the coronation, he made excursions down the Rhine from Cologne to Nijmwegen, and back overland by ’s Hertogenbosch; to Brussels; to Bruges and Ghent; and to Zealand with the object of seeing a natural curiosity, a whale reported ashore. The vivid account of this last expedition given in his diary contrasts with the usual dry entries of interviews and disbursements. A still more striking contrast is the passionate outburst of sympathy and indignation with which, in the same diary, he comments on the supposed kidnapping of Luther by foul play on his return from the diet of Worms. Without being one of those who in his city took an avowed part against the old ecclesiastical system, and probably without seeing clearly whither the religious ferment of the time was tending—without, that is, being properly speaking a Reformer—Dürer in his art and his thoughts was the incarnation of those qualities of the German character and conscience which resulted in the Reformation; and, personally, with the fathers of the Reformation he lived in the warmest sympathy.
On the 12th of July 1521 Dürer reached home again. Drawings of this and the immediately following years prove that on his return his mind was full of schemes for religious pictures. For a great group of the Madonna surrounded with saints there are extant two varying sketches of the whole composition and a number of finished studies for individual heads and figures. Less abundant, but still sufficient to prove the artist’s intention, are the preliminary studies to a picture of the Crucifixion. There exist also fine drawings for a “Lamentation over the body of Christ,” an “Adoration of the Kings,” and a “March to Calvary”; of the last-named composition, besides the beautiful and elaborate pen-and-ink drawing at Florence, three still more highly-wrought versions in green monochrome exist; whether any of them are certainly by the artist’s own hand is matter of debate. But no religious paintings on the grand scale, corresponding to these drawings of 1521–1524, were ever carried out; perhaps partly because of the declining state of the artist’s health, but more because of the degree to which he allowed his time and thoughts to be absorbed in the preparation of his theoretical works on geometry and perspective, proportion and fortification. Like Leonardo, but with much less than Leonardo’s genius for scientific speculation and divination, Dürer was a confirmed reasoner and theorist on the laws of nature and natural appearances. He himself attached great importance to his studies in this kind; his learned friends expected him to give their results to the world; which accordingly, though having little natural gift or felicity in verbal expression, he laboured strenuously to do. The consequence was that in the last and ripest years of his life he produced as an artist comparatively little. In painting there is the famous portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher at Berlin, in which the personality and general aspect of the sitter assert themselves with surprising power. This and the Antwerp head of Jerome are perhaps the most striking examples of Dürer’s power of forcing into subordination to a general impression such a multiplicity of insistent detail as would have smothered any weaker conception than his. No other hand could have ventured to render the hair and beard of a sitter, as it was the habit of this inveterate linearist to do, not by indication of masses, but by means of an infinity of single lines swept, with a miraculous certainty and fineness of touch, in the richest and most intricate of decorative curves. To the same period belong a pleasing but somewhat weak “Madonna and Child” at Florence; and finally, still in the same year 1526, the two famous panels at Munich embodying the only one of the great religious conceptions of the master’s later years which he lived to finish. These are the two pairs of saints, St John with St Peter in front and St Paul with St Mark in the background. The John and Paul are conceived and executed really in the great style, with a commanding nobility and force alike in the character of the heads, the attitudes, and the sweep of draperies; they represent the highest achievement of early German art in painting. In copper-engraving Dürer’s work during the same years was confined entirely to portraits, those of the cardinal-elector of Mainz (“The Great Cardinal”), Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, Willibald Pirkheimer, Melanchthon and Erasmus. To the tale of his woodcuts, besides a few illustrations to his book on measurements (that is, geometry and perspective), and on fortification, he only added one Holy Family and one portrait, that of his friend Eoban Hesse. Of his theoretical books, he only succeeded
