ALBERT DCRER 231 ALBERT DURER* By W. J. Holland, Chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania (1471-1528) I t has been given to some men to be not only great in the domain of art by reason of that which they have themselves succeeded in producing, but by reason of that which they have inspired other men to produce. They have been not merely artists, but teachers, who by precept and example have moulded the whole current and drift of artistic thought in the ages and lands to which they have be- longed. Among these lofty spirits, who live through the centuries not only in what their hands once fashioned, but still more in what they have inspired others to do, undoubtedly one of the greatest is Albert Durer. Justly reckoned as the representative artist of Ger- many, he has the peculiar honor of having raised the craft of the engraver to its true posi- tion, as one of the fine arts. As a painter not unworthy to be classified with Titian and Raphael, his contemporaries upon Italian soil, he poured the wealth of his genius into woodcuts and copperplates, and taught men the practically measureless capacity of what before his day had been a rudimentary art. Durer was born in Nuremberg on May 21, 147 1. The family was of Hun- garian origin, though the name is German, and is derived from Thurer, meaning a maker of doors. The ancestral calling of the family probably was that of the carpenter. Albert Durer, the father of the great artist, was a goldsmith, and settled about 1460 in Nuremberg, where he served as an assistant to Hierony- mus Holper, a master goldsmith, whose daughter, Barbara, he married in 1468. He was at the time forty years of age, and she fifteen. As the result of the union eighteen children were born into the world, of whom Albrecht was the second. The lad, as he grew up, became a great favorite with his father, who appeared to discern in him the promise of future ability. The feeling of attach- ment was reciprocated in the most filial manner, and there are extant two well- authenticated portraits of the father from the facile brush of the son, one in the Uffizi at Florence, the other in the possession of the Duke of Northumberland. It was the original intention of the father of the artist that he should follow the craft of the goldsmith, but after serving a period as an apprentice in his father's •Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.
