Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/574

554 founded in and in  was made a provincial establishment. Woollen goods, paper, and needles are manufactured on an extensive scale ; and flax-spinning, felt- weaving, wire-weaving, rail-casting, and zinc-rolling are also carried on.

1em  DÜRER, (–), was born at Nuremberg on the 21st of May ; he was therefore six s older than Titian and twelve older than Raphael. In the history of art, Albert Dürer has a name equal to that of the greatest of the Italians. North of the Alps, his only peer was Holbein. But Holbein was not born till, and lived after principally in England; hence in youth he came within the influence of the already matured arts of Italy, and in manhood his best powers were concen trated on the painting of portraits in a foreign country. Dirrer lived a German among Germans, and is the true representative artist of that nation. All the qualities of his art its combination of the wild and rugged with the homely and tender, its meditative depth, its enigmatic gloom, its sincerity and energy, its iron diligence and discipline all these are qualities of the German spirit. And the hour at which Diirer arose to interpret that spirit in art was the most pregnant and critical in the whole history of his race, It was the hour of the Renaissance, of the transition between the Middle Ages and our own. The awakening of Germany at the Renaissance was not, like the other awaken ing of Italy at the same time, a movement merely intellec tual. It was, indeed, from Italy that the races of the North caught the impulse of intellectual freedom, the spirit of science and curiosity, the longing 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 tyranny and corruption, an assertion of spiritual independence the Renaissance was big in the North, as it was not in the South, with a Reformation to come. The art of printing was invented at the right 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 come into use another kind of printing, picture-printing, or what is commonly called engraving. Just as books, or word-printing, were the means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminating ideas, so engravings, or picture-printing, were the means of multiplying, cheapening, and disseminat ing images which gave vividness to the ideas, or served, for those ignorant of letters, in their stead. Technically, the art of engraving was a development of the art of the gold- emith or metal- chaser. Between the art of the goldsmith and the art of 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, so to speak, for the new art which was a combination of the other two, and required of the man who practised it that he should design like a painter and cut metal like a gold smith. The engraver on metal habitually cut his own designs ; whereas designs intended to be cut on wood were usually handed over to a class of workmen Formschneider 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, separate engraving.% or sets of engravings, were produced, and 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, the evangelists, the fathers of the church, the saints and martyrs, with illustration 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, subjects of classical learning confused mythologies of Hercules, Satyr, and Triton sub jects of witchcraft and superstition, subjects 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. The emperor Maximilian himself, chivalrous, adventurous, ostentatious, on fire with a hundred ambitions, and above all with the desire of popular fame, gave continual employment to the craftsmen of Augsburg and Nuremberg in designing and engraving processional and historical representations, which were destined to commemorate him to all time in his double character of imperial lawgiver and hero of romance. So the new art became the mirror, for all men to read, of all the life and thoughts of the age. The genius of Albert Dürer cannot be rightly estimated without taking into account the position which the art of engraving thus held in the culture of his time. He was, indeed, first of all a painter ; and though in his methods he was too scrupulous and laborious to produce many great works, and though one of his greatest, the Assumption of the Virgin, has been destroyed by fire, and another, the Feast of Rose-Garlands, has suffered irreparably between injury and repair, yet the paintings which remain by his hand are sufficient to place him among the great masters of the world. He has every gift in art except the Greek and the Italian gift of beauty or ideal grace. In religious painting, he has profound earnestness and humanity, and an inexhaustible dramatic invention ; and the acces sory landscape and scenery of his compositions are more richly conceived and better studied than by any painter before him. In portrait, he is equally master of the soul and body, rendering every detail of the human super ficies with a microscopic fidelity, which nevertheless does not encumber or overlay the essential and inner character of the person represented. Still more if we judge him by his drawings and studies, of which a vast number are pre served in private as well as public collections, shall we realize his power in grasping and delineating natural fact and character, the combined gravity and minute ness of his style, the penetration of his eye, and the almost superhuman patience and accuracy of his line in draw ing, whether from persons, animals, plants, or landscape, whether with pen, pencil, charcoal, or (which was his favourite method) in colour with the point of the brush. But neither his paintings nor his drawings could by them selves have won for him the immense popular fame and authority which have been his from his own time to ours ; that fame and that authority are due to his pre-eminence in the most popular and democratic of the arts, that of which the works are accessible to the largest number, the art of engraving. In an age which drew a large part of its intellectual nourishment from engravings, Diirer furnished the most masterly examples both of the refined and elabo rate art of the metal engraver, as well as the most striking inventions for the robust and simple art of the wood engraver. The town of Nuremberg in Franconia, in the age of Dürer, was a home most favourable to the growth and exercise of his powers. Of the free imperial cities of central Germany, none had a greater historic fame, none a more settled and patriotic government, none was more the favourite of the emperors, none was the seat of a more active 