Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/575

555 D U R E K 555 and flourishing commerce. Nuremberg was the great mart fur the merchandise that came to central Europe from the East through Venice and over the passes of the Tyrol She held not only a close commercial intercourse, but also a close intellectual intercourse, with Italy. Without being so forward as the neighbour city of Augsburg to embrace the architectural fashions of the Italian Renaissance, nay, continuing to be profoundly imbued with the old German burgher spirit, and to wear, with an evidence which is almost unimpaired to this day, the old German civic aspect, she had imported, before the close of the 15th century, much of the new learning of Italy, and numbered among her citizens a Willibald Pirkheimer, a Sebald Schreyer, a Hartmann Schedel, and others fit to hold a place in the first rank of European humanists. The life into which Albert Diirer was born was a grave, a devout, a law-loving, and a lettered life, in the midst of a community devoted to honourable commerce and honourable civic activities, proud of its past, proud of its wealth, proud of its liberties, proud of its arts and ingenuities, and abound ing in aspects of a quaint and picturesque dignity. His family was not of Nuremberg descent, but came from the village of Eytas in Hungary. The name, however, is German, and the family bearing an open door points to an original form of Thiirer, meaning a maker of doors, or carpenter. Albrecht Diirer the elder was a goldsmith by trade, and settled soon after the middle of the 15th century in Nuremberg. He served as assistant under a master goldsmith of the city, Hieronymus Holper, and presently married his master s daughter, Barbara. This was in 1468, the bridegroom being forty and the bride fifteen years of age. They had eighteen children, of whom Albert was the second. The elder Diirer was an esteemed craftsman and citizen, sometimes, it seems, straitened by the claims of his immense family, but living in virtue and honour to the end of his days. The accounts we have of him proceed from his illustrious son, who always speaks with the tenderest reverence and affection of both his parents, and has left a touching nai rative of the deathbed of each. He painted the portrait of his father twice, once about 1490, the second time in 1497. The former of these two pieces is in the Uffizj at Florence ; the latter, well known by Hollar s engraving, is in the possession of the duke of Northumberland. A third &quot;Portrait of his Father &quot; by Diirer, in the gallery at Frankfort, is probably so called in error. The young Albert was his father s favourite son. &quot; My father,&quot; these are his own words, &quot; took special delight in me. Seeing that I was industrious in working and learning, he put me to school ; and when I had learned to read and write, he took me home from school and taught me the goldsmith s trade.&quot; By-and-by the boy found himself drawn by preference from goldsmith s work to painting; and after some hesitation, his father at first opposing his wishes on the ground of the time already spent in learning the former trade, he was at the age of fifteen and a half apprenticed for three years to the principal painter of the town, Michael Wohlgemuth. Wohlgemuth furnishes a complete type of the German painter of that age. At the head of a large shop with numerous assistants, his business was to turn out, generally for a small price, devotional pieces commissioned by mercantile corporations or private persons to decorate their chapels in the churches, the preference being usually for scenes of our Lord s Passion, or for tortures and martyrdoms of the saints. In work of this class, the painters of upper Germany before the Renaissance show considerable technical knowledge, and a love of rich and quaint costumes and of landscape, but in the human part of their representa tions often a grim and debased exaggeration, transgressing all bounds in the grotesqueness of undesigned caricature. Wohlgemuth and his assistants also produced woodcuts for book Illustration, and probably though this is a vexed question engravings on copper. In this school Diirer learnt much, by his own account, but suffered also not a little from the roughness of his companions. At the end of his term under Wohlgemuth, he entered upon the usual course of travels the Wanderjahreoi a German youth. The direction of these travels we cannot retrace with cer tainty. It had been at one time his father s intention to apprentice him to Martin Schongauer, of Colmar in Alsace, incomparably the most refined German painter and engraver of his time. To Colmar, among other places, Albert Diirer went in the course of his travels ; but Schongauer had already died there in 1488. We also hear of him at Strassburg. It is a moot point among biographers whether towards the end of his Wanderjahre about the year 1494 the young Diirer did or did not cross the Alps to Venice. On the one hand it is argued that he did; first, because, on the occasion of an undoubted visit to Venice in 1506, he speaks of admiring no longer that which he had vastly admired &quot; eleven years before ; &quot; secondly, because several careful drawings by his hand from the engravings of Mantegna and other Italian masters, bearing the date 1494, show that in this year he was making a special study of Italian art ; and thirdly, because he has left a number of coloured drawings of the scenery of Tyrol, such as he would have to traverse on the road between Bavaria and Venice, and these show a technical finish and minute ness of execution, characteristic of his studies at this early period but not later. Those who do not believe in this early visit to Venice reply, first, that the allusion interpreted as above in Diirer s correspondence is too vague and un certain, and that what Diirer, in 1506, had really &quot; admired eleven years ago &quot; was probably not the work of Venetians seen at Venice, but of a Venetian artist known as Jacopo de Barbari, or Jacob Walch, who resided about that time in Nuremberg, and who, we know, had a very considerable influence on the art of Diirer ; secondly, that the prints of Mantegna and other Italians, undoubtedly copied by Diirer in 1494, may very well have been brought to Germany with other wares on sale from Venice, or have been shown him by the same Jacopo de Barbari ; and thirdly, that other landscapes, bearing the date of 1506 or later dates, do in fact show the same technical characteristics as those which are assigned, by the other side in the argument, to 1494. The ques tion will probably remain open to the end. With re ference, however, to the third head of the argument, the character of Diirer s early landscape work, it has not been sufficiently observed that his ideal of scenery shows itself fully formed and developed by the time of the publication of his Apocalypse woodcuts and his earliest engravings on copper, that is, about the year 1497 ; that this ideal back ground, of a lake with castled and wooded headlands sloping down from either side, and sloops afloat in the distance, is taken not from the neighbourhood of Nuremberg but from the northern borders of Tyrol it is the scenery, not of the banks of the Pegnitz nor even the Danube, but rather of the Wiirmsee or the Tegernsee; that to the alps and lakes, therefore, of the Northern Tyrol, whether on his way to Venice or otherwise, Diirer must certainly have come during these travels of his youth. At the end of May 1494, being twenty-three years old, Albert Diirer returned, at his father s summons, to his native Nuremberg, and within two months was married to Agnes, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant of the town named Hans Frey. It is probable that the marriage had been arranged between Hans Frey and the elder Diirer while Albert was on his travels ; and possible that a portrait of the young painter very richly habited, executed by himself