Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/576

556 550 D U R E R in the previous year 1493, and showing him in the first bloom of that admirable manly beauty for which he was afterwards renowned, may have been destined to recommend him to the good graces of the lady. Their marriage was childless. Agnes survived her husband. The petulance of an old friend of her husband s has unjustly blackened her reputation. Her name has for centuries been used to point a moral, and among the unworthy mates of great men the wife of Diirer was as notorious as the wife of Socrates. The origin of this tradition must bs sought in a letter written a few years after Diirer s death by his dose friend and life long companion, Willibald Pirkheimer, in which Pirkheimer accuses Agnes of having plagued her husband to death with her parsimonious ways, of having made him over-work him self for money s sake, of having given his latter days no peace. But a closer study of facts and documents shows that there is not a jot of evidence to support these splenetic charges. Pirkheimer, when he made them, was old, broken with gout, and disgusted with the world, and the immediate occasion of his outbreak was a fit of peevishness against the widow because she had not let him have a pair of antlers a household ornament much prized in those days to which he fancied himself entitled out of the property left by Diirer. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence of the close confidence and companionship that subsisted between Diirer and his wife ; she accompanied him on his journey to the Low Countries in 1521; after his death she behaved with peculiar generosity to his brothers ; it is perfectly probable that Diirer had in her a kind and beloved as w T ell as a care ful partner; the old legend of his sufferings at her hands must be regarded as completely discredited. So far from being forced to toil for money to the end, he died well off, though he had in his latter years occupied himself more and more with unremunerative pursuits with the theoretical studies of Perspective, Geometry, Fortification, Proportion, for which he shared the passion of Leonardo, and on which, like Leonardo, he has left written treatises. For more than eleven years after his marriage, Diirer lived at Nuremberg the settled and industrious life of his profession. Within this period his masterly powers unfolded and matured themselves. Two important devotional pictures are attributed to his early practice ; one a large triptych painted in tempera on linen, now in the gallery at Dresden, the other also an altar-piece with wings, now in the summer palace of the archbishop of Vienna at Ober St Veit ; both probably painted for the Elector Frederick of Saxony. These pictures have been executed, like those of Wohl- gemuth, hastily, and with the help of pupils. (Of painters trained in the school of Diirer, we know the names and characters of Sehaufelein, Springinklee, Haas Baldung Grim, and Hans of Culmbach). A finer, and somewhat later, example of the master s work in this class is the altar-piece painted for the family of Baumgartner, having a Birth of Christ in the centre and the figure of a knight on either side ; this is now at Munich. The best of Diirer s energies, both of mind and hand, must have been given in these days to the preparation of his sixteen great w r oodcut designs for the Apocalypse. The first edition illustrated with this series appeared in 1498. The Northern mind had long dwelt with eagerness on these mysteries of things to come, and among the earliest block-books printed in Germany is an edition of the Apocalypse with rude figures. But Diirer not only transcends all efforts made before him in the representation of these strange promises, terrors, and transformations, these thaumaturgic visions of doom and redemption ; the passionate energy and undismayed simplicity of his imagination enable him, in this order of creations, to touch the highest point of human achieve ment. The four angels keeping back the winds that they blow not ; the four riders ; the loosing of the angels of the Euphrates to slay the third part of men ; these and others are conceptions of such force, such grave or tempestuous grandeur in the midst of grotesque- ness, as the art of no other age or hand has pro duced. At the same time, Diirer was practising himself diligently in the laborious art of copper engraving. In the years immediately about or preceding 1500, he produced a number of plates of which the subjects are generally fanciful and allegorical, and the execution is more or less tentative and uncertain. Of several of these, other versions exist by contemporary masters, and it is disputed in most of such cases whether Diirer s version is the original, or whether, being at that time young and comparatively unknown, he did not rather begin by copying the work of older men ; in which case, the originals of such engravings would have to be sought in versions bearing other signatures than Diirer s. One signature of frequent occurrence on German engravings of this time, and among them, on several subjects which are also repeated by Diirer s hand, is the letter W. As to the identity of this W, criticism is much divided. He has been generally identified with one Wenzel of Olmiitz, whom we know to have engraved copies after Martin Schongauer and other masters. Others, again, attribute some at least of the prints signed W to Diirer s teacher Wohlgemuth, and when the same composition is found engraved by each of the two masters, conclude that the younger has copied the work of the elder. Instances are the subjects of the Four Naked Women with Death and the Fiend ; the Old Man s Dream of Love ; the Virgin and Child with the Ape, etc. The question is difficult to decide. It seems certain that the work of several different hands is signed Avith this same initial W ; and we are of those who hold that, of the engravers so signing, one, whether Wohlgemuth or not, is a very accomplished master, whose work Diirer, until near the age of thirty, was in the habit of occasionally copying. From another master, again, whose name we have already mentioned, the half Venetian half German Jacopo de Barbari, Diirer learned much. The Italians had already begun to work out a science of the human structure and of ideal proportions ; and from Jacopo de Barbari, as Diirer himself tells us, he received in youth the first hints of this science ; which he subsequently investigated for himself with his usual persistent industry. These early notions received from Jacopo de Barbari led to one immediate result of value, the famous engraving of Adam and Eve published in 1 504. The figures here, as we can see by many pre paratory sketches, are planned on geometrical principles, not drawn as was the common German custom, and Diirer s own in a large majority of his works direct from the model, with all the crudities of the original faithfully delineated. The background of foliage and animals is a miracle of rich invention and faithful and brilliant execu tion; the full powers of Diirer as an engraver on copper are here for the first time asserted. In another elaborate engrav ing which probably soon followed this the Great Fortune or Nemesis the opposite principle is observed ; above a mountain valley, of which every detail is rendered in bird s eye view with amazing completeness, an allegorical figure of a woman rides upright upon the clouds, bearing a cup in one hand and a bridle in the other ; in her countenance and proportions there is nothing ideal, there is the most literal and graceless commonness. In his own journals Diirer calls this plate Nemesis ; it has been conjectured that the piece was composed in allusion to the unfortunate expedition sent by tha emperor Maximilian to Switzer land, in which a number of Nuremberg citizens took part, with Pirkheimer at their head. In the meantime Diirer had been variously exercising his inexhaustible power of dramatic invention on the subjects of Christian story He had completed the set of drawings of the Passion