chapter IV. The anecdote alluded to will be found in Dr. Dibdin’s

Bibliographical Tour, vol. iii. pp. 445, 446. The Baron sold a rare specimen of copper-plate engraving with the date M. CCCC. XXX. to the Doctor, and it seems that he also sold _another_ impression from the same plate to Mr. John Payne. There is no doubt of their being gross forgeries; and it is not unlikely that the plate was in the Baron’s possession.]

Neudörffer, who in 1546 collected some particulars relative to the history of the artists of Nuremberg, says that Jerome Resch, or Rösch, engraved most of the cuts designed by Albert Durer. He also says that Resch was one of the most skilful wood engravers of his day, and that he particularly excelled in engraving letters on wood. This artist also used to engrave dies for coining money, and had a printing establishment of his own. He dwelt in the Broad Way at Nuremberg, with a back entrance in Petticoat Lane;[V-10] and when he was employed in engraving the Triumphal Car drawn by Albert Durer for the Emperor Maximilian, the Emperor used to call almost every day to see the progress of the work; and as he entered at Petticoat Lane, it became a by-word with the common people: “The Emperor still often drives to Petticoat Lane.”[V-11]

[Footnote V-10: “Dieser Hieronymus hat allhier im breiten Gassen gewohnt, dessen Wohnung hinten ins Frauengässlein ging.”]

[Footnote V-11: Neudörffer, quoted in Von Murr’s Journal, 2ter Theil, S. 158, 159.]

Although it is by no means unlikely that Albert Durer might engrave two or three wood-cuts of his own designing, yet, after a careful examination of most of those that bear his mark, I cannot find one which is so decidedly superior to the rest as to induce an opinion of its being engraved by himself; and I cannot for a moment believe that an artist of his great talents, and who painted so many pictures, engraved so many copper-plates, and made so many designs, could find time to engrave even a small part of the many wood-cuts which have been supposed to be executed by him, and which a common wood engraver might execute as well. “If Durer himself had engraved on wood,” says Bartsch in the seventh volume of his Peintre-Graveur, “it is most likely that among the many particular accounts which we have of his different pursuits, and of the various kind of works which he has left, the fact of his having applied himself to wood engraving would certainly have been transmitted in a manner no less explicit; but, far from finding the least trace of it, everything that relates to this subject proves that he had never employed himself in this kind of work. He is always described as a painter, a designer, or an editor of works engraved on wood, but never as a wood engraver.”[V-12] I also further agree with Bartsch, who thinks that the wood-cuts which contain the marks of Lucas Cranach, Hans Burgmair, and others who are known to have been painters of considerable reputation in their day, were not engraved by those artists, but only designed or drawn by them on the block.

[Footnote V-12: At the end of the first edition of the cuts illustrative of the Apocalypse, 1498, we find the words: “_Gedrukt durch Albrecht Durer, Maler_,”--Printed by Albert Durer, painter; and the same in Latin in the second edition, printed about 1510. The passion of Christ and the History of the Virgin are respectively said to have been “_effigiata_” and “_per figuras digesta_”--“drawn” and “pictorially represented” by Albert Durer; and the cuts of the Triumphal Car of the Emperor Maximilian are described as being “_erfunden und geordnet_”--“invented and arranged” by him.--Bartsch, Peintre-Graveur, tom. vii. p. 28.]

Albert Durer was born at Nuremberg, on 20th May 1471. His father, whose name was also Albert, was a goldsmith, and a native of Cola in Hungary. His mother was a daughter of Jerome Haller, who was also a goldsmith, and the master under whom the elder Durer had acquired a knowledge of his art. Albert continued with his father till his sixteenth year, and had, as he himself says, learned to execute beautiful works in the goldsmith’s art, when he felt a great desire to become a painter. His father on hearing of his wish to change his profession was much displeased, as he considered that the time he had already spent in endeavouring to acquire a knowledge of the art of a goldsmith was entirely lost. He, however, assented to his son’s earnest request, and placed him, on St. Andrew’s day, 1486, as a pupil under Michael Wolgemuth for the term of three years, to learn the art of painting. On the expiration of his “lehr-jahre,” or apprenticeship, in 1490, he left his master, and, according to the custom of German artists of that period, proceeded to travel for the purpose of gaining a further knowledge of his profession. In what manner or in what places he was chiefly employed during his “wander-jahre”[V-13] is not very well known; but it is probable that his travels did not extend beyond Germany. In the course of his peregrinations he visited Colmar, in 1492, where he was kindly received by Caspar, Paul, and Louis, the brothers of Martin Schongauer; but he did not see, either then or at any other period, that celebrated engraver himself.[V-14] He returned to Nuremberg in the spring of 1494; and shortly afterwards married Agnes, the daughter of John Frey, a mechanist of considerable reputation of that city. This match, which is said to have been made for him by his parents, proved to be an unhappy one; for, though his wife possessed considerable personal charms, she was a woman of a most wretched temper; and her incessant urging him to continued exertion in order that she might obtain money, is said to have embittered the life of the artist and eventually to have hastened his death.[V-15]

[Footnote V-13: The time that a German artist spends in travel from the expiration of his apprenticeship to the period of his settling as a master is called his “wander-jahre,”--his travelling years. It is customary with many trades in Germany for the young men to travel for a certain time on the termination of their apprenticeship before they are admitted to the full privileges of the company or fellowship.]

[Footnote V-14: It has been stated, though erroneously, that Albert Durer was a pupil of Martin Schongauer, or Schön, as the surname was spelled by some writers, one of the most eminent painters and copper-plate engravers of his day. It has been generally supposed that he died in 1486; but, if an old memorandum at the back of his portrait in the collection of Count de Fries can be depended on, his death did not take place till the 2d of February 1499. An account of this memorandum will be found in Ottley’s Inquiry into the Origin and Early History of Engraving, vol. ii. p. 640.]

[Footnote V-15: On a passage, in which Durer alludes to his wife, in one of his letters from Venice, 1506, to his friend Bilibald Pirkheimer, Von Murr makes the following remark: “This Xantippe must even at that time have vexed him much; and he was obliged to drag on his life with her for twenty-two years longer, till she fairly plagued him to death.”--Journal, 10er Theil, S. 32.]

It has not been ascertained from whom Albert Durer learnt the art of engraving on copper; for there seems but little reason to believe that his master Michael Wolgemuth ever practised that branch of art, though several copper-plates, marked with a W, have been ascribed to him by some authors.[V-16] As most of the early copper-plate engravers were also goldsmiths, it is probable that Durer might acquire some knowledge of the former art during the time that he continued with his father; and, as he was endowed with a versatile genius, it is not unlikely that he owed his future improvement entirely to himself. The earliest date that is to be found on his copper-plates is 1494. The subject in which this date occurs represents a group of four naked women with a globe suspended above them, in the manner of a lamp, on which are inscribed the letters O. G. H. which have been supposed to signify the words “O Gott helf!”--Help, O Lord!--as if the spectator on beholding the naked beauties were exceedingly liable to fall into temptation.[V-17]

[Footnote V-16: Bartsch is decidedly of opinion that Michael Wolgemuth was not an engraver; and he ascribes all the plates marked with a W, which others have supposed to be Wolgemuth’s, to Wenceslaus of Olmutz, an artist of whom nothing is positively known.]

[Footnote V-17: This subject has also been engraved by Israel Von Mecken, and by an artist supposed to be Wenceslaus of Olmutz. It is probable that those artists have copied Durer’s engraving. On the globe in Israel Von Mecken’s plate the letters are O. G. B.]

The earliest wood engravings that contain Albert Durer’s mark are sixteen subjects, of folio size, illustrative of the Apocalypse, which were printed at Nuremberg, 1498. On the first leaf is the title in German: “Die heimliche Offenbarung Johannes”--“The Revelation of John;”--and on the back of the last cut but one is the imprint: “Gedrücket zu Nurnbergk durch Albrecht Durer, maler, nach Christi geburt M. CCCC. und darnach im xcviij. iar”--“Printed at Nuremberg by Albert Durer, painter, in the year after the birth of Christ 1498.” The date of those cuts marks an important epoch in the history of wood engraving. From this time the boundaries of the art became enlarged; and wood engravers, instead of being almost wholly occupied in executing designs of the very lowest character, drawn without feeling, taste, or knowledge, were now to be engaged in engraving subjects of general interest, drawn, expressly for the purpose of being thus executed, by some of the most celebrated artists of the age. Though several cuts of the Apocalypse are faulty in drawing and extravagant in design, they are on the whole much superior to any series of wood engravings that preceded them; and their execution, though coarse, is free and bold. They are not equal, in point of well-contrasted light and shade, to some of Durer’s later designs on wood; but considering them as his first essays in drawing on wood, they are not unworthy of his reputation. They appear as if they had been drawn on the block with a pen and ink; and though cross-hatching is to be found in all of them, this mode of indicating a shade, or obtaining “colour,” is much less frequently employed than in some of his later productions. The following is a reduced copy of one of the cuts, No. 11, which is illustrative of the twelfth chapter of Revelations, verses 1-4: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.----And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth; and the dragon stood before the woman.”

In 1502 a pirated edition of those cuts was published at Strasburg by Jerome Greff, who describes himself as a painter of Frankfort. In 1511 Durer published a second edition of the originals; and on the back of the last cut but one is a caution addressed to the plagiary, informing him of the Emperor’s order, prohibiting any one to copy the cuts or to sell the spurious impressions within the limits of the German empire, under the penalty of the confiscation of goods, and at the peril of further punishment.[V-18]

[Footnote V-18: This caution is in the original expressed in the following indignant terms: “Heus, tu insidiator, ac alieni laboris et ingenii surreptor, ne manus temerarias his nostris operibus inicias cave. Scias enim a gloriosissimo Romanorum imperatore Maximiliano nobis concessum esse ne quis suppositiciis formis has imagines imprimere seu impressas per imperii limites vendere audeat: q’ per contemptum seu avariciæ crimen secus feceris, post bonorum confiscationem tibi maximum periculum subeundum esse certissime scias.”]

Though no other wood engravings with Durer’s mark are found with a date till 1504, yet it is highly probable that several subjects of his designing were engraved between 1498, the date of the Apocalypse, and the above year; and it is also likely that he engraved several copper-plates within this period; although, with the exception of that of the four naked women, there are only four known which contain a date earlier than 1505. About the commencement of 1506 Durer visited Venice, where he remained till October in the same year. Eight letters which he addressed to Bilibald Pirkheimer from Venice, are printed in the tenth volume of Von Murr’s Journal. In the first letter, which is dated on the day of the Three Kings of Cologne, 1506, he informs his friend that he was employed to paint a picture for the German church at Venice, for which he was to receive a hundred and ten Rhenish guilders,[V-19] and that he expects to have it ready to place above the altar a month after Easter. He expresses a hope that he will be enabled to repay out of this money what he had borrowed of Pirkheimer. From this letter it seems evident that Durer’s circumstances were not then in a very flourishing state, and that he had to depend on his exertions for the means of living. The comparatively trifling sums which he mentions as having sent to his mother and his wife sufficiently declare that he had not left a considerable sum at home. He also says, that should his wife want more money, her father must assist her, and that he will honourably repay him on his return.

[Footnote V-19: Von Murr says that the subject of this picture was the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, the saint to whom the church was dedicated; and that the painting afterwards came into the possession of the Emperor Rudolf II. and was placed in his gallery at Prague. It seems that Durer had taken some pictures with him to Venice; for in his fifth letter he says that he has sold two for twenty-four ducats, and exchanged three others for three rings, valued also at twenty-four ducats.]

In the second letter, after telling Pirkheimer that he has no other friend but him on earth, he expresses a wish that he were in Venice to enjoy the pleasant company that he has met with there. The following passage, which occurs in this letter, is, perhaps, the most interesting in the collection: “I have many good friends among the Italians, who warn me not to eat or drink with their painters, of whom several are my enemies, and copy my picture in the church and others of mine, wherever they can find them; and yet they blame them, and say they are not according to ancient art, and therefore not good. Giovanni Bellini[V-20] however has praised me highly to several gentlemen, and wishes to have something of my doing. He called on me himself, and requested that I would paint a picture for him, for which he said he would pay me well. People are all surprised that I should be so much thought of by a person of his reputation. He is very old, but is still the best painter of them all. The things which pleased me eleven years ago, please me no longer. If I had not seen it myself I could not have believed it. You must also know that there are many better painters within this city than Master Jacob is without, although Anthony Kolb swears that there is not on earth a better painter than Jacob.[V-21] The others laugh, and say if he were good for anything he would live in Venice.”

[Footnote V-20: In the Venetian dialect of that period Giovanni Bellini was called Zan Belin; and Durer spells the name “Sambellinus.” He was the master of Titian, and died in 1514, at the age of ninety.--Von Murr, Journal, 10er Theil, S. 8.]

[Footnote V-21: Von Murr says that he cannot discover what Jacob is here meant. It would not be Jacob Walsch, as he died in 1500. The person alluded to was certainly not an Italian.]

The greater part of the other six letters are chiefly occupied with accounts of his success in executing sundry little commissions with which he had been entrusted by his friends, such as the purchase of a finger-ring and two pieces of tapestry; to enquire after such Greek books as had been recently published; and to get him some crane feathers. The sixth and seventh letters are written in a vein of humour which at the present time would be called gross. Von Murr illustrates one passage by a quotation from Swift which is not remarkable for its delicacy; and he also says that Durer’s eighth letter is written in the humorous style of that writer. Those letters show that chastity was not one of Bilibald Pirkheimer’s virtues; and that the learned counsellor of the imperial city of Nuremberg was devoted “tam Veneri quam Mercurio.”[V-22]

[Footnote V-22: Bilibald Pirkheimer was a learned man, and a person of great authority in the city of Nuremberg. He was also a member of the Imperial Council, and was frequently employed in negociations with neighbouring states. He published several works; and among others a humorous essay entitled “Laus Podagræ”--The Praise of the Gout. His memory is still held in great respect in Germany as the friend of Albert Durer and Ulrich Hutten, two of the most extraordinary men that Germany has produced. He died in 1530, aged 60.]

In the fourth letter Durer says that the painters were much opposed to him; that they had thrice compelled him to go before the magistracy; and that they had obliged him to give four florins to their society. In the seventh letter, he writes as follows about the picture which he had painted for the German church: “I have through it received great praise, but little profit. I might well have gained two hundred ducats in the same time, and all the while I laboured most diligently in order that I might get home again. I have given all the painters a rubbing down who said that I could engrave[V-23] well, but that in painting I knew not how to manage my colours. Everybody here says they never saw colours more beautiful.” In his last letter, which is dated, “at Venice, I know not what day of the month, but about the fourteenth day after Michaelmas, 1506,” he says that he will be ready to leave that city in about ten days; that he intends to proceed to Bologna, and after staying there about eight or ten days for the sake of learning some secrets in perspective, to return home by way of Venice. He visited Bologna as he intended; and was treated with great respect by the painters of that city. After a brief stay at Bologna, he returned to Nuremberg; and there is no evidence of his ever having visited Italy again.

[Footnote V-23: The kind of engraving meant was copper-plate engraving. Durer’s words are: “Ich hab awch dy Moler all gesthrilt dy do sagten, Im _Stechen_ wer ich gut, aber im molen west ich nit mit farben um zu gen.” The word “_Stechen_” applies to engraving on copper; “Schneiden” to engraving on wood.--Von Murr, Journal, 10er Theil, S. 28.]

In 1511, the second of Durer’s large works engraved on wood appeared at Nuremberg. It is generally entitled the History of the Virgin, and consists of nineteen large cuts, each about eleven inches and three quarters high, by eight inches and a quarter wide, with a vignette of smaller size which ornaments the title-page.[V-24] Impressions are to be found without any accompanying text, but the greater number have explanatory verses printed from type at the back. The cut here represented is a reduced copy of the vignette on the title-page. The Virgin is seen seated on a crescent, giving suck to the infant Christ; and her figure and that of the child are drawn with great feeling. Of all Durer’s Madonnas, whether engraved on wood or copper, this, perhaps, is one of the best. Her attitude is easy and natural, and happily expressive of the character in which she is represented--that of a nursing mother. The light and shade are well contrasted; and the folds of her ample drapery, which Durer was fond of introducing whenever he could, are arranged in a manner which materially contributes to the effect of the engraving.

[Footnote V-24: The title at length is as follows: “Epitome in Divæ Parthenices Marie Historiam ab Alberto Durero Norico per figuras digestam, cum versibus annexis Chelidonii.” Chelidonius, who was a Benedictine monk of Nuremberg, also furnished the descriptive text to the series of twelve cuts illustrative of Christ’s Passion, of which specimens will be found between page 246 and page 250.]

The following cuts are reduced copies of two of the larger subjects of the same work. That which is here given represents the birth of the Virgin; and were it not for the angel who is seen swinging a censer at the top of the room, it might be taken for the accouchement of a German burgomaster’s wife in the year 1510. The interior is apparently that of a house in Nuremberg of Durer’s own time, and the figures introduced are doubtless faithful copies, both in costume and character, of such females as were generally to be found in the house of a German tradesman on such an occasion. From the number of cups and flagons that are seen, we may be certain that the gossips did not want liquor; and that in Durer’s age the female friends and attendants on a groaning woman were accustomed to enjoy themselves on the birth of a child over a cheerful cup. In the fore-ground an elderly female is perceived taking a draught, without measure, from a flagon; while another, more in the distance and farther to the right, appears to be drinking, from a cup, health to the infant which a woman like a nurse holds in her arms. An elderly female, sitting by the side of the bed, has dropped into a doze; but whether from the effects of the liquor or long watching it would not be easy to divine. On the opposite side of the bed a female figure presents a caudle, with a spoon in it, to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin, while another is seen filling a goblet of wine. At the bottom of the cut is Durer’s mark on a tablet. The original cut is not remarkable for the excellence of its engraving, but it affords a striking example of the little attention which Durer, in common with most other German painters of that period, paid to propriety of costume in the treatment of such subjects. The piece is Hebrew, of the age of Herod the Great; but the scenery, dresses, and decorations are German, of the time of Maximilian I.

The second specimen of the large cuts of Durer’s Life of the Virgin, given on the next page, represents the Sojourn of the Holy Family in Egypt. In the fore-ground St. Joseph is seen working at his business as a carpenter; while a number of little figures, like so many Cupids, are busily employed in collecting the chips which he makes and in putting them into a basket. Two little winged figures, of the same family as the chip-collectors, are seen running hand-in-hand, a little more in the distance to the left, and one of them holds in his hand a plaything like those which are called “windmills” in England, and are cried about as “toys for girls and boys,” and sold for a halfpenny each, or exchanged for old pewter spoons, doctors’ bottles, or broken flint-glass. To the right the Virgin, a matronly-looking figure, is seen sitting spinning, and at the same time rocking with her foot the cradle in which the infant Christ is asleep. Near the Virgin are St. Elizabeth and her young son, the future Baptist. At the head of the cradle is an angel bending as if in the act of adoration; while another, immediately behind St. Elizabeth, holds a pot containing flowers. In the sky there is a representation of the Deity, with the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove. The artist has not thought it necessary to mark the locality of the scene by the introduction of pyramids and temples in the back-ground, for the architectural parts of his subject, as well as the human figures, have evidently been supplied by his own country, Durer’s mark is at the bottom of the cut on the right.

Christ’s Passion, consisting of a series of eleven large wood-cuts and a vignette, designed by Albert Durer, appeared about the same time as his History of the Virgin.[V-25] The descriptive matter was compiled by Chelidonius; and, in the same manner as in the History of the Virgin, a certain number of impressions were printed without any explanatory text.[V-26] The large subjects are about fifteen inches and a half high, by eleven inches and an eighth wide. The following cut is a reduced copy of the vignette on the title-page.

[Footnote V-25: The cuts of these two works appear to have been in the hands of the engraver at the same time. Of those in the History of the Virgin one is dated 1509; and two bear the date 1510; and in the Passion of Christ four are dated 1510.]

[Footnote V-26: The Latin title of the work is as follows: “Passio Domini nostri Jesu, ex Hieronymo Paduano, Dominico Mancino, Sedulio, et Baptista Mantuana, per fratrem Chelidonium collecta, cum figuris Alberti Dureri Norici Pictoris.”]

The subject is Christ mocked; but the artist has at the same time wished to express in the figure of Christ the variety of his sufferings: the Saviour prays as if in his agony on the mount; near him lies the instrument of his flagellation; his hands and feet bear the marks of the nails, and he appears seated on the covering of his sepulchre. The soldier is kneeling and offering a reed as a sceptre to Christ, whom he hails in derision as King of the Jews.

The three following cuts are reduced copies of the same number in the Passion of Christ. In the cut of the Last Supper, in the next page, cross-hatching is freely introduced, though without contributing much to the improvement of the engraving; and the same effect in the wall to the right, in the groins of the roof, and in the floor under the table, might be produced by much simpler means. No artist, I am persuaded, would introduce such work in a design if he had to engrave it himself. The same “colour” might be produced by single lines which could be executed in a third of the time required to cut out the interstices of the cross-hatchings. Durer’s mark is at the bottom of the cut, and the date 1510 is perceived above it, on the frame of the table.

The cut on page 249, from the Passion, Christ bearing his Cross, is highly characteristic of Durer’s style; and the original is one of the best of all the wood engravings which bear his mark. The characters introduced are such as he was fondest of drawing; and most of the heads and figures may be recognised in several other engravings either executed by himself on copper or by others on wood from his designs.

The figure which is seen holding a kind of halbert in his right hand is a favourite with Durer, and is introduced, with trifling variations, in at least half a dozen of his subjects; and the horseman with a kind of turban on his head and a lance in his left hand occurs no less frequently. St. Veronica, who is seen holding the “sudarium,” or holy handkerchief, in the fore-ground to the left, is a type of his female figures; the head of the executioner, who is seen urging Christ forward, is nearly the same as that of the mocker in the preceding vignette; and Simon the Cyrenian, who assists to bear the cross, appears to be the twin-brother of St. Joseph in the Sojourn in Egypt. The figure of Christ, bowed down with the weight of the cross, is well drawn, and his face is strongly expressive of sorrow. Behind Simon the Cyrenian are the Virgin and St. John; and under the gateway a man with a haggard visage is perceived carrying a ladder with his head between the steps. The artist’s mark is at the bottom of the cut.

The subject of the cut on page 250, from Christ’s Passion, represents the descent into hell and the liberation of the ancestors. The massive gates of the abode of sin and death have been burst open, and the banner of the cross waves triumphant. Among those who have already been liberated from the pit of darkness are Eve, who has her back turned towards the spectator, and Adam, who in his right hand holds an apple, the symbol of his fall, and with his left supports a cross, the emblem of his redemption. In the front is Christ aiding others of the ancestors to ascend from the pit, to the great dismay of the demons whose realm is invaded. A horrid monster, with a head like that of a boar surmounted with a horn, aims a blow at the Redeemer with a kind of rude lance; while another, a hideous compound of things that swim, and walk, and fly, sounds a note of alarm to arouse his kindred fiends. On a stone, above the entrance to the pit, is the date 1510; and Durer’s mark is perceived on another stone immediately before the figure of Christ. This cut, with the exception of the frequent cross-hatching, is designed more in the style and spirit of the artist’s illustrations of the Apocalypse than in the manner of the rest of the series to which it belongs.

The preceding specimens of wood-cuts from Durer’s three great works, the Apocalypse, the History of the Virgin, and Christ’s Passion, afford not only an idea of the style of his drawing on wood, but also of the progress made by the art of wood engraving from the time of his first availing himself of its capabilities. In Durer’s designs on wood we perceive not only more correct drawing and a greater knowledge of composition, but also a much more effective combination of light and shade, than are to be found in any wood-cuts executed before the date of his earliest work, the Apocalypse, which appeared in 1498. One of the peculiar advantages of wood engraving is the effect with which strong shades can be represented; and of this Durer has generally availed himself with the greatest skill. On comparing his works engraved on wood with all those previously executed in the same manner, we shall find that his figures are not only much better drawn and more skilfully grouped, but that instead of sticking, in hard outline, against the back-ground, they stand out with the natural appearance of rotundity. The rules of perspective are more attentively observed; the back-grounds better filled; and a number of subordinate objects introduced--such as trees, herbage, flowers, animals, and children--which at once give a pleasing variety to the subject and impart to it the stamp of truth. Though the figures in many of his designs may not indeed be correct in point of costume,--for though he diligently studied Nature, it was only in her German dress,--yet their character and expression are generally appropriate and natural. Though incapable of imparting to sacred subjects the elevated character which is given to them by Raffaele, his representations are perhaps no less like the originals than those of the great Italian master. It is indeed highly probable that Albert Durer’s German representatives of saints and apostles are more like the originals than the more dignified ideal portraits of Raffaele. The latter, from his knowledge of the antique, has frequently given to his Jews a character and a costume borrowed from Grecian art of the age of Phidias; while Albert Durer has given to them the features and invested them in the costume of Germans of his own age.

Shortly after the appearance of the large cuts illustrative of Christ’s Passion, Durer published a series of thirty-seven of a smaller size, also engraved on wood, which Mr. Ottley calls “The Fall of Man and his Redemption through Christ,” but which Durer himself refers to under the title of “The Little Passion.”[V-27] All the cuts of the Little Passion, as well as seventeen of those of the Life of the Virgin and several other pieces of Durer’s, were imitated on copper by Marc Antonio Raimondi, the celebrated Italian engraver, who is said to have sold his copies as the originals. Vasari, in his Life of Marc Antonio, says that when Durer was informed of this imitation of his works, he was highly incensed and he set out directly for Venice, and that on his arrival there he complained of Marc Antonio’s proceedings to the government; but could obtain no further redress than that in future Marc Antonio should not put Durer’s mark to his engravings.

[Footnote V-27: The Latin title of this work is “Passio Christi,” and the explanatory verses are from the pen of Chelidonius. Durer, in the Journal of his Visit to the Netherlands, twice mentions it as “die Kleine Passion,” and each time with a distinction which proves that he did not mean the Passion engraved by him on copper and probably published in 1512. “Item Sebaldt Fischer hat mir zu Antorff [Antwerp] abkaufft 16 _kleiner Passion_, pro 4 fl. Mehr 32 grosser Bücher pro 8 fl. Mehr 6 gestochne Passion pro 3 fl.”--“Darnach die drey Bücher unser Frauen Leben, Apocalypsin, und den grossen Passion, darnach _den klein Passion_, und den Passion in Kupffer.”--Albrecht Dürers Reisejournal, in Von Murr, 7er Theil, S. 60 and 67. The size of the cuts of the Little Passion is five inches high by three and seven-eighths wide. Four impressions from the original blocks are given in Ottley’s Inquiry, vol. ii. between page 730 and page 731.]

Though it is by no means unlikely that Durer might apply to the Venetian government to prevent the sale of spurious copies of his works within the bounds of their jurisdiction, yet Vasari’s account of his personally visiting that city for the purpose of making a complaint against Marc Antonio, and of the government having forbid the latter to affix Durer’s mark to his engravings in future, is certainly incorrect. The History of the Virgin, the earliest of the two works which were almost entirely copied by Marc Antonio, was not published before 1510, and there is not the slightest evidence of Durer having re-visited Venice after his return to Nuremberg about the latter end of 1506. Bartsch thinks that Vasari’s account of Durer’s complaining to the Venetian government against Marc Antonio is wholly unfounded; not only from the fact of Durer not having visited Venice subsequent to 1506, but from the improbability of his applying to a foreign state to prohibit a stranger from copying his works. Mr. Ottley, however,--after observing that Marc Antonio had affixed Durer’s mark to his copies of the seventeen cuts of the Life of the Virgin and of some other single subjects, but had omitted it in his copies of the cuts of the Little Passion,--thus expresses his opinion with respect to the correctness of this part of Vasari’s account: “That Durer, who enjoyed the especial protection of the Emperor Maximilian, might be enabled through the imperial ambassador at Venice to lay his complaints before the government, and to obtain the prohibition before stated, may I think readily be imagined; and it cannot be denied, that the circumstance of Marc Antonio’s having omitted to affix the mark of Albert to the copies which he afterwards made of the series of the ‘Life of Christ’ is strongly corroborative of the general truth of the story.”[V-28] As two of the cuts in the Little Passion, which Mr. Ottley here calls the “Life of Christ,” are dated 1510, and as, according to Mr. Ottley, Marc Antonio arrived at Rome in the course of that year, it is difficult to conceive how the government of Venice could have the power to prohibit a native of Bologna, living in a state beyond their jurisdiction, from affixing Albert Durer’s mark to such engravings as he might please to copy from the works of that master.

[Footnote V-28: Inquiry into the Origin and Early History of Engraving, vol. ii. p. 782. The objections to the general truth of Vasari’s story appear to be much stronger than the presumptions in its favour. 1. The improbability of Albert Durer having visited Venice subsequent to 1506; 2. The fact of Marc Antonio’s copies of the cuts of the Little Passion _not_ containing Albert Durer’s mark; and 3. The probability of Mark Antonio residing beyond the jurisdiction of the Venetian government at the time of his engraving them.]

Among the more remarkable single subjects engraved on wood from Durer’s designs, the following are most frequently referred to: God the Father bearing up into heaven the dead body of Christ, with the date 1511; a Rhinoceros, with the date 1515; a portrait of Ulrich Varnbuler, with the date 1522; a large head of Christ crowned with thorns, without date; and the Siege of a fortified town, with the date 1527. In the first of the above-named cuts, God the Father wears a kind of tiara like that of the Pope, and above the principal figure the Holy Ghost is seen hovering in the form of a dove. On each side of the Deity and the dead Christ are angels holding the cross, the pillar to which Christ was bound when he was scourged, the crown of thorns, the sponge dipped in vinegar, and other emblems of the Passion. At the foot are heads with puffed-out cheeks intended to represent the winds. This cut is engraved in a clearer and more delicate style than most of the other subjects designed by Durer on wood. There are impressions of the Rhinoceros, and the portrait of Varnbuler, printed in chiaro-scuro from three blocks; and there are also other wood-cuts designed by Durer executed in the same manner. The large head of Christ, which is engraved in a coarse though spirited and effective manner, is placed by Bartsch among the doubtful pieces ascribed to Durer; but Mr. Ottley says, “I am unwilling to deny to Durer the credit of this admirable and boldly executed production.”[V-29] The cut representing the siege of a fortified town is twenty-eight inches and three-eighths wide, by eight inches and seven eighths high. It has been engraved on two blocks, and afterwards pasted together. A number of small figures are introduced, and a great extent of country is shown in this cut, which is, however, deficient in effect; and the little figures, though drawn with great spirit, want relief, which causes many of them to appear as if they were riding or walking in the air. The most solid-like part of the subject is the sky; there is no ground for most of the figures to stand on; and those which are in the distance are of the same size as those which are apparently a mile or two nearer the spectator. There is nothing remarkable in the execution, and the design adds nothing to Durer’s reputation.

[Footnote V-29: There is a copy of this head, also engraved on wood, of the size of the original, but without Durer’s, or any other mark. Underneath an impression of the copy, in the Print Room of the British Museum, there is written in a hand which appears to be at least as old as the year 1550, “Dieser hat [[HSB]]ehaim gerissen”--“H. S. Behaim drew this.” Hans Sebald Behaim, a painter and designer on wood, was born at Nuremberg in 1500, and was the pupil of his uncle, also named Behaim, a painter and engraver of that city. The younger Behaim abandoned the arts to become a tavern-keeper at Frankfort, where he died in 1550.]

The great patron of wood engraving in the earlier part of the sixteenth century was the Emperor Maximilian I, who,--besides originating the three works, known by the titles of Sir Theurdank, the Wise King, and the Triumphs of Maximilian, which he caused to be illustrated with numerous wood engravings, chiefly from the designs of Hans Burgmair and Hans Schaufflein,--employed Albert Durer to make the designs for two other series of wood engravings, a Triumphal Car and a Triumphal Arch.

The Triumphal _Car_, engraved by Jerome Resch from Durer’s drawings on wood, is frequently confounded with the larger work called the Triumphs of Maximilian, most of the designs of which were made by Hans Burgmair. It is indeed generally asserted that all the designs for the latter work were made by Hans Burgmair; but I think I shall be able to show, in a subsequent notice of that work, that some of the cuts contained in the edition published at Vienna and London in 1796 were, in all probability, designed by Albert Durer. The Triumphal Car consists of eight separate pieces, which, when joined together, form a continuous subject seven feet four inches long; the height of the highest cut--that containing the car--is eighteen inches from the base line to the upper part of the canopy above the Emperor’s head. The Emperor is seen seated in a highly ornamented car, attended by female figures, representing Justice, Truth, Clemency, and other virtues, who hold towards him triumphal wreaths. One of the two wheels which are seen is inscribed “Magnificentia,” and the other “Dignitas;” the driver of the car is Reason,--“Ratio,”--and one of the reins is marked “Nobilitas,” and the other “Potentia.” The car is drawn by six pair of horses splendidly harnessed, and each horse is attended by a female figure. The names of the females at the head of the first pair from the car are “Providentia” and “Moderatio;” of the second, “Alacritas” and “Opportunitas;” of the third, “Velocitas” and “Firmitudo;” of the fourth, “Acrimonia” and “Virilitas;” of the fifth, “Audacia” and “Magnanimitas;” and the attendants on the leaders are “Experientia” and “Solertia.” Above each pair of horses there is a portion of explanatory matter printed in letter-press; and in that above the leading pair is a mandate from the Emperor Maximilian, dated Inspruck, 1518, addressed to Bilibald Pirkheimer, who appears to have suggested the subject; and in the same place is the name of the inventor and designer, Albert Durer.[V-30] The first edition of those cuts appeared at Nuremberg in 1522; and in some copies the text is in German, and in others in Latin. A second edition, with the text in Latin only, was printed at the same place in the following year. A third edition, from the same blocks, was printed at Venice in 1588; and a fourth at Amsterdam in 1609. The execution of this subject is not particularly good, but the action of the horses is generally well represented, and the drawing of some of the female figures attending them is extremely spirited. Guido seems to have availed himself of some of the figures in Durer’s Triumphal Car in his celebrated fresco of the Car of Apollo, preceded by Aurora, and accompanied by the Hours.

[Footnote V-30: In the edition with Latin inscriptions, 1523, are the words, “Excogitatus et depictus est currus iste Nurembergæ, impressus vero per Albertum Durer. Anno MDXXIII.” The Latin words “excogitatus et depictus” are expressed by “gefunden und geordnet” in the German inscriptions in the edition of 1522. A sketch by Durer, for the Triumphal Car, is preserved in the Print Room in the British Museum.]

It is said that the same subject painted by Durer himself is still to be seen on the walls of the Town-hall of Nuremberg; but how far this is correct I am unable to positively say; for I know of no account of the painting written by a person who appears to have been acquainted with the subject engraved on wood. Dr. Dibdin, who visited the Town-hall of Nuremberg in 1818, speaks of what he saw there in a most vague and unsatisfactory manner, as if he did not know the Triumphal Car designed by Durer from the larger work entitled the Triumphs of Maximilian. The notice of the learned bibliographer, who professes to be a great admirer of the works of Albert Durer, is as follows: “The great boast of the collection [in the Town-hall of Nuremberg] are the Triumphs of Maximilian executed by _Albert Durer_,--which, however, have by no means escaped injury.”[V-31] It is from such careless observations as the preceding that erroneous opinions respecting the Triumphal Car and the Triumphs of Maximilian are continued and propagated, and that most persons confound the two works; which is indeed not surprising, seeing that Dr. Dibdin himself, who is considered to be an authority on such matters, has afforded proof that he does not know one from the other. In the same volume that contains the notice of the “Triumphs of Maximilian” in the Town-hall of Nuremberg, Dr. Dibdin says that he saw the “ORIGINAL PAINTINGS” from which the large wood blocks were taken for the well-known work entitled the “_Triumphs of the Emperor Maximilian_,” in large folio, in the Imperial Library at Vienna.[V-32] Such observations are very much in the style of the countryman’s, who had seen _two_ genuine skulls of Oliver Cromwell,--one at Oxford, and another in the British Museum. Though I have not been able to ascertain satisfactorily the subject of Durer’s painting in the Town-hall of Nuremberg, I am inclined to think that it is the Triumphal _Car_ of Maximilian. In a memorandum in the hand-writing of Nollekins, preserved with his copies of Durer’s Triumphal Car and Triumphal Arch of Maximilian, in the Print Room of the British Museum, it is said, though erroneously, that the former is painted in the Town-hall of _Augsburg_ with the figures as large as life.

[Footnote V-31: Bibliographical Tour, vol. iii. p. 438. Edit. 1829.]

[Footnote V-32: Ibid. p. 330.]

The Triumphal _Arch_ of the Emperor Maximilian, engraved on wood from Durer’s designs, consists of ninety-two separate pieces, which, when joined together, form one large composition about ten feet and a half high by nine and a half wide, exclusive of the margins and five folio sheets of explanatory matter by the projector of the design, John Stabius, who styles himself the historiographer and poet of the Emperor, and who says, at the commencement of his description, that this arch was drawn “after the manner of those erected in honour of the Roman emperors at Rome, some of which are destroyed and others still to be seen.” In the arch of Maximilian are three gates or entrances; that in the centre is named the Gate of Honour and Power; that to the left the Gate of Fame; and that to the right the Gate of Nobility.[V-33] Above the middle entrance is what Stabius calls the “grand tower,” surmounted with the imperial crown, and containing an inscription in German to the memory of Maximilian. Above and on each side of the gates or entrances, which are of very small dimensions, are portraits of the Roman emperors from the time of Julius Cæsar to that of Maximilian himself; there are also portraits of his ancestors, and of kings and princes with whom he was allied either by friendship or marriage; shields of arms illustrative of his descent or of the extent of his sovereignty; with representations of his most memorable actions, among which his adventures in the Tyrolean Alps, when hunting the chamois, are not forgotten. Underneath each subject illustrative of his own history are explanatory verses, in the German language, engraved on wood; and the names of the kings and emperors, as well as the inscriptions explanatory of other parts of the subject, are also executed in the same manner. The whole subject is, in fact, a kind of pictorial epitome of the history of the German empire; representing the succession of the Roman emperors, and the more remarkable events of Maximilian’s own reign; with illustrations of his descent, possessions, and alliances.

[Footnote V-33: The two last names are, in the first edition, pasted over others which appear to have been “The Gate of Honour” and “The Gate of Relationship, Friendship, and Alliance.” The last name alludes to the emperor’s possessions as acquired by descent or marriage, and to his power as strengthened by his friendly alliances with neighbouring states.]

At the time of Maximilian’s death, which happened in 1519, this great work was not finished; and it is said that Durer himself did not live to see it completed, as one small block remained to be engraved at the period of his death, in 1528. At whatever time the work might be finished, it certainly was commenced at least four years before the Emperor’s death, for the date 1515 occurs in two places at the foot of the subject. Though Durer’s mark is not to be found on any one of the cuts, there can be little doubt of his having furnished the designs for the whole. In the ninth volume of Von Murr’s Journal it is stated that Durer received a hundred guilders a year from the Emperor,--probably on account of this large work; and in the same volume there is a letter of Durer’s addressed to a friend, requesting him to apply to the emperor on account of arrears due to him. In this letter he says that he has made many drawings besides the “_Tryumps_”[V-34] for the emperor; and as he also thrice mentions Stabius, the inventor of the Triumphal Arch, there can be little doubt but that this was the work to which he alludes.

[Footnote V-34: “Item wist auch das Ich K. Mt. ausserhalb des Tryumps sonst viel mancherley Fisyrung gemacht hab.”--“You must also know that I have made many other drawings for the emperor besides those of the Triumph.” The date of this letter is not given, but Durer informs his friend that he had been already three years employed for the emperor, and that if he had not exerted himself the beautiful “work” would not have been so soon completed. If this is to be understood of the Triumphal Arch, it would seem that the designs at least were all finished before the emperor’s death.--Von Murr, Journal, 9er Theil, S. 4.]

As a work of art the best single subjects of the Triumphal Arch will not bear a comparison with the best cuts in Durer’s Apocalypse, the History of the Virgin, or Christ’s Passion; and there are several in which no trace of his effective style of drawing on wood is to be found. Most of the subjects illustrative of the emperor’s battles and adventures are in particular meagre in point of drawing, and deficient in effect. The whole composition indeed appears like the result of continued application without much display of talent. The powers of Durer had been evidently constrained to work out the conceptions of the historiographer and poet, Stabius; and as the subjects were not the suggestions of the artist’s own feelings, it cannot be a matter of surprise that we should find in them so few traces of his genius. The engraving of the cuts is clear, but not generally effective; and the execution of the whole, both figures and letters, would occupy a single wood engraver not less than four years; even allowing him to engrave more rapidly on pear-tree than a modern wood engraver does on box; and supposing him to be a master of his profession.

From his varied talents and the excellence which he displayed in every branch of art that he attempted, Albert Durer is entitled to rank with the most extraordinary men of his age. As a painter he may be considered as the father of the German school; while for his fidelity in copying nature and the beauty of his colours he may bear a comparison with most of the Italian artists of his own age. As an engraver on copper he greatly excelled all who preceded him; and it is highly questionable if any artist since his time, except Rembrandt, has painted so many good pictures and engraved so many good copper-plates. But besides excelling as an engraver on copper after the manner in which the art had been previously practised, giving to his subjects a breadth of light and a depth of shade which is not to be found in the productions of the earlier masters, he further improved the art by the invention of etching,[V-35] which enables the artist to work with greater freedom and to give a variety and an effect to his subjects, more especially landscapes, which are utterly unattainable by means of the graver alone.

[Footnote V-35: In the process of etching the plate is first covered with a resinous composition--called etching ground--on which the lines intended to be _etched_, or bit into the plate, are drawn through to the surface of the metal by means of a small pointed tool called an etching needle, or an etching point. When the drawing of the subject upon the etching ground is finished, the plate is surrounded with a slightly raised border, or “wall,” as it is technically termed, formed of rosin, bee’s-wax, and lard; and, a corrosive liquid being poured upon the plate, the lines are “bit” into the copper or steel. When the engraver thinks that the lines are corroded to a sufficient depth, he pours off the liquid, cleans the plate by means of turpentine, and proceeds to finish his work with the graver and dry-point. According to the practice of modern engravers, where several _tints_ are required, as is most frequently the case, the process of “biting-in” is repeated; the corrosive liquid being again poured on the plate to corrode deeper the stronger lines, while the more delicate are “stopped out,”--that is, covered with a kind of varnish that soon hardens, to preserve them from further corrosion. Most of our best engravers now use a diamond point in etching. _Nitrous_ acid is used for “biting-in” on copper in the proportion of one part acid to four parts water, and the mixture is considered to be better after it has been once or twice used. Before using the acid it is advisable to take the stopper out of the bottle for twenty-four hours in order to allow a portion of the strength to evaporate. During the process of biting-in a large copper-plate the fumes which arise are so powerful as frequently to cause an unpleasant stricture in the throat, and sometimes to bring on a spitting of blood when they have been incautiously inhaled by the engraver. At such times it is usual for the engraver to have near him some powerful essence, generally hartshorn, in order to counteract the effects of the noxious vapour. For biting-in on steel, _nitric_ acid is used in the proportion of thirty drops to half a pint of distilled water; and the mixture is never used for more than one plate.--When a _copper_-plate is sufficiently bit-in, it is only necessary to wash it with a little water previous to removing the etching ground with turpentine; but, besides this, with a _steel_ plate it is further necessary to set it on one of its edges against a wall or other support, and to blow it with a pair of small bellows till every particle of moisture in the lines is perfectly evaporated. The plate is then rubbed with oil, otherwise the lines would rust from the action of the atmosphere and the plate be consequently spoiled. Previous to a steel plate being laid aside for any length of time it ought to be warmed, and the engraved surface rubbed carefully over with virgin wax so that it may be completely covered, and every line filled. A piece of thick paper the size of the plate, laid over the wax while it is yet adhesive, will prove an additional safeguard. For this information respecting the process of biting-in, the writer is indebted to an eminent engraver, Mr. J. T. Wilmore.]

There are two subjects by Albert Durer, dated 1512, which Bartsch thinks were etched upon plates of iron, but which Mr. Ottley considers to have been executed upon plates of a softer metal than copper, with the dry-point. There are, however, two undoubted etchings by Durer with the date 1515; two others executed in the same manner are dated 1516; and a fifth, a landscape with a large cannon in the fore-ground to the left, is dated 1518. There is another undoubted etching by Durer, representing naked figures in a bath; but it contains neither his mark nor a date. The three pieces which Mr. Ottley thinks were not etched, but executed on some soft kind of metal with the dry-point, are: 1. The figure of Christ, seen in front, standing, clothed with a mantle, having his hands tied together, and on his head a crown of thorns; date 1512. 2. St. Jerome seated amongst rocks, praying to a crucifix, with a book open before him, and a lion below to the left; date 1512. 3. The Virgin, seated with the infant Christ in her lap, and seen in front, with St. Joseph behind her on the left, and on the right three other figures; without mark or date.--One of the more common of Durer’s undoubted etchings is that of a man mounted on a unicorn, and carrying off a naked woman, with the date 1516.

Albert Durer not only excelled as a painter, an engraver on copper, and a designer on wood, but he also executed several pieces of sculpture with surprising delicacy and natural expression of character. An admirable specimen of his skill in this department of art is preserved in the British Museum, to which institution it was bequeathed by the late R. Payne Knight, Esq., by whom it was purchased at Brussels for five hundred guineas upwards of forty years ago. This most exquisite piece of sculpture is of small dimensions, being only seven and three quarter inches high, by five and a half wide. It is executed in hone-stone, of a cream colour, and is all of one piece, with the exception of a dog and one or two books in front. The subject is the naming of John the Baptist.[V-36] In front, to the right, is an old man with a tablet inscribed with Hebrew characters; another old man is seen immediately behind him, further to the right; and a younger man,--said to be intended by the artist for a portrait of himself,--appears entering the door of the apartment. An old woman with the child in her arms is seated near the figure with the tablet; St. Elizabeth is perceived lying in bed, on the more distant side of which a female attendant is standing, and on the other, nearer to the spectator, an elderly man is seen kneeling. It is supposed that the latter figure is intended for Zacharias, and that the artist had represented him in the act of making signs to Elizabeth with his hands. The figures in the fore-ground are executed in high relief, and the character and expression of the heads have perhaps never been surpassed in any work of sculpture executed on the same scale. Durer’s mark is perceived on a tablet at the foot of the bed, with the date 1510. This curious specimen of Durer’s talents as a sculptor is carefully preserved in a frame with a glass before it, and is in most perfect condition, with the exception of the hands of Zacharias and of Elizabeth, some of the fingers of which are broken off.

[Footnote V-36: The account of the naming of John the Baptist will be found in St. Luke’s Gospel, chap. i. verse 59-64.]

Shortly after Whitsuntide, 1520, Durer set out from Nuremberg, accompanied by his wife and her servant Susanna, on a visit to the Netherlands; and as he took with him several copies of his principal works, engravings on copper as well as on wood, and painted and drew a number of portraits during his residence there, the journey appears to have been taken as much with a view to business as pleasure. He kept a journal from the time of his leaving Nuremberg till the period of his reaching Cologne on his return, and from this curious record of the artist’s travels the following particulars of his visit to the Netherlands have been obtained.[V-37]

[Footnote V-37: Durer’s Journal of his Travels is given by Von Murr, 7er Theil, S. 55-98. The title which the Editor has prefixed to it is, “Reisejournal Albrecht Dürer’s von seiner Niederländischen Reise, 1520 und 1521. E. Bibliotheca Ebneriana.” In the same volume, Von Murr gives some specimens of Durer’s poetry. The first couplet which he made in 1509 is as follows:

“Du aller Engel Spiegel und Erlöser der Welt, Deine grosse Marter sey für mein Sünd ein Widergelt.”

Thou mirror of all Angels and Redeemer of mankind, Through thy martyrdom, for all my sins may I a ransom find.

This couplet being ridiculed by Bilibald Pirkheimer, who said that rhyming verses ought not to consist of more than eight syllables, Durer wrote several others in a shorter measure, but with no better success; for he says at the conclusion, that they did not please the learned counsellor. With Durer’s rhymes there is an epistle in verse from his friend Lazarus Sprengel, written to dissuade him from attempting to become a poet. Durer’s verses want “the right butter-woman’s trot to market,” and are sadly deficient in rhythm when compared with the more regular clink of his friend’s.]

Durer proceeded from Nuremberg direct to Bamberg, where he presented to the bishop a painting of the Virgin, with a copy of the Apocalypse and the Life of the Virgin engraved on wood. The bishop invited Durer to his table, and gave him a letter exempting his goods from toll, with three others which were, most likely, letters of recommendation to persons of influence in the Netherlands.[V-38] From Bamberg, Durer proceeded by way of Eltman, Sweinfurth, and Frankfort to Mentz, and from the latter city down the Rhine to Cologne. In this part of his journey he seems to have met with little which he deemed worthy of remark: at Sweinfurth Dr. Rebart made him a present of some wine; at Mentz, Peter Goldsmith’s landlady presented him with two flasks of the same liquor; and when Veit Varnbuler invited him to dinner there, the tavern-keeper would not receive any payment, but insisted on being Durer’s host himself. At Lohnstein, on the Rhine, between Boppart and Coblentz, the toll-collector, who was well acquainted with Durer’s wife, presented him with a can of wine, and expressed himself extremely glad to see him.

[Footnote V-38: Subsequently, Durer mentions having delivered to the Margrave John, at Brussels, a letter of recommendation [Fürderbrief] from the Bishop of Bamberg.]

From Cologne, Durer proceeded direct to Antwerp, where he took up his abode in the house of “Jobst Planckfelt;” and on the evening of his arrival[V-39] he was invited to a splendid supper by Bernard Stecher, an agent of the Fuggers, the celebrated family of merchants of Nuremberg, and the most wealthy in Germany. On St. Oswald’s day, Sunday, 5th August, the Painters’ Company of Antwerp invited Durer, with his wife and her maid,[V-40] to a grand entertainment in their hall, which was ornamented in a splendid manner, and all the vessels on the table were of silver. The wives of the painters were also present; and when Durer was conducted to his seat at the table “all the company stood up on each side, as if some great lord had been making his entrance.” Several honourable persons, who had also been invited, bowed to him; and all expressed their respect and their wishes to afford him pleasure. While he was at table the messenger of the magistrates of Antwerp made his appearance, and presented him in their name with four flaggons of wine, saying, that the magistrates thus testified their respect and their good-will towards him. Durer, as in duty bound, returned thanks, and tendered to the magisterial body his humble service. After this little affair was despatched, entered Peter the city carpenter _in propria persona_, and presented Durer with two more flaggons of wine, and complimented him with the offer of his services. After the party had enjoyed themselves cheerfully till late in the night, they attended Durer to his lodgings with torches in a most honourable manner, expressing their good-will towards him, and their readiness to assist him in whatever manner he might choose.--Shortly after this grand Fellowship-feast, Durer was entertained by Quintin Matsys,--frequently called the Blacksmith of Antwerp,--whose celebrated picture of the Misers is now in the Royal Collection at Windsor.

[Footnote V-39: As Durer was at Cologne about the 26th July, it is probable that he would arrive at Antwerp about the last day of that month.]

[Footnote V-40: The maid, Susanna, seems to have been rather a “humble friend” than a menial servant; for she is mentioned in another part of the Journal as being entertained with Durer’s wife at the house of “Tomasin Florianus,” whom Durer describes as “_Romanus_, von Luca bürtig.”]

On the Sunday after the Assumption,[V-41] Durer witnessed a grand procession in honour of the Virgin, and the account which he has given of it presents so curious a picture of the old religious pageantries that it appears worthy of being translated without abridgement. “On the Sunday after the Assumption of our Lady,” says the artist, “I saw the grand procession from our Lady’s church at Antwerp, where all the inhabitants of the city assembled, gentry as well as trades-people, each, according to his rank, gayly dressed. Every class and fellowship was distinguished by its proper badge; and large and valuable crosses were borne before several of the crafts. There were also silver trumpets of the old Frankish fashion; with German drums and fifes playing loudly. I also saw in the street, marching after each other in rank, at a certain distance, the Goldsmiths, the Painters, the Masons, the Embroiderers, the Statuaries, the Cabinet-makers, the Carpenters, the Sailors, the Fishermen, the Butchers, the Curriers, the Weavers, the Bakers, the Tailors, the Shoemakers, and all kinds of craftsmen with labourers engaged in producing the necessaries of life. In the same manner came the Shopkeepers and Merchants with their assistants. After these came the Shooters, with firelocks, bows, and cross-bows, some on horseback and some on foot; and after them came the City Guard. These were followed by persons of the higher classes and the magistrates, all dressed in their proper habits; and after them came a gallant troop arrayed in a noble and splendid manner. In this procession were a number of females of a religious order who subsist by means of their labour, all clothed in white from head to foot, and forming a very pleasing sight. After them came a number of gallant persons and the canons of our Lady’s church, with all the clergy and scholars, followed by a grand display of characters. Twenty men carried the Virgin and Christ, most richly adorned, to the honour of God. In this part of the procession were a number of delightful things, represented in a splendid manner. There were several waggons in which were representations of ships and fortifications. Then came a troop of characters from the Prophets in regular order, followed by others from the New Testament, such as the Annunciation, the Wise Men of the East, riding on great camels and other wonderful animals, and the Flight into Egypt, all very skilfully appointed. Then came a great dragon, and St. Margaret, with the image of the Virgin at her girdle, exceedingly beautiful; and last St. George and his squire. In this troop rode a number of boys and girls very handsomely arrayed in various costumes, representing so many saints. This procession, from beginning to end, was upwards of two hours in passing our house; and there were so many things to be seen, that I could never describe them all even in a book.”[V-42]

[Footnote V-41: The Assumption of the Virgin is celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church on the 15th August.]

[Footnote V-42: Albrecht Dürer’s Reisejournal, in Von Murr, 7er Theil, S. 63-65.]

Though Durer chiefly resided at Antwerp during his stay in the Netherlands, he did not entirely confine himself to that city, but occasionally visited other places. On the 2nd of September 1520, he left Antwerp for Brussels, proceeding by way of Malines and Vilvorde. When at Brussels, he saw a number of valuable curiosities which had been sent to the Emperor from Mexico, among which he enumerates a golden sun, a fathom broad, and a silver moon of the same size, with weapons, armour, and dresses, and various other admirable things of great beauty and cost. He says that their value was estimated at a hundred thousand guilders; and that he never saw any thing that pleased him so much in his life. Durer was evidently fond of seeing sights; he speaks with delight of the fountains, the labyrinths, and the parks in the neighbourhood of the Royal Palace, which he says were like Paradise; and among the wonders which he saw at Brussels, he notices a large fish-bone which was almost a fathom in circumference and weighed fifteen “centner;”[V-43] a great bed that would hold fifty men; and a stone which fell from the sky in a thunder-storm in presence of the Count of Nassau. He also mentions having seen at Antwerp the bones of a giant who had been eighteen feet high. Durer and his wife seem to have had a taste for zoology: Herr Lazarus Von Ravenspurg complimented him with a monkey; and “Signor Roderigo,” a Portuguese, presented his ill-tempered spouse with a green parrot.

[Footnote V-43: This “gross Fischpein” was probably part of the back-bone of a whale.]

When at Brussels, Durer painted the portrait of the celebrated Erasmus, from whom, previous to leaving Antwerp, he had received as a present a Spanish mantle and three portraits. He remained about a week at Brussels, during which time he drew or painted seven portraits; and in his Journal he makes the following memorandum: “Item, six persons whose likenesses I have taken at Brussels, have not given me anything.” Among those portraits was that of Bernard Van Orley, an eminent Flemish painter who had studied under Raffaele, and who at that time held the office of painter to the Archduchess Margaret, regent of the Netherlands, and aunt of the Emperor Charles V. When at Brussels, Durer bought for a stiver[V-44] two copies of the “Eulenspiegel,” a celebrated engraving by Lucas Van Leyden, now of very great rarity.

[Footnote V-44: The stiver was the twenty-fourth part of a guilder or florin of gold, which was equal to about nine shillings English money of the present time; the stiver would therefore be equal to about four pence half-penny. About the same time, Durer sold a copy of his Christ’s Passion, probably the large one, for twelve stivers, and an impression of his copper-plate of Adam and Eve for four stivers. Shortly after his first arrival at Antwerp, he sold sixteen copies of the Little Passion for four guilders or florins; and thirty-two copies of his larger works,--probably the Apocalypse, the History of the Virgin, and the Great Passion,--for eight florins, being at the rate of sixteen stivers for each copy. He also sold six copies of the Passion engraved on copper at the same price. He gave to his host a painting of the Virgin on canvass to sell for two Rhenish florins. The sum that he received for each portrait in pencil [the German is mit Kohlen, which is literally charcoal], when the parties _did_ pay, appears to have been a florin.]

After remaining at Antwerp till the latter end of September, Durer proceeded to Aix-la-Chapelle, where, on the 23rd of October, he witnessed the coronation of the Emperor Charles V. He afterwards proceeded to Cologne, where, on the Sunday after All Saints’ day, he saw a grand banquet and dance given by the emperor, from whom, on the Monday after Martinmas day, he received the appointment of court-painter to his Imperial Majesty. When at Cologne, Durer bought a copy of the “Condemnation of that good man, Martin Luther, for a white-penny.” This Condemnation was probably a copy of the bull of excommunication issued against Luther by Pope Leo X. on 20th June 1520. In a day or two after receiving his appointment, Durer left Cologne and proceeded down the Rhine, and visited Nimeguen. He then went to Bois-le-duc, where he was entertained by Arnold de Beer, a painter of considerable reputation in his day, and treated with great respect by the goldsmiths of the place. On the Thursday after the Presentation of the Virgin,[V-45]--21st November,--Durer again arrived at Antwerp. “In the seven weeks and upwards that I was absent,” he writes in his Journal, “my wife and her maid spent seven gold crowns. The first had her pocket cut off in St. Mary’s church on St. Mary’s day; there were two guilders in it.”

[Footnote V-45: In Von Murr the words are “Am Donnerstage nach Marien Himmelfahrt,”--On the Thursday after the _Assumption_ of the Virgin. But this is evidently incorrect, the feast of the Assumption being kept on 15th August. The “Marien Opferung”--the Presentation of the Virgin--which is commemorated on 21st November, is evidently meant.]

On the 3rd of December, Durer left Antwerp on a short journey through Zealand, proceeding by way of Bergen-op-Zoom. In the Abbey at Middleburg he saw the great picture of the Descent from the Cross by Mabeuse; of which he remarks that “it is better painted than drawn.” When he was about to land at Armuyden, a small town on the island of Walcheren, the rope broke, and a violent wind arising, the boat which he was in was driven out to sea. Some persons, however, at length came to their assistance, and brought all the passengers safely ashore. On the Friday after St. Lucia’s day he again returned to Antwerp, after having been absent about twelve days.

On Shrove Tuesday, 1521, the company of goldsmiths invited Durer and his wife to a dinner, at which he was treated with great honour; and as this was an early meal, he was enabled at night to attend a grand banquet to which he was invited by one of the chief magistrates of Antwerp. On the Monday after his entertainment by the goldsmiths he was invited to another grand banquet which lasted two hours, and where he won, at some kind of game, two guilders of Bernard of Castile. Both at this and at the magistrates’ banquet there was masquerading. At another entertainment given by Master Peter the Secretary, Durer and Erasmus were present. He was not idle at this period of festivity, but drew several portraits in pencil. He also made a drawing for “Tomasin,” and a painting of St. Jerome for Roderigo of Portugal, who appears to have been one of the most liberal of all Durer’s Antwerp friends. Besides the little green parrot which he gave his wife, he also presented Durer with one for himself; he also gave him a small cask of comfits, with various other sweetmeats, and specimens of the sugar-cane. He also made him a present of cocoa-nuts and of several other things; and shortly before the painting was finished, Signor Roderigo gave him two large pieces of Portuguese gold coin, each of which was worth ten ducats.

On the Saturday after Easter, Durer visited Bruges, where he saw in St. James’s church some beautiful paintings by Hubert Van Eyck and Hugo Vander Goes; and in the Painters’ chapel, and in other churches, he saw several by John Van Eyck; he also mentions having seen, in St. Mary’s church, an image of the Virgin in alabaster by Michael Angelo. The guild of painters invited him to a grand banquet in their hall. Two of the magistrates, Jacob and Peter Mostaert, presented him with twelve flaggons of wine; and on the conclusion of the entertainment, all the company, amounting to sixty persons, accompanied him with torches to his lodgings. He next visited Ghent, where the company of painters also treated him with great respect. He there saw, in St. John’s church, the celebrated picture of the Elders worshipping the Lamb, from the Revelations, painted by John Van Eyck for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Durer thus expresses his opinion of it: “This is a well conceived and capital picture; the figures of Eve, the Virgin, and God the Father, are, in particular, extremely good.” After being about a week absent, he again returned to Antwerp, where he was shortly after seized with an intermitting fever, which was accompanied with a violent head-ache and great sense of weariness. This illness, however, does not seem to have lasted very long; his fever commenced in the third week after Easter, and on Rogation Sunday he attended the marriage feast of “Meister Joachim,”--probably Joachim Patenier, a landscape painter whom Durer mentions in an earlier part of his Journal.

Durer was a man of strong religious feelings; and when Luther began to preach in opposition to the church of Rome, he warmly espoused his cause. The following passages from his Journal sufficiently demonstrate the interest which he felt in the success of the great champion of the Reformation. Luther on his return from Worms, where he had attended the Diet under a safe-conduct granted by the Emperor Charles V, was waylaid, on 4th May 1521, by a party of armed men, who caused him to descend from the light waggon in which he was travelling, and to follow them into an adjacent wood. His brother James, who was in the waggon with him, made his escape on the first appearance of the horsemen. Luther having been secured, the driver and others who were in the waggon were allowed to pursue their journey without further hindrance. This secret apprehension of Luther was, in reality, contrived by his friend and supporter, Frederick, Elector of Saxony,[V-46] in order to withdraw him for a time from the apprehended violence of his enemies, whose hatred towards him had been more than ever inflamed by the bold and undisguised statement of his opinions at Worms. Luther’s friends, being totally ignorant of the elector’s design, generally supposed that the safe-conduct had been disregarded by those whose duty it was to respect it, and that he had been betrayed and delivered into the hands of his enemies. Durer, on hearing of Luther’s apprehension, writes in his Journal as follows.

[Footnote V-46: Luther’s safe-conduct from Worms to Wittenberg was limited to twenty-one days, at the expiration of which he was declared to be under the ban of the empire, or, in other words, an outlaw, to whom no prince or free city of Germany was to afford a refuge. Luther, previous to leaving Worms, was informed of the elector’s intention of secretly apprehending him on the road and conveying him to a place of safety. After getting into the wood, Luther was mounted on horseback, and conveyed to Wartburg, a castle belonging to the elector, where he continued to live disguised as a knight--Junker Jörge--till March 1522. Luther was accustomed to call the castle of Wartburg his Patmos.]

“On the Friday after Whitsuntide, 1521, I heard a report at Antwerp, that Martin Luther had been treacherously seized; for the herald of the Emperor Charles, who attended him with a safe-conduct, and to whose protection he was committed, on arriving at a lonely place near Eisenach, said he durst proceed no further, and rode away. Immediately ten horsemen made their appearance, and carried off the godly man thus betrayed into their hands. He was indeed a man enlightened by the Holy Ghost, and a follower of the true Christian faith. Whether he be yet living, or whether his enemies have put him to death, I know not; yet certainly what he has suffered has been for the sake of truth, and because he has reprehended the abuses of unchristian papacy, which strives to fetter Christian liberty with the incumbrance of human ordinances, that we may be robbed of the price of our blood and sweat, and shamefully plundered by idlers, while the sick and needy perish through hunger. Above all, it is especially distressing to me to think that God may yet allow us to remain under the blind doctrine which those men called ‘the fathers’ have imagined and set forth, whereby the precious word is either in many places falsely expounded or not at all observed.”[V-47]

[Footnote V-47: Durer, though an advocate of Luther, does not seem to have withdrawn himself from the communion of the Church of Rome. In his Journal, in 1521, he enters a sum of ten stivers given to his confessor, and, subsequently, eight stivers given to a monk who visited his wife when she was sick. The passage in which the last item occurs is curious, and seems to prove that female practitioners were then accustomed both to dispense and administer medical preparations at Antwerp. “Meine Frau ward krank,--der Apothekerinn für Klystiren gegeben 14 Stüber; dem Mönch, der sie besuchte, 8 Stüber.”--Von Murr, Journal, 7er Theil, S. 93.]

After indulging in sundry pious invocations and reflections to the extent of two or three pages, Durer thus proceeds to lament the supposed death of Luther, and to invoke Erasmus to put his hand to the work from which he believed that Luther had been removed. “And is Luther dead? Who henceforth will so clearly explain to us the Gospel? Alas! what might he not have written for us in ten or twenty years? Aid me, all pious Christians, to bewail this man of heavenly mind, and to pray that God may send us another as divinely enlightened. Where, O Erasmus, wilt thou remain? Behold, now, how the tyranny of might and the power of darkness prevail. Hear, thou champion of Christ! Ride forward, defend the truth, and deserve the martyr’s crown, for thou art already an old man.[V-48] I have heard from thy own mouth that thou hast allotted to thyself two years yet of labour in which thou mightst still be able to produce something good; employ these well for the benefit of the Gospel and the true Christian faith: let then thy voice be heard, and so shall not the see of Rome, the gates of Hell, as Christ saith, prevail against thee. And though, like thy master, thou shouldst bear the scorn of the liars, and even die a short time earlier than thou otherwise mightst, yet wilt thou therefore pass earlier from death unto eternal life and be glorified through Christ. If thou drinkest of the cup of which he drank, so wilt thou reign with him and pronounce judgment on those who have acted unrighteously.”[V-49]

[Footnote V-48: This inducement for Erasmus to stand forth as a candidate for the honour of martyrdom is, in the original, as simple in expression as it is novel in conception: “Du bist doch sonst ein altes Menniken.” Literally: For thou art already an old _mannikin_. Erasmus, however, was not a spirit to be charmed to enter such a circle by such an invocation. As he said of himself, “his gift did not lie that way,” and he had as little taste for martyrdom as he had for fish.--In one or two other passages in Durer’s Journal there is an allusion to the diminutive stature of Erasmus.]

[Footnote V-49: Von Murr, Journal, 7er Theil, S. 88-93. In volume X, p. 41, Von Murr gives from Peucer, the son-in-law of Melancthon, the following anecdote: “Melancthon, when at Nuremberg, on church and university affairs, was much in the society of Pirkheimer; and Albert Durer, the painter, an intelligent man, whose least merit, as Melancthon used to say, was his art, was frequently one of the party. Between Pirkheimer and Durer there were frequent disputes respecting the recent [religious] contest, in which Durer, as he was a man of strong mind, vigorously opposed Pirkheimer, and refuted his arguments as if he had come prepared for the discussion. Pirkheimer growing warm, for he was very irritable and much plagued with the gout, would sometimes exclaim “Not so:--these things cannot be _painted_.”--“And the arguments which you allege,” Durer would reply, “can neither be correctly expressed nor comprehended.”--Whatever might have been the particular points in dispute between the two friends, Pirkheimer, as well as Durer, was a supporter of the doctrines of Luther.”]

About this time a large wood-cut, of which the following is a reduced copy, was published; and though the satire which it contains will apply equally to any monk who may be supposed to be an instrument of the devil, it was probably directed against Luther in particular, as a teacher of false doctrine through the inspiration of the father of lies. In the cut the arch-enemy, as a bag-piper, is seen blowing into the ear of a monk, whose head forms the “bag,” and by skilful fingering causing the nose, elongated in the form of a “chanter,” to discourse sweet music. The preaching friars of former times were no less celebrated for their nasal melody than the “saints” in the days of Cromwell. A serious portrait of Luther, probably engraved or drawn on wood by Hans Baldung Grün, a pupil of Durer, was also published in 1521. It is printed in a quarto tract, entitled, “Acta et Res gestæ D. Martini Lutheri in Comitiis Principum Vuormaciæ, Anno MDXXI,” and also in a tract, written by Luther himself in answer to Jerome Emser, without date, but probably printed at Wittenberg about 1523. In this portrait, which bears considerable resemblance to the head forming the bag of Satan’s pipe, Luther appears as if meditating on a passage that he has just read in a volume which he holds open; his head is surrounded with rays of glory; and the Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, appears as if about to settle on his shaven crown. In an impression now before me, some one, apparently a contemporary, who thought that Luther’s inspiration was derived from another source, has with pen and ink transformed the dove into one of those unclean things between bat and serpent, which are supposed to be appropriate to the regions of darkness, and which are generally to be seen in paintings and engravings of the temptation of St. Anthony.

A week after Corpus Christi day[V-50] Durer left Antwerp for Malines, where the Archduchess Margaret, the aunt of the emperor Charles V, was then residing. He took up his lodgings with Henry de Bles, a painter of considerable reputation, called Civetta by the Italians, from the owl which he painted as a mark in most of his pictures; and the painters and statuaries, as at Antwerp and other places, invited him to an entertainment and treated him with great respect. He waited on the archduchess and showed her his portrait of the emperor, and would have presented it to her, but she would by no means accept of it;--probably because she could not well receive such a gift without making the artist a suitable return, for it appears, from a subsequent passage in Durer’s Journal, that she had no particular objection to receive other works of art when they cost her nothing.

[Footnote V-50: Corpus Christi day is a moveable festival, and is celebrated on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday.]

In the course of a few days Durer returned to Antwerp, where he shortly afterwards saw Lucas Van Leyden, the celebrated painter and engraver, whose plates at that time were by many considered nearly equal to his own. Durer’s brief notice of his talented contemporary is as follows: “Received an invitation from Master Lucas, who engraves on copper. He is a little man, and a native of Leyden in Holland.” Subsequently he mentions having drawn Lucas’s portrait in crayons; and having exchanged some of his own works to the value of eight florins for a complete set of Lucas’s engravings. Durer in this part of his Journal, after enumerating the portraits he had taken and the exchanges he had made since his return from Malines to Antwerp, thus speaks of the manner in which he was rewarded: “In all my transactions in the Netherlands--for my paintings, drawings, and in disposing of my works--both with high and low I have had the disadvantage. The Lady Margaret, especially, for all that I have given her and done for her, has not made me the least recompense.”

Durer now began to make preparations for his return home. He engaged a waggoner to take him and his wife to Cologne; he exchanged a portrait of the emperor for some white English cloth; and, on 1st July, he borrowed of Alexander Imhoff a hundred gold guilders to be repaid at Nuremberg; another proof that Durer, though treated with great distinction in the Low Countries, had not derived much pecuniary advantage during the period of his residence there. On the 2nd July, when he was about to leave Antwerp, the King of Denmark, Christian II, who had recently arrived in Flanders, sent for him to take his portrait. He first drew his majesty with black chalk--mit der Kohlen--and afterwards went with him to Brussels, where he appears to have painted his portrait in oil colours, and for which he received thirty florins. At Brussels, on the Sunday before St. Margaret’s Day,[V-51] the King of Denmark gave a grand banquet to the Emperor and the Archduchess Margaret, to which Durer had the honour of being invited, and failed not to attend. On the following Friday he left Brussels to return to Nuremberg, proceeding by way of Aix-la-Chapelle to Cologne.

[Footnote V-51: St. Margaret’s day is the 20th July.]

Out of a variety of other matters which Durer has mentioned in his Journal, the following--which could not be conveniently given in chronological order in the preceding abstract--may not, perhaps, be wholly uninteresting. He painted a portrait of one Nicholas, an astronomer, who was in the service of the King of England, and who was of great service to Durer on several occasions.[V-52] He gave one florin and eight stivers for wood, but whether for drawing on, or for fuel, is uncertain. He only mentions having made two drawings on wood during his residence in the Low Countries, and both were of the arms of Von Rogendorff, noticed at page 236. In one of those instances, he distinctly says that he made the drawing, “_das man’s schneiden mag_”--that it may be engraved. The word “_man’s_” clearly shows that it was to be engraved by another person.--He mentions that since Raffaele’s death his works are dispersed--“_verzogen_,”--and that one of that master’s pupils, by name “Thomas Polonier,” had called on him and made him a present of an antique ring. In a subsequent passage he calls this person “Thomas Polonius,” and says that he had given him a set of his works to be sent to Rome and exchanged for “_Raphaelische Sache_”--things by Raffaele.

[Footnote V-52: Durer says that this astronomer was a German, and a native of Munich.]

It has been said, though without sufficient authority, that Durer, weary of a home where he was made miserable by his bad-tempered, avaricious wife, left Nuremberg, and visited the Low Countries alone for the purpose of avoiding her constant annoyance. There is, however, no evidence of Durer’s visiting the Low Countries previous to 1520, when he was accompanied by his wife; nor is there any authentic record of his ever again visiting Flanders subsequent to the latter end of August 1521, when he left Brussels to return to Nuremberg. In 1522, Durer published the first edition of the Triumphal Car of the Emperor Maximilian, the designs for which had probably been made five or six years before. One of the best portraits drawn by Durer on wood also bears the date 1522. It is that of his friend Ulrich Varnbuler,[V-53]-- mentioned at page 253,--and is of large size, being about seventeen inches high by twelve and three-fourths wide. The head is full of character, and the engraving is admirably executed. From 1522 to 1528, the year of Durer’s death, he seems to have almost entirely given up the practice of drawing on wood, as there are only three cuts with his mark which contain a date between those years; they are his own arms dated 1523; his own portrait dated 1527; and the siege of a fortified city previously noticed at page 253, also dated 1527. The following is a reduced copy of the cut of Durer’s arms. The pair of _doors_ on the shield--in German _Durer_ or _Thurer_--is a rebus of the artist’s name; after the manner of the Lucys of our own country, who bore three _luces_,[V-54] or pikes--fish, not weapons--argent, in their coat of arms.

[Footnote V-53: Ulrich Varnbuler was subsequently the chancellor of the Emperor Ferdinand I. Durer mentions him in a letter addressed to “Hernn Frey in Zurich,” and dated from Nuremberg on the Sunday _after St. Andrew’s day_, 1523. With this letter Durer sent to his correspondent a humorous sketch, in pen and ink, of apes dancing, which in 1776 was still preserved in the Public Library of Basle. The date of this letter proves the incorrectness of Mr. Ottley’s statement, in page 723 of his Inquiry, where he says that Durer did not return to Nuremberg from the Low Countries “until _the middle of the year_ 1524.” Mr. Ottley is not more correct when he says, at page 735, that the portrait of Varnbuler is the “size of nature.”]

[Footnote V-54: It is supposed that Shakspeare, in alluding to the “dozen white luces” in Master Shallow’s coat of arms,--Merry Wives of Windsor, Act I,--intended to ridicule Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecotte, Wiltshire, before whom he is said to have been brought in his youth on a charge of deer-stealing.]

The last of Durer’s engravings on copper is a portrait of Melancthon, dated 1526, the year in which the meek and learned reformer visited Nuremberg. The following is a reduced copy of his own portrait, perhaps the last drawing that he made on wood. It is probably a good likeness of the artist; at any rate it bears a great resemblance to the portrait said to be intended for Durer’s own in his carving of the naming of St. John, of which some account is given at page 259. The size of the original is eleven inches and three-eighths high by ten inches wide. According to Bartsch, the earliest impressions have not the arms and mark, and are inscribed above the border at the top: “_Albrecht Durer’s Conterfeyt_”--Albert Durer’s portrait. It would seem that the block had been preserved for many years subsequent to the date, for I have now before me an impression, on comparatively modern paper, from which it is evident that at the time of its being taken, the block had been much corroded by worms.

It is probable that between 1522 and 1528 the treatises of which Durer is the author were chiefly composed. Their Titles are An Essay on the Fortification of Towns and Villages; Instructions for Measuring with the Rule and Compass; and On the Proportions of the Human Body.[V-55] They were all published at Nuremberg with illustrative wood-cuts; the first in 1527, and the other two in 1528. It is to the latter work that Hogarth alludes, in his Analysis of Beauty, when he speaks of Albert Durer, Lamozzo, and others, having “puzzled mankind with a heap of minute unnecessary divisions” in their rules for correctly drawing the human figure.

[Footnote V-55: Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett, Schloss, und Flecken; Underweysung der Messung mit der Zirckel und Richtscheyt; Bucher von Menschlicher Proportion. All in folio. Those treatises were subsequently translated into Latin and several times reprinted. The treatise on the Proportions of the Human Body was also translated into French and printed at Paris in 1557. A collection of Durer’s writings was published by J. Jansen, 1604.]

After a life of unremitted application,--as is sufficiently proved by the number of his works as a painter, an engraver, and a designer on wood,--Albert Durer died at Nuremberg on 6th April 1528, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. His wife’s wretched temper had unquestionably rendered the latter years of his life very unhappy, and in her eagerness to obtain money she appears to have urged her husband to what seems more like the heartless toil of a slave than an artist’s exercise of his profession. It is said that her sitting-room was under her husband’s studio, and that she was accustomed to give an admonitory knock against the ceiling whenever she suspected that he was “not getting forward with his work.” The following extracts from a letter, written by Bilibald Pirkheimer shortly after Durer’s death, will show that common fame has not greatly belied this heartless, selfish woman, in ascribing, in a great measure, her husband’s death to the daily vexation which she caused him, and to her urging him to continual application in order that a greater sum might be secured to her on his decease. The passages relating to Durer in Pirkheimer’s letter are to the following effect.[V-56]

[Footnote V-56: This letter is addressed to “Johann Tscherte,” an architect residing at Vienna, the mutual friend of Pirkheimer and Durer.--Von Murr, Journal, 10er Theil, S. 36.]

“I have indeed lost in Albert one of the best friends I had on earth; and nothing pains me more than the thought of his death having been so melancholy, which, next to the will of Providence, I can ascribe to no one but his wife, for she fretted him so much and tasked him so hard that he departed sooner than he otherwise would. He was dried up like a bundle of straw; durst never enjoy himself nor enter into company. This bad woman, moreover, was anxious about that for which she had no occasion to take heed,--she urged him to labour day and night solely that he might earn money, even at the cost of his life, and leave it to her; she was content to live despised, as she does still, provided Albert might leave her six thousand guilders. But she cannot enjoy them: the sum of the matter is, she alone has been the cause of his death. I have often expostulated with her about her fretful, jealous conduct, and warned her what the consequences would be, but have only met with reproach. To the friends and sincere well-wishers of Albert she was sure to be the enemy; while such conduct was to him a cause of exceeding grief, and contributed to bring him to the grave. I have not seen her since his death; she will have nothing to say to me, although I have on many occasions rendered her great service. Whoever contradicts her, or gives not way to her in all things, is sure to incur her enmity; I am, therefore, better pleased that she should keep herself away. She and her sister are not indeed women of loose character; but, on the contrary, are, as I believe, of honest reputation and religious; one would, however, rather have one of the other kind who otherwise conducts herself in a pleasant manner, than a fretful, jealous, scolding wife--however devout she may be--with whom a man can have no peace either day or night. We must, however, leave the matter to the will of God, who will be gracious and merciful to Albert, for his life was that of a pious and righteous man. As he died like a good Christian, we may have little doubt of his salvation. God grant us grace, and that in his own good time we may happily follow Albert.”

The popular error,--as I believe it to be,--that Albert Durer was an engraver on wood, has not tended, in England, where his works as a painter are but little known, to increase his reputation. Many persons on looking over the wood engravings which bear his mark have thought but meanly of their execution; and have concluded that his abilities as an artist were much over-rated, on the supposition that his fame chiefly rested on the presumed fact of his being the engraver of those works. Certain writers, too, speaking of him as a painter and an engraver on copper, have formed rather an unfavourable estimate of his talents, by comparing his pictures with those of his great Italian contemporaries,-- Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Raffaele,--and by judging of his engravings with reference to the productions of modern art, in which the freedom and effect of etching are combined with the precision and clearness of lines produced by the burin. This, however, is judging the artist by an unfair standard. Though he has not attained, nor indeed attempted, that sublimity which seems to have been principally the aim of the three great Italian masters above mentioned, he has produced much that is beautiful, natural, and interesting; and which, though it may not stand so high in the scale of art as the grand compositions of his three great contemporaries, is no less necessary to its completion. The field which he cultivated, though not yielding productions so noble or splendid as theirs, was of greater extent and afforded greater variety. If they have left us more sublime conceptions of past and future events, Durer has transmitted to us more faithful pictures of the characters, manners, and customs of his own times. Let those who are inclined to depreciate his engravings on copper, as dry and meagre when compared with the productions of modern engravers, consider the state in which he found the art; and let them also recollect that he was not a mere translator of another person’s ideas, but that he engraved his own designs. Setting aside his merits as a painter, I am of opinion that no artist of the present day has produced, from his own designs, three such engravings as Durer’s Adam and Eve, St. Jerome seated in his chamber writing, and the subject entitled Melancolia.[V-57] Let it also not be forgotten that to Albert Durer we owe the discovery of etching; a branch of the art which gives to modern engravers, more especially in landscape, so great an advantage over the original inventor. Looking impartially at the various works of Durer, and considering the period and the country in which he lived, few, I think, will venture to deny that he was one of the greatest artists of his age. The best proof indeed of the solidity of his fame is afforded by the esteem in which his works have been held for three centuries by nearly all persons who have had opportunities of seeing them, except such as have, upon narrow principles, formed an exclusive theory with respect to excellence in art. With such authorities nothing can be beautiful or interesting that is not _grand_; every country parish church should be built in the style of a Grecian temple; our woods should grow nothing but oaks; a country gentleman’s dove-cot should be a fac-simile of the lantern of Demosthenes; the sign of the Angel at a country inn should be painted by a Guido; and a picture representing the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science should be in the style of Raffaele’s School of Athens.

[Footnote V-57: Those three engravings are respectively numbered 1, 60, and 67 in Bartsch’s list of Durer’s works in his Peintre-Graveur, tom. vii. The Adam and Eve is nine inches and three-fourths high by seven inches and a half wide,--date 1504; St. Jerome, nine inches and five-eighths high by seven inches and three-eighths wide,--date 1514; Melancolia, nine inches and three-eighths high by seven inches and one fourth wide,--date 1514.]

Lucas Cranach, a painter of great repute in his day, like his contemporary Durer has also been supposed to be the engraver of the wood-cuts which bear his mark, but which, in all probability, were only drawn by him on the block and executed by professional wood engravers. The family name of this artist was Sunder, and he is also sometimes called Muller or Maler--Painter--from his profession. He acquired the name Cranach, or Von Cranach, from Cranach, a town in the territory of Bamberg, where he was born in 1470. He enjoyed the patronage of the electoral princes of Saxony, and one of the most frequent of his marks is a shield of the arms of that family. Another of his marks is a shield with two swords crossed; a third is a kind of dragon; and a fourth is the initial letters of his name, L. C. Sometimes two or three of those marks are to be found in one cut. There are four engravings on copper with the mark [[LCZ]] which are generally ascribed to this artist. That they are from his designs is very likely, but whether they were engraved by himself or not is uncertain. One of them bears the date 1492, and it is probable that they were all executed about the same period. Two of those pieces were in the possession of Mr. Ottley, who says, “Perhaps the two last characters of the mark may be intended for _Cr_.” It seems, however, more likely that the last character is intended for the letter which it most resembles--a Z, and that it denotes the German word _zeichnet_--that is “_drew_;” in the same manner as later artists occasionally subjoined the letter P or F to their names for _Pinxit_ or _Fecit_, respectively as they might have painted the picture or engraved the plate.

One of the earliest chiaro-scuros, as has before been observed, printed from three blocks, is from a design of Lucas Cranach. It is dated 1509, nine years before the earliest chiaro-scuro with a date executed by Ugo da Carpi, to whom Vasari and others have erroneously ascribed the invention of this mode of imitating a drawing by impressions from two or more wood-blocks. The subject, like that of the following specimen, is a Repose in Egypt, but is treated in a different manner,--the Virgin being represented giving suck to the infant Christ.

The wood engravings that contain Cranach’s mark are not so numerous as those which contain the mark of Albert Durer, and they are also generally inferior to the latter both in effect and design. The following reduced copy of a cut which contains three of Cranach’s four marks will afford some idea of the style of his designs on wood. As a specimen of his ability in this branch of art it is perhaps superior to the greater part of his designs executed in the same manner. The subject is described by Bartsch as a Repose in Egypt. The action of the youthful angels who are dancing round the Virgin and the infant Christ is certainly truly juvenile if not graceful. The two children seen up the tree robbing an eagle’s nest are perhaps emblematic of the promised peace of Christ’s kingdom and of the destruction of the power of Satan: “No lion shall be there nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there.”[V-58] In the right-hand corner at the top is the shield of the arms of Saxony; and to the left, also at the top, is another of Cranach’s marks--a shield with two swords crossed; in the right-hand corner at the bottom is a third mark,--the figure of a kind of dragon with a ring in its mouth. The size of the original cut is thirteen inches and one-fourth high by nine inches and one-fourth wide.

[Footnote V-58: Isaiah, chapter xxxv. verse 9.]

Cranach was much esteemed in his own country as a painter, and several of his pictures are still regarded with admiration. He was in great favour with John Frederick, Elector of Saxony,[V-59] and at one period of his life was one of the magistrates of Wittenberg. He died at Weimar, on 16th October 1553, aged eighty-three.

[Footnote V-59: One of the largest wood-cuts designed by Cranach is a subject representing the baptism of some saint; and having on one side a portrait of Frederick, Elector of Saxony, and on the other a portrait of Luther. The block has consisted of three pieces, and from the impressions it seems as if the parts containing the portraits of the elector and Luther had been added after the central part had been finished. The piece altogether is comparatively worthless in design, and is very indifferently engraved.]

Another eminent painter who has been classed with Durer and Cranach as a wood engraver is Hans Burgmair, who was born at Augsburg about 1473. The mark of this artist is to be found on a great number of wood engravings, but beyond this fact there is not the least reason to suppose that he ever engraved a single block. To those who have described Burgmair as a wood engraver from this circumstance only, a most satisfactory answer is afforded by the fact that several of the original blocks of the Triumphs of Maximilian, which contain Burgmair’s mark, have at the back the names of the different engravers by whom they were executed. As we have here positive evidence of cuts with Burgmair’s mark being engraved by other persons, we cannot certainly conclude that any cut, from the mere fact of its containing his mark, was actually engraved by himself. Next to Albert Durer he was one of the best designers on wood of his age; and as one of the early masters of the German school of painting he is generally considered as entitled to rank next to the great painter of Nuremberg. It has indeed been supposed that Burgmair was a pupil of Durer; but for this opinion there seems to be no sufficient ground. It is certain that he made many of the designs for the wood-cuts published under the title of The Triumphs of Maximilian; and it is also probable that he drew nearly all the cuts in the book entitled Der Weiss Kunig--The Wise King, another work illustrative of the learning, wisdom, and adventures of the Emperor Maximilian.[V-60] Before proceeding, however, to give any account of those works, it seems advisable to give two specimens from a different series of wood-cuts of his designing, and to briefly notice two or three of the more remarkable single cuts that bear his mark.

[Footnote V-60: Burgmair also made the designs for a series of saints, male and female, of the family of the emperor, which are also engraved on wood. The original blocks, with the names of the engravers written at the back, are still preserved, and are at present in the Imperial Library at Vienna.]

The cut on the opposite page is a reduced copy from a series designed by Burgmair. The subject is Samson and Delilah, and is treated according to the old German fashion, without the least regard to propriety of costume. Samson is represented like a grisly old German baron of Burgmair’s own time, with limbs certainly not indicating extraordinary strength; and Delilah seems very deliberately engaged in cutting off his hair. The wine flagon and fowl, to the left, would seem to indicate the danger of yielding to sensual indulgence. The original cut is surrounded by an ornamental border, and is four inches and five-eighths high by three inches and five-eighths wide. Burgmair’s mark H. B. is at the bottom of the cut, to the right.

The cut on page 280 is also a reduced copy from one of the same series, and is a proof that those who call the whole by the general title of “Bible Prints” are not exactly correct in their nomenclature. The somewhat humorous-looking personage, whom a lady is using as her pad, is thus described in an inscription underneath the cut: “Aristotle, a Greek, the son of Nicomachus. A disciple of Plato, and the master of Alexander the Great.” Though Aristotle is said to have been extremely fond of his wife Pythaïs, and to have paid her divine honours after her death, there is no record, I believe, of her having amused herself with riding on her husband’s back. The subject is probably intended to illustrate the power of the fair sex over even the wisest of mortals, and to show that philosophers themselves when under such influence occasionally forget their character as teachers of men, and exhibit themselves in situations which scarcely an ass might envy. The original is surrounded by a border, and is four inches and five-eighths high by three inches and five-eighths wide.

There are several chiaro-scuros from wood-blocks with Burgmair’s mark. One of the earliest is a portrait of “Joannes Paungartner,” from two blocks, with the date 1512; another of St. George on horseback, from two blocks, engraved by Jost or Josse de Negher, without date; a third representing a young woman flying from Death, who is seen killing a young man,--from three blocks, without date; and a fourth of the Emperor Maximilian on horseback, from two blocks, with the date 1518.

The best cuts of Burgmair’s designing, though drawn with great spirit and freedom, are decidedly inferior to the best of the wood-cuts designed by Albert Durer. Errors in perspective are frequent in the cuts which bear his mark; his figures are not so varied nor their characters so well indicated as Durer’s; and in their arrangement, or grouping, he is also inferior to Durer, as well as in the art of giving effect to his subjects by the skilful distribution of light and shade. The cuts in the Wise King, nearly all of which are said to have been designed by him, are, for the most part, very inferior productions both with respect to engraving and design. His merits as a designer on wood are perhaps shown to greater advantage in the Triumphs of Maximilian than in any other of his works executed in this manner.--Some writers have asserted that Burgmair died in 1517, but this is certainly incorrect; for there is a portrait of him, with that of his wife on the same pannel, painted by himself in 1529, when he was fifty-six years old. Underneath this painting was a couplet to the following effect:

Our likeness such as here you view;-- The glass itself was not more true.[V-61]

[Footnote V-61: “Solche Gestalt unser baider was, Im Spigel aber nix dan das!” A small engraving in a slight manner appears to have been made of the portraits of Burgmair and his wife by George Christopher Kilian, an artist of Augsburg, about 1774.--Von Murr, Journal, 4er Theil, S. 22.]

Burgmair, like Cranach, lived till he was upwards of eighty; but it would seem that he had given up drawing on wood for many years previous to his death, for I am not aware of there being any wood-cuts designed by him with a date subsequent to 1530. He died in 1559, aged eighty-six.

Hans Schäufflein is another of those old German painters who are generally supposed to have been also engravers on wood. Bartsch, however, thinks that, like Durer, Cranach, and Burgmair, he only made the designs for the wood-cuts which are ascribed to him, and that they were engraved by other persons. Schäufflein was born at Nuremberg in 1483; and it is said that he was a pupil of Albert Durer. Subsequently he removed to Nordlingen, a town in Suabia, about sixty miles to the south-westward of Nuremberg, where he died in 1550.

The wood-cuts in connexion with which Schäufllein’s name is most frequently mentioned are the illustrations of the work usually called the Adventures of Sir Theurdank,[V-62] an allegorical poem, in folio, which is said to have been the joint composition of the Emperor Maximilian and his private secretary Melchior Pfintzing, provost of the church of St. Sebald at Nuremberg. Though Köhler, a German author, in an Essay on Sir Theurdank,--De inclyto libro poetico Theurdank,--has highly praised the poetical beauties of the work, they are certainly not such as are likely to interest an English reader. “The versified allegory of Sir Theurdank,” says Küttner,[V-63] “is deficient in true Epic beauty; it has also nothing, as a poem, of the romantic descriptions of the thirteenth century,--nothing of the delicate gallantry of the age of chivalry and the troubadours. The machinery which sets all in action are certain personifications of Envy, restless Curiosity, and Daring; these induce the hero to undertake many perilous adventures, from which he always escapes through Understanding and Virtue. Such is the groundwork of the fable which Pfintzing constructs in order to extol, under allegorical representations, the perils, adventures, and heroic deeds of the emperor. Everything is described so figuratively as to amount to a riddle; and the story proceeds with little connexion and without animation. There are no striking descriptive passages, no Homeric similes, and no episodes to allow the reader occasionally to rest; in fact, nothing admirable, spirit-stirring, or great. The poem is indeed rather moral than epic; Lucan’s Pharsalia partakes more of the epic character than Pfintzing’s Theurdank. Pfintzing, however, surpasses the Cyclic poets alluded to by Horace.”[V-64]

[Footnote V-62: The original title of the work is: “Die gevarlichkeiten und eins teils der Geschichten des loblichen streytparen und hochberümbten Helds und Ritters Tewrdanckha.” That is: The adventurous deeds and part of the history of the famous, valiant, and highly-renowned hero Sir Theurdank. The name, Theurdank, in the language of the period, would seem to imply a person whose thoughts were only employed on noble and elevated subjects. Goethe, who in his youth was fond of looking over old books illustrated with wood-cuts, alludes to Sir Theurdank in his admirable play of Götz von Berlichingen: “Geht! Geht!” says Adelheid to Weislingen, “Erzählt das Mädchen die den Teurdanck lesen, und sich so einen Mann wünschen.”--“Go! Go! Tell that to a girl who reads Sir Theurdank, and wishes that she may have such a husband.” In Sir Walter Scott’s faulty translation of this play--under the name of _William_ Scott, 1799,--the passage is rendered as follows: “Go! Go! Talk of that to some forsaken damsel whose Corydon has proved forsworn.” In another passage where Goethe makes Adelheid allude to the popular “Märchen,” or tale, of Number-Nip, the point is completely lost in the translation: “Entbinden nicht unsre Gesetze solchen Schwüren?--Macht das Kindern weiss die den Rübezahl glauben.” Literally, “Do not our laws release you from such oaths?--Tell that to children who believe Number-Nip.” In Sir Walter Scott’s translation the passage is thus most incorrectly rendered: “Such agreement is no more binding than an unjust extorted oath. Every child knows what faith is to be kept with robbers.” The name _Rübezahl_ is literally translated by _Number-Neep_; Rübe is the German name for a turnip,--Scoticè, a neep. The story is as well known in Germany as that of Jack the Giant-Killer in England.]

[Footnote V-63: Charaktere Teutscher Dichter und Prosaisten, S. 71. Berlin, 1781.]

[Footnote V-64:

Nec sic incipies, ut scriptor cyclicus olim: “Fortunam Priami cantabo, et nobile bellum:” Quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu? Parturiunt montes; nascetur ridiculus mus. Ars Poetica, v. 136-139.

In a Greek epigram the Cyclic poets are thus noticed:

Τοὺς κυκλίους τούτους τοὺς αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα λέγοντας Μισῶ λωποδύτας ἀλλοτρίων ἐπέων.]

The first edition of Sir Theurdank was printed by Hans Schönsperger the elder, at Nuremberg in 1517; and in 1519 two editions appeared at Augsburg from the press of the same printer. As Schönsperger’s established printing-office was at the latter city and not at Nuremberg, Panzer has supposed that the imprint of Nuremberg in the first edition might have been introduced as a compliment to the nominal author, Melchior Pfintzing, who then resided in that city. Two or three other editions of Sir Theurdank, with the same cuts, appeared between 1519 and 1602; but Küttner, in his Characters of German poets and prose-writers, says that in all those editions alterations have been made in the text.

The character in which Sir Theurdank is printed is of great beauty and much ornamented with flourishes. Several writers, and among others Fournier, who was a type-founder and wood-engraver, have erroneously described the text as having been engraved on blocks of wood. This very superficial and incorrect writer also states that the cuts contained in the volume are “chefs-d’œuvres de la gravure en bois.”[V-65] His opinion with respect to the cuts is about as correct as his judgment respecting the type; the most of them are in fact very ordinary productions, and are neither remarkable for execution nor design. He also informs his readers that he has discovered on some of those cuts an H and an S, accompanied with a little shovel, and that they are the monogram of _Hans Sebalde_, or Hans Schäufflein. By _Hans Sebalde_ he perhaps means Hans Sebald Behaim, an artist born at Nuremberg in 1500, and who never used the letters H and S, accompanied with a little shovel, as a monogram. Fournier did not know that this mark is used exclusively by Hans Schäufflein; and that the little shovel, or baker’s peel,--called in old German, Schäufflein, or Scheuffleine,--is a rebus of his surname. The careful examination of writers more deserving of credit has completely proved that the text of the three earliest editions--those only in which it was asserted to be from engraved wood-blocks--is printed from moveable types of metal. Breitkopf[V-66] has observed, that in the edition of 1517 the letter i, in the word _shickhet_, in the second line following the eighty-fourth cut, is inverted; and Panzer and Brunner have noticed several variations in the orthography of the second and third editions when compared with the first.

[Footnote V-65: Dissertation sur l’Origine et les Progres de l’Art de Graver en Bois, p. 74. Paris, 1758.]

[Footnote V-66: The kind of character in which the text of Sir Theurdank is printed is called “Fractur” by German printers. “The first work,” says Breitkopf, “which afforded an example of a perfectly-shaped _Fractur_ for printing, was unquestionably the Theurdank, printed at Nuremberg, 1517.”--Ueber Bibliographie und Bibliophile, S. 8. 1793.--Neudörffer, a contemporary, who lived at Nuremberg at the time when Sir Theurdank was first published, says that the specimens for the types were written by Vincent Rockner, the emperor’s court-secretary.--Von Murr, Journal, 2er Theil, S. 159; and Lichtenberger, Initia Typographica, p. 194.]

There are a hundred and eighteen wood-cuts in the Adventures of Sir Theurdank, which are all supposed to have been designed, if not engraved, by Hans Schäufflein, though his mark, [Symbol], occurs on not more than five or six. From the general similarity of style I have, however, no doubt that the designs were all made by the same person, and I think it more likely that Schaufflein was the designer than the engraver. The cut on page 284 is a reduced copy of that numbered 14 in the first edition. The original is six inches and one-fourth high by five inches and a half wide. In this cut, Sir Theurdank is seen, in the dress of a hunter, encountering a huge bear; while to the right is perceived one of his tempters, _Fürwittig_--restless Curiosity,--and to the left, on horseback, Theurdank’s squire, Ernhold. The title of the chapter, or fytte, to which this cut is prefixed is to the following effect: “How Fürwittig led Sir Theurdank into a perilous encounter with a she-bear.” The subject of the thirteenth chapter is his perilous encounter with a stag, and in the fifteenth we are entertained with the narration of one of his adventures when hunting the chamois.

The opposite cut is a reduced copy of No. 111 in the Adventures of Sir Theurdank. The title of the chapter to which this cut is prefixed is: “How Unfalo [one of Theurdank’s tempters] was hung.” A monk at the foot of the gallows appears to pray for the culprit just turned off; while Ernold seems to be explaining to a group of spectators to the left the reason of the execution. The cut illustrative of the 110th chapter represents the beheading of “Fürwittig;” and in the 112th, “Neydelhart,” the basest of Theurdank’s enemies, is seen receiving the reward of his perfidy by being thrown into a moat. The two original cuts which have been selected as specimens of the wood engravings in the Adventures of Sir Theurdank, though not the best, are perhaps, in point of design and execution, rather superior to two-thirds of those contained in the work. The copies, though less in size, afford a tolerably correct idea of the style of the originals, which no one who is acquainted with the best wood-cuts engraved after the designs of Durer and Burgmair will assert to be “chefs-d’œuvres” of the art of wood engraving.

There are a number of wood-cuts which contain Hans Schäufflein’s mark, though somewhat different from that which occurs in the Adventures of Sir Theurdank; the S being linked with one of the upright lines of the H, instead of being placed between them. When the letters are combined in this manner, there are frequently two little shovels crossed, “in saltire,” as a herald would say, instead of a single one as in Sir Theurdank. The following mark, [Symbol], occurs on a series of wood-cuts illustrative of Christ’s Passion, printed at Frankfort by C. Egenolf, 1542; on the cuts in a German almanack, Mentz, 1545, and 1547; and on several single subjects executed about that period. This mark, it is said, distinguishes the designs of Hans Schaufflein the younger. Bartsch, however, observes, that “what Strutt has said about there being two persons of this name, an elder and a younger, seems to be a mere conjecture.”

The book entitled Der Weiss Kunig--the Wise King--is another of the works projected by the Emperor Maximilian in order to inform the world of sundry matters concerning his father Frederick III, his own education, warlike and perilous deeds, government, wooing, and wedding. This work is in prose; and though Marx Treitzsaurwein, the emperor’s secretary, is put forth as the author, there is little doubt of its having been chiefly composed by Maximilian himself. About 1512 it appears that the materials for this work were prepared by the emperor, and that about 1514 they were entrusted to his secretary, Treitzsaurwein, to be put in order. It would appear that before the work was ready for the press Maximilian had died; and Charles V. was too much occupied with other matters to pay much attention to the publication of an enigmatical work, whose chief object was to celebrate the accomplishments, knowledge, and adventures of his grandfather. The obscurity of many passages in the emperor’s manuscript seems to have, in a great measure, retarded the completion of the work. There is now in the Imperial Library at Vienna a manuscript volume of queries respecting the doubtful passages in the Weiss Kunig; and as each had ultimately to be referred to the emperor, it would seem that, from the pressure of more important business and his increased age, he had wanted leisure and spirits to give the necessary explanations. In the sixteenth century, Richard Strein, an eminent philologer, began a sort of commentary or exposition of the more difficult passages in the Wise King; and subsequently his remarks came into the hands of George Christopher von Schallenberg, who, in 1631, had the good fortune to obtain at Vienna impressions of most of the cuts which were intended by the emperor to illustrate the work, together with several of the original drawings. Treitzsaurwein’s manuscript, which for many years had been preserved at Ambras in the Tyrol, having been transferred to the Imperial Library at Vienna, and the original blocks having been discovered in the Jesuits’ College at Gratz in Stiria, the text and cuts were printed together, for the first time, in a folio volume, at Vienna in 1775.[V-67]

[Footnote V-67: The title of the volume is “Der Weiss Kunig. Eine Erzehlung von den Thaten Kaiser Maximilian des Ersten. Von Marx Treitzsaurwein auf dessen Angeben zusammen getragen, nebst von Hannsen Burgmair dazu verfertigten Holzschnitten. Herausgeben aus dem Manuscripte der Kaiserl. Königl. Hofbibliothek. Wien, auf Kosten Joseph Kurzböckens, 1775.”]

It is probable that the greater part, if not all the cuts, were finished previous to the emperor’s death; and impressions of them, very likely taken shortly after the blocks were finished, were known to collectors long before the publication of the book. The late Mr. Ottley had seventy-seven of the series, apparently taken as proofs by means of a press. The paper on which these cuts are impressed appears to have consisted of fragments, on one side of which there had previously been printed certain state papers of the Emperor Maximilian, dated 1514. They were sold at the sale of the late Mr. Ottley’s engravings in 1838, and are now in the Print Room of the British Museum. In the volume printed at Vienna in 1775, there are two hundred and thirty-seven[V-68] large cuts, of which number ninety-two contain Burgmair’s mark, H. B; one contains Schaufflein’s mark; another the mark of Hans Springinklee; and a third, a modern cut, is marked “F. F. S. V. 1775.” Besides the large cuts, all of which are old except the last noticed, there are a few worthless tail-pieces of modern execution, one of which, a nondescript bird, has been copied by Bewick, and is to be found at page 144 of the first edition of his Quadrupeds, 1790.

[Footnote V-68: In the Imperial Library at Vienna there is a series of old impressions of cuts intended for “Der Weiss Kunig,” consisting of two hundred and fifty pieces; it would therefore appear, supposing this set to be perfect, that there are fourteen of the original blocks lost. Why a single modern cut has been admitted into the book, and thirteen of the old impressions not re-engraved, it perhaps would be difficult to give a satisfactory reason.]

The cuts in the Weiss Kunig, with respect to the style in which they are designed, bear considerable resemblance to those in Sir Theurdank; and from their execution it is evident that they have been cut by different engravers; some of them being executed in a very superior manner, and others affording proofs of their either being cut by a novice or a very indifferent workman. It has been said that all those which contain the mark of Hans Burgmair show a decided superiority in point of engraving; but this assertion is not correct, for several of them may be classed with the worst executed in the volume. The unequal manner in which the cuts with Burgmair’s mark are executed is with me an additional reason for believing that he only furnished the designs for professional wood engravers to execute, and never engraved on wood himself.

It seems unnecessary to give any specimens of the cuts in the Weiss Kunig, as an idea of their style may be formed from those given at pages 284 and 285 from Sir Theurdank; and as other specimens of Burgmair’s talents as a designer on wood will be given subsequently from the Triumphs of Maximilian. The following abstract of the titles of a few of the chapters may perhaps afford some idea of the work, while they prove that the education of the emperor embraced a wide circle, forming almost a perfect Cyclopædia. The first fifteen chapters give an account of the marriage of the Old Wise King, Frederick III, the father of Maximilian, with Elenora, daughter of Alphonso V, King of Portugal; his journey to Rome and his coronation there by the pope; with the birth, and christening of Maximilian, the Young Wise King. About thirty-five chapters, from XV. to L., are chiefly occupied with an account of Maximilian’s education. After learning to write, he is instructed in the liberal arts; and after some time devoted to “Politik,” or King-craft, he proceeds to the study of the _black-art_, a branch of knowledge which the emperor subsequently held to be vain and ungodly. He then commences the study of history, devotes some attention to medicine and law, and learns the Italian and Bohemian languages. He then learns to paint; studies the principles of architecture, and tries his hand at carpentry. He next takes lessons in music; and about the same time acquires a practical knowledge of the art of cookery:--the Wise King, we are informed, was a person of nice taste in kitchen affairs, and had a proper relish for savoury and well-cooked viands. To the accomplishment of dancing he adds a knowledge of numismatics; and, after making himself acquainted with the mode of working mines, he learns to shoot with the hand-gun and the cross-bow. The chase, falconry, angling, and fowling next occupy his attention; and about the same time he learns to fence, to tilt, and to manage the great horse. His course of education appears to have been wound up with practical lessons in the art of making armour, in gunnery, and in fortification. From the fiftieth chapter to the conclusion, the book is chiefly filled with accounts of the wars and adventures of Maximilian, which are for the most part allegorically detailed, and require the reader to be well versed in the true history of the emperor to be able to unriddle them. Küttner says that, notwithstanding its allegories and enigmatical allusions, the Weiss Kunig is a work which displays much mind in the conception and execution, and considerable force and elegance of language; and that it chiefly wants a more orderly arrangement of the events. “Throughout the whole,” he adds, “there are evidences of a searching genius, improved by science and a knowledge of the affairs of the world.”[V-69]

[Footnote V-69: Charaktere Teutscher Dichter und Prosaisten, S. 70.]

The series of wood-cuts called the Triumphs of Maximilian are, both with respect to design and engraving, the best of all the works thus executed by command of the emperor to convey to posterity a pictorial representation of the splendour of his court, his victories, and the extent of his possessions. This work appears to have been commenced about the same time as the Weiss Kunig; and from the subject, a triumphal procession, it was probably intended to be the last of the series of wood-cuts by which he was desirous of disseminating an opinion of his power and his fame. Of those works he only lived to see one published,--the Adventures of Sir Theurdank; the Wise King, the Triumphal Car, the Triumphal Arch, and the Triumphal Procession, appear to have been all unfinished at the time of his decease in 1519. The total number of cuts contained in the latter work, published under the title of the Triumphs of Maximilian, in 1796, is one hundred and thirty-five; but had the series been finished according to the original drawings, now preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, the whole number of the cuts would have been about two hundred and eighteen. Of the hundred and thirty-five published there are about sixteen designed in a style so different from the rest, that it is doubtful if they belong to the same series; and this suspicion receives further confirmation from the fact that the subjects of those sixteen doubtful cuts are not to be found among the original designs. It would therefore seem, that, unless some of the blocks have been lost or destroyed, little more than one-half of the cuts intended for the Triumphal Procession were finished when the emperor’s death put a stop to the further progress of the work. It is almost certain, that none of the cuts were engraved after the emperor’s death; for the date, commencing with 1516, is written at the back of several of the original blocks, and on no one is it later than 1519.

The plan of the Triumphal Procession,--consisting of a description of the characters to be introduced, the order in which they are to follow each other, their arms, dress, and appointments,--appears to have been dictated by the emperor to his secretary Treitzsaurwein, the nominal author of the Weiss Kunig, in 1512. In this manuscript the subjects for the rhyming inscriptions intended for the different banners and tablets are also noted in prose. Another manuscript, in the handwriting of Treitzsaurwein, and interlined by the emperor himself, contains the inscriptions for the banners and tablets in verse; and a third manuscript, written after the drawings were finished, contains a description of the subjects,--though not so much in detail as the first, and in some particulars slightly differing,--with all the inscriptions in verse except eight. From those manuscripts, which are preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, the descriptions in the edition of 1796 have been transcribed. Most of the descriptions and verses were previously given by Von Murr, in 1775, in the ninth volume of his Journal. The edition of the Triumphal Procession published in 1796 also contains a French translation of the descriptions, with numbers referring to those printed at the right-hand corner of the cuts. The numbers, however, of the description and the cut in very many instances do not agree; and it would almost seem, from the manner in which the text is printed, that the publishers did not wish to facilitate a comparison between the description and the cut which they have numbered as corresponding with it. The gross negligence of the publishers, or their editor, in this respect materially detracts from the interest of the work. To compare the descriptions with the cuts is not only a work of some trouble, but it is also labour thrown away. Von Murr’s volume, from its convenient size, is of much greater use in comparing the cuts with the description than the text printed in the edition of 1796; and though it contains no numbers for reference,--as no complete collection of the cuts had then been printed,--it contains no misdirections: and it is better to have no guide-posts than such as only lead the traveller wrong.

The original drawings for the Triumphal Procession,--or as the work is usually called, the Triumphs of Maximilian,--are preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna. They are painted in water colours, on a hundred and nine sheets of vellum, each thirty-four inches long by twenty inches high, and containing two of the engraved subjects. Dr. Dibdin, who saw the drawings in 1818, says that they are rather gaudily executed, and that he prefers the engravings to the original paintings.[V-70] Whether those paintings are the work of Hans Burgmair, or not, appears to be uncertain. From the following extract from the preface to the Triumphs of Maximilian, published in 1796, it is evident that the writer did not think that the original drawings were executed by that artist. “The engravings of this Triumph, far from being servile copies of the paintings in miniature, differ from them entirely, so far as regards the manner in which they are designed. Most all the groups have a different form, and almost every figure a different attitude; _consequently Hans Burgmair appears in his work in the character of author [original designer], and so much the more, as he has in many points surpassed his model_. But whatever may be the difference between the engravings and the drawings on vellum, the subjects still so far correspond that they may be recognised without the least difficulty. It is, however, necessary to except eighteen of the engravings, in which this correspondence would be sought for in vain. Those engravings are, the twelve from No. 89 to 100, and the six from 130 to 135.” As the cuts appear to have been intentionally wrong numbered, it is not easy to determine from this reference which are actually the first twelve alluded to, for in most of the copies which I have seen, the numerals 91, 92, and 93 occur twice,--though the subjects of the cuts are different. In the copy now before me, I have to observe that there are _sixteen_[V-71] cuts designed in a style so different from those which contain Burgmair’s mark, that I am convinced they have not been drawn by that artist. Without enquiring whether the subjects are to be found in the paintings or not, I am satisfied that a considerable number of the engravings, besides those sixteen, were not drawn on the wood by Hans Burgmair. Both Breitkopf and Von Murr[V-72] have asserted that the drawings for the Triumphs of Maximilian were made by Albert Durer, but they do not say whether they mean the drawings on vellum, or the drawings on the blocks. This assertion is, however, made without any authority; and, whether they meant the drawings on vellum or the drawings on the block, it is unquestionably incorrect. The drawings on vellum are not by Durer, and of the whole hundred and thirty-five cuts there are not more than five or six that can be supposed with any degree of probability to have been of his designing.

[Footnote V-70: Bibliographical Tour, vol iii. p. 330.]

[Footnote V-71: The subjects of those sixteen cuts are chiefly the statues of the emperor’s ancestors, with representations of himself, and of his family alliances. Several of the carriages are propelled by mechanical contrivances, which for laborious ingenuity may vie with the machine for uncorking bottles in one of the subjects of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode. In the copy before me those engravings are numbered 89, 90, 91, 91, 92, 92, 93, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103.]

[Footnote V-72: Breitkopf, Ueber Bibliographie und Bibliophile, S. 4. Leipzig, 1793. Von Murr, Journal, 9er Theil, S. 1. At page 255 I have said: “Though I have not been able to ascertain satisfactorily the subject of Durer’s painting in the Town-hall of Nuremberg, I am inclined to think that it is the Triumphal _Car_ of Maximilian.” Since the sheet containing the above passage was printed off I have ascertained that the subject _is_ the Triumphal Car; and that it is described in Von Murr’s Nürnbergischen Merkwürdigkeiten, S. 395.]

Forty of the blocks from which the Triumphs of Maximilian are printed were obtained from Ambras in the Tyrol, where they had probably been preserved since the time of the emperor’s death; and the other ninety-five were discovered in the Jesuits’ College at Gratz in Stiria. The whole were brought to Vienna and deposited in the Imperial Library in 1779. A few proofs had probably been taken when the blocks were engraved; there are ninety of those old impressions in the Imperial Library; Monsieur Mariette had ninety-seven; and Sandrart had seen a hundred. The latter, in speaking of those impressions, expresses a suspicion of the original blocks having been destroyed in a fire at Augsburg; their subsequent discovery, however, at Ambras and Gratz, shows that his suspicion was not well founded. On the discovery of those blocks it was supposed that the remainder of the series, as described in the manuscript, might also be still in existence; but after a diligent search no more have been found. It is indeed highly probable that the further progress of the work had been interrupted by Maximilian’s death, and that if any more of the series were finished, the number must have been few. About 1775, a few impressions were taken from the blocks preserved at Ambras, and also from those at Gratz; but no collection of the whole accompanied with text was ever printed until 1796, when an edition in large folio was printed at Vienna by permission of the Austrian government, and with the name of J. Edwards, then a bookseller in Pall-Mall, on the title-page, as the London publisher. It is much to be regretted that greater pains were not taken to afford the reader every information that could be obtained with respect to the cuts; and it says very little for the English publisher’s patriotism that the translation of the original German descriptions should be in French;--but perhaps there might be a reason for this, for, where no precise meaning is to be conveyed, French is certainly much better than English. From the fact of several of the subjects not being contained in the original drawings, and from the great difference in the style of many of the cuts, it is by no means certain that they were all intended for the same work. There can, however, be little doubt of their all having been designed for a triumphal procession intended to celebrate the fame of Maximilian.

The original blocks, now preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, are all of pear-tree, and several of them are partially worm-eaten. At the back of those blocks are written or engraved seventeen names and initials, which are supposed, with great probability, to be those of the engravers by whom they were executed. At the back of No. 18, which represents five musicians in a car, there is written, “Der kert an die Elland,--hat _Wilhelm geschnitten_:” that is, “This follows the Elks.--Engraved by William.” In the preceding cut, No. 17, are the two elks which draw the car, and on one of the traces is Hans Burgmair’s mark. At the back of No. 20 is written, “_Jobst putavit, 14 Aprilis 1517. Die gehert an die bifel, und die bifel halt Jos geschnitten._”[V-73] This inscription Mr. Ottley, at page 756, volume ii. of his Inquiry, expounds as follows: “Josse putavit (perhaps for _punctavit_), the 14th of April, 1517. This block joins to that which represents the Buffaloes.” This translation is substantially correct; but it is exceedingly doubtful if _putavit_ was written in mistake for _punctavit_. The proposed substitution indeed seems very like explaining an _ignotum per ignotius_. The verb _punctare_ is never, that I am aware of, used by any writer, either classical or modern, to express the idea of engraving on wood. A German, however, who was but imperfectly acquainted with Latin, would not be unlikely to translate the German verb _schneiden_, which signifies _to cut_ generally, by the Latin _putare_, which is specially applied to the lopping or pruning of trees. I have heard it conjectured that _putavit_ might have been used in the sense of _imaginavit_, as if Jobst were the designer; but there can be little doubt of its being here intended to express the cutting of the wood-engraver; for Burgmair’s mark is to be found both on this cut and on the preceding one of the two buffaloes, No. 19; and it cannot for a moment be supposed that he was a mere workman employed to execute the designs of another person. Were such a supposition granted, it would follow that the wood-engraver of that period--at least so far as regards the work in question--was considered as a much superior person to him who drew the designs; that the _workman_, in fact, was to be commemorated, but the _artist_ forgotten; a conclusion which is diametrically opposed to fact, for so little were the mere wood-engravers of that period esteemed, that we only incidentally become acquainted with their names; and from their not putting their marks or initials to the cuts which they engraved has arisen the popular error that Durer, Cranach, Burgmair, and others, who are known to have been painters of great repute in their day, were wood-engravers and executed themselves the wood-cuts which bear their marks.

[Footnote V-73: _Jobst_ and _Jos_, in this inscription, are probably intended for the name of the same person. For the name Jobst, Jost, Josse, or Jos--for it is thus variously spelled--we have no equivalent in English. It is not unusual in Germany as a baptismal name--it can scarcely be called _Christian_--and is Latinized, I believe, under the more lengthy form of _Jodocus_.]

The following are the names and initial letters at the back of the blocks. 1. Jerome André, called also Jerome Resch, or Rösch, the engraver of the Triumphal Arch designed by Albert Durer. 2. Jan de Bonn. 3. Cornelius. 4. Hans Frank. 5. Saint German. 6. Wilhelm. 7. Corneille Liefrink. 8. Wilhelm Liefrink. 9. Alexis Lindt. 10. Josse de Negker. On several of the blocks Negker is styled, “engraver on wood, at Augsburg.” 11. Vincent Pfarkecher. 12. Jaques Rupp. 13. Hans Schaufflein. 14. Jan Taberith. 15. F. P. 16. H. F. 17. W. R. It is not unlikely that “Cornelius,” No. 3, may be the same as Corneille Liefrink, No. 7; and that “Wilhelm,” No. 6, and Wilhelm Liefrink, No. 8, may also be the same person. At the back of the block which corresponds with the description numbered 120, Hans Schaufflein’s name is found coupled with that of Cornelius Liefrink; and at the back of the cut which corresponds with the description numbered 121 Schaufflein’s name occurs alone.[V-74] The occurrence of Schaufflein’s name at the back of the cuts would certainly seem to indicate that he was one of the engravers; but his name also appearing at the back of that described under No. 120, in conjunction with the name of Cornelius Liefrink, who was certainly a wood-engraver,[V-75] makes me inclined to suppose that he might only have made the drawing on the block and not have engraved the cut; and this supposition seems to be partly confirmed by the fact that the cuts which are numbered 104, 105, and 106, corresponding with the descriptions Nos. 119, 120, and 121, have not Hans Burgmair’s mark, and are much more like the undoubted designs of Hans Schaufflein than those of that artist. That the cuts published under the title of the Triumphs of Maximilian were not all drawn on the block by the same person will, I think, appear probable to any one who even cursorily examines them; and whoever carefully compares them can scarcely have a doubt on the subject.

[Footnote V-74: The printed numbers on those two cuts are 105 and 106, though the descriptions are numbered 120 and 121 in the text. The subjects are, No. 105, two ranks, of five men each, on foot, carrying long lances; and No. 106, two ranks, of five men each, on foot, carrying large two-handed swords on their shoulders.--Perhaps it may not be out of place to correct here the following passage which occurs at page 285 of this volume: “Bartsch, however, observes, that ‘what Strutt has said about there being two persons of this name [Hans Schaufflein], an elder and a younger, seems to be a mere conjecture.’” Since the sheet containing this passage was printed off, I have learnt from a paper, in Meusel’s Neue Miscellaneen, 5tes. Stück, S. 210, that Hans Schäufflein had a son of the same name who was also a painter, and that the elder Schäufflein died at Nordlingen, in 1539. At page 281, his death, on the authority of Bartsch, is erroneously placed in 1550.]

[Footnote V-75: The name of Cornelius Liefrink occurs at the back of some of the wood-cuts representing the saints of the family of Maximilian, designed by Burgmair, mentioned at page 278, note.]

Almost every one of the cuts that contains Burgmair’s mark, in the Triumphal Procession, is designed with great spirit, and has evidently been drawn by an artist who had a thorough command of his pencil. His horses are generally strong and heavy, and the men on their backs of a stout and muscular form. The action of the horses seems natural; and the indications of the joints and the drawing of the hoofs--which are mostly low and broad--evidently show that the artist had paid some attention to the structure of the animal. There are, however, a considerable number of cuts where both men and horses appear remarkable for their leanness; and in which the hoofs of the horses are most incorrectly drawn, and the action of the animals represented in a manner which is by no means natural. Though it is not unlikely that Hans Burgmair was capable of drawing both a stout, heavy horse, and a long-backed, thin-quartered, lean one, I cannot persuade myself that he would, in almost every instance, draw the hoofs and legs of the one correctly, and those of the other with great inaccuracy. The cut on the opposite page and the five next following, of single figures, copied on a reduced scale from the Triumphs, will exemplify the preceding observations. The numbers are those printed on the cuts, and they all, except one, appear to correspond with the French descriptions in the text. The preceding cut is from that marked No. 15. The mark of Hans Burgmair is on the ornamental breast-plate, as an English saddler would call it, that passes across the horse’s chest. This figure, in the original cut, carries a tablet suspended from a staff, of which the lower part only is perceived in the copy, as it has not been thought necessary to give the tablet and a large scroll which were intended to contain inscriptions.[V-76] The description of the subject is to the following effect: “After the chase, comes a figure on horseback, bearing a tablet, on which shall be written the five charges of the court,--that is, of the butler, the cook, the barber, the tailor, and the shoemaker; and Eberbach shall be the under-marshal of the household, and carry the tablet.”

[Footnote V-76: In all the blocks, the tablets and scrolls, and the upper part of banners intended to receive verses and inscriptions, were left unengraved. In order that the appearance of the cuts might not be injured, the black ground, intended for the letters, was cut away in most of the tablets and scrolls, in the edition of 1796.]

The cut on page 295 is a reduced copy of a figure, the last, in No. 65, which is without Burgmair’s mark. In the original the horseman bears a banner, having on it the arms of the state or city which he represents; and at the top of the banner a black space whereon a name or motto ought to have been engraved. The original cut contains three figures; and, if the description can be relied on, the banners which they bear are those of Fribourg, Bregentz, and Saulgau. The other two horsemen and their steeds in No. 65 are still more unlike those in the cuts which contain Burgmair’s mark.

The above cut is a reduced copy of a figure on horseback in No. 33. Burgmair’s mark, an H and a B, may be perceived on the trappings of the horse. This figure, in the original, bears a large tablet, and he is followed by five men on foot carrying flails, the _swingels_[V-77] of which are of leather. The description of the cut,--which forms the first of seven representing the dresses and arms of combatants on foot,--is as follows: “Then shall come a person mounted and properly habited like a master of arms, and he shall carry the tablet containing the rhyme. Item, Hans Hollywars shall be the master of arms, and his rhyme shall be this effect: that he has professed the noble practice of arms at the court, according to the method devised by the emperor.”[V-78]

[Footnote V-77: That part of the flail which comes in contact with the corn is, in the North of England, termed a _swingel_.]

[Footnote V-78: The substance of almost every rhyme and inscription is, that the person who bears the rhyme-tablet or scroll has derived great improvement in his art or profession from the instructions or suggestions of the emperor. Huntsmen, falconers, trumpeters, organists, fencing-masters, ballet-masters, tourniers, and jousters, all acknowledge their obligations in this respect to Maximilian. For the wit and humour of the jesters and the natural fools, the emperor, with great forbearance, takes to himself no credit; and Anthony von Dornstett, the leader of the drummers and fifers, is one of the few whose art he has not improved.]

The following is a reduced copy of a figure in the cut erroneously numbered 83, but which corresponds with the description that refers to 84. This figure is the last of the three, who, in the original, are represented bearing banners containing the arms of Malines, Salins and Antwerp.

The following figure, who is given with his rhyme-tablet in full, is copied from the cut numbered 27. This jovial-looking personage, as we learn from the description, is the Will Somers of Maximilian’s court, and he figures as the leader of the professed jesters and the natural fools, who appear in all ages to have been the subjects of “pleasant mirth.” The instructions to the painter are as follows: “Then shall come one on horseback habited like a jester, and carrying a rhyme-tablet for the jesters and natural fools; and he shall be Conrad von der Rosen.” The fool’s cap with the bell at the peak, denoting his profession, is perceived hanging on his left shoulder; and on the breast-plate, crossing the chest of the horse, is Burgmair’s mark.

The figure on page 299 of a horseman, bearing the banner of Burgundy, is from the cut numbered 74. The drawing both of rider and horse is extremely unlike the style of Burgmair as displayed in those cuts which contain his mark. Burgmair’s men are generally stout, and their attitudes free; and they all appear to sit well on horseback. The present lean, lanky figure, who rides a horse that seems admirably suited to him, cannot have been designed by Burgmair, unless he was accustomed to design in two styles which were the very opposites of each other; the one distinguished by the freedom and the boldness of the drawing, the stoutness of the men, and the bulky form of the horses introduced; and the other remarkable for laboured and stiff drawing, gaunt and meagre men, and leggy, starved-like cattle. The whole of the cuts from No. 57 to No. 88, inclusive,--representing, except three,[V-79] men on horseback bearing the banners of the kingdoms and states either possessed or claimed by the emperor,--are designed in the latter style. Not only are the men and horses represented according to a different standard, but even the very ground is indicated in a different manner; it seems to abound in fragments of stones almost like a Macadamized road after a shower of rain. There is indeed no lack of stones on Burgmair’s ground, but they appear more like rounded pebbles, and are not scattered about with so liberal a hand as in the cuts alluded to. In not one of those cuts which are so unlike Burgmair’s is the mark of that artist to be found; and their general appearance is so unlike that of the cuts undoubtedly designed by him, that any person in the least acquainted with works of art will, even on a cursory examination, perceive the strongly marked difference.

[Footnote V-79: Those three are the numbers 77, 78, 79, representing musicians on horseback. The same person who drew the standard-bearers has evidently drawn those three cuts also.]

The following cut is a reduced copy of that numbered 57; and which is the first of those representing horsemen bearing the banners of the several kingdoms, states, and cities subject to the house of Austria or to which Maximilian laid claim. It is one of the most gorgeous of the series; but, from the manner in which the horses and their riders are represented, I feel convinced that it has not been drawn by Burgmair. The subject is thus described in the emperor’s directions prefixed to the volume: “One on horseback bearing the banner of the arms of Austria; another on horseback bearing the old Austrian arms; another also on horseback bearing the arms of Stiria.” On the parts which are left black in the banners it had been intended to insert inscriptions. The instructions to the painter for this part of the procession are to the following effect: “One on horseback bearing on a lance a rhyme-tablet. Then the arms of the hereditary dominions of the house of Austria on banners, with their shields, helms, and crests, borne by horsemen; and the banners of those countries in which the emperor has carried on war shall be borne by riders in armour; and the painter shall vary the armour according to the old manner. The banners of those countries in which the emperor has not carried on war shall be borne by horsemen without armour, but all splendidly clothed, each according to the costume of the country he represents. Every one shall wear a laurel wreath.”

The cut on the next page is copied from that numbered 107, but which accords with the description of No. 122. The subject is described by the emperor as follows: “Then shall come riding a man of Calicut, naked, except his loins covered with a girdle, bearing a rhyme-tablet, on which shall be inscribed these words, ‘These people are the subjects of the famous crowns and houses heretofore named.’” In this cut the mark of Burgmair is perceived on the harness on the breast of the elephant. There are two other cuts of Indians belonging to the same part of the procession, each of which also contains Burgmair’s mark.

The cuts which were to follow the Indians and close the procession were the baggage-waggons and camp-followers of the army. Of those there are five cuts in the work published in 1796, and it is evident that some are wanting, for the two which may be considered as the first and last of those five, respectively require a preceding and a following cut to render them complete; and there are also one or two cuts wanting to complete the intermediate subjects. Those cuts are referred to in the French description under Nos. 125 to 129, but they are numbered 129, 128, 110, 111, 125. The last three, as parts of a large subject, follow each other as the numbers are here placed; and though the right side of No. 110 accords with the left of No. 128, inasmuch as they each contain the half of a tree which appears complete when they are joined together, yet there are no horses in No. 128 to draw the waggon which is seen in No. 110. The order of Nos. 110, 111, and 125, is easily ascertained; a horse at the left of No. 110 wants a tail which is to be found in No. 111; and the outline of a mountain in the left of No. 111 is continued in the right of No. 125. From the back-grounds, trees, and figures in those cuts I am very much inclined to think that they have been engraved from designs by Albert Durer, if he did not actually draw them on the block himself. There is no mark to be found on any of them; and they are extremely unlike any cuts which are undoubtedly of Burgmair’s designing, and they are decidedly superior to any that are usually ascribed to Hans Schaufflein. The following, which is a reduced copy of that numbered 110, will perhaps afford some idea of those cuts, and enable persons who are acquainted with Durer’s works to judge for themselves with respect to the probability of their having been engraved from his designs. One or two of the other four contain still more striking resemblances of Durer’s style.

Besides the twelve cuts which, in the French preface to the Triumphal Procession of Maximilian, are said not to correspond with the original drawings, there are also six others which the editor says are not to be found in the original designs, and which he considers to have been additions made to the work while it was in the course of engraving. Those six cuts are described in an appendix, where their numbers are said to be from 130 to 135. In No. 130 the principal figures are a king and queen, on horseback, supposed to be intended for Philip the Fair, son of the Emperor Maximilian, and his wife Joanna of Castile. This cut is very indifferently executed, and has evidently been designed by the artist who made the drawings for the questionable cuts containing the complicated locomotive carriages, mentioned at page 290. No. 131, a princess on horseback, accompanied by two female attendants also on horseback, and guards on foot, has evidently been designed by the same artist as No. 130. These two, I am inclined to think, belong to some other work. Nos. 132, 133, and 134, are from the designs of Hans Burgmair, whose mark is to be found on each; and there can be little doubt of their having been intended for Maximilian’s Triumphal Procession. They form one continuous subject, which represents twelve men, habited in various costume, leading the same number of horses splendidly caparisoned. A figure on horseback bearing a rhyme-tablet leads this part of the procession; and above the horses are large scrolls probably intended to contain their names, with those of the countries to which they belong. The cut on the opposite page is a reduced copy of the last, numbered 135, which is thus described in the appendix: “The fore part of a triumphal car, drawn by four horses yoked abreast, and managed by a winged female figure who holds in her left hand a wreath of laurel.” There is no mark on the original cut; but from the manner in which the horses are drawn it seems like one of Burgmair’s designing.

That the cuts of the Triumphal Procession of Maximilian were engraved by different persons is certain from the names at their backs; and I think the difference that is to be perceived in the style of drawing renders it in the highest degree probable that the subjects were designed, or at least drawn on the wood, by different artists. I am inclined to think that Burgmair drew very few besides those that contain his mark; the cuts of the banner-bearers I am persuaded are not of his drawing; a third artist, of inferior talent, seems to have made the drawings of the fanciful cars containing the emperor and his family; and the five cuts of the baggage-waggons and camp followers, appear, as I have already said, extremely like the designs of Albert Durer. The best engraved cuts are to be found among those which contain Burgmair’s mark. Some of the banner-bearers are also very ably executed, though not in so free or bold a manner; which I conceive to be owing to the more laboured style in which the subject has been drawn on the block. The mechanical subjects, with their accompanying figures, are the worst engraved as well as the worst drawn of the whole. The five cuts which I suppose to have been designed by Albert Durer are engraved with great spirit, but not so well as the best of those which contain the mark of Burgmair.

Though there are still in existence upwards of a hundred of the original blocks designed by Albert Durer, and upwards of three hundred designed by the most eminent of his contemporaries, yet a person who professes to be an instructor of the public on subjects of art made the following statement before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Arts and their Connexion with Manufactures, appointed in 1835. He is asked, “Do you consider that the progress of the arts in this country is impeded by the want of protection for new inventions of importance?” and he proceeds to enlighten the committee as follows. “Very much impeded. Inventions connected with the arts of design, of new instruments, or new processes, for example, are, from the ease with which they can be pirated, more difficult of protection than any other inventions whatever. Such protection as the existing laws afford is quite inadequate. I cannot better illustrate my meaning, than by mentioning the case of _engraving in metallic relief_, an art which is supposed to have existed three or four centuries ago; and the re-discovery of which has long been a desideratum among artists. Albert Durer, who was both a painter and engraver, _certainly possessed this art_, that is to say, the art of transferring his designs, after they had been sketched on paper, _immediately into metallic relief_, so that they might be printed along with letter-press. At present, the only sort of engravings you can print along with letter-press are wood engravings, or stereotype casts from wood engravings; and then those engravings are but copies, and often very rude copies, of their originals; while, in the case of Albert Durer, it is QUITE CLEAR _that it was his own identical designs that were transferred into the metallic relief_. Wood engravings, too, are limited in point of size, _because they can only be executed on box-wood_, the width of which is very small; in fact, we have no wood engravings on a single block of a larger size than octavo: when the engraving is larger, two or three blocks are joined together; but this is attended with so much difficulty and inconvenience, that it is seldom done. From the specimens of _metallic relief engraving_, left us by Albert Durer, there is every reason to infer that he was under no such limitation; that he could produce plates of any size.”[V-80] This statement abounds in errors, and may justify a suspicion that the person who made it had never seen the cuts designed by Albert Durer which he pretends were executed in “metallic relief.” At the commencement he says that the art of engraving in metallic relief is _supposed_ to have existed three or four centuries ago; and immediately afterwards he asserts that Albert Durer “certainly possessed this art;” as if by his mere word he could convert a groundless fiction into a positive fact. When he made this confident assertion he seems not to have been aware that many of the original pear-tree blocks of the cuts pretendedly executed in metallic relief are still in existence; and when, speaking of the difficulty of getting blocks of a larger size than an octavo, he says, “From the specimens of metallic relief engraving, left us by Albert Durer, there is every reason to infer that he was under no such limitation,--that he could produce plates of any size,” he affords a positive proof that he knows nothing of the subject on which he has spoken so confidently. Had he ever examined the large cuts engraved from Durer’s designs, he would have seen, in several, undeniable marks of the junction of the blocks, proving directly the reverse of what he asserts on this point. What he says with respect to the modern practice of the art is as incorrect as his assertions about Albert Durer’s engraving in metallic relief. Though it is true that there are few modern engravings on box-wood of a larger size than octavo, it is not true that the forming of a large block of two or more pieces is attended with much difficulty, and is seldom done. The making of such blocks is now a regular trade; they are formed without the least difficulty, and hundreds of cuts on such blocks are engraved in London every year.[V-81] When he says that wood engravings “can only be made on box-wood,” he gives another proof of his ignorance of the subject. Most of the earlier wood engravings were executed on blocks of pear-tree or crab; and even at the present time box-wood is seldom used for the large cuts on posting-bills. In short, every statement that this person has made on the subject of wood and pretended metallic relief engraving is incorrect; and it is rather surprising that none of the members of the committee should have exposed his ignorance. When such persons put themselves forward as the instructors of mechanics on the subject of art, it cannot be a matter of surprise that in the arts as applied to manufactures we should be inferior to our continental neighbours.

[Footnote V-80: Minutes of Evidence before the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, p. 130. Ordered to be printed, 16th August 1836.]

[Footnote V-81: Among the principal modern wood-cuts engraved on blocks consisting of several pieces the following may be mentioned: The Chillingham Bull, by Thomas Bewick, 1789; A view of St. Nicholas’ Church, Newcastle-on-Tyne, by Charlton Nesbit, from a drawing by R. Johnson, 1798; The Diploma of the Highland Society, by Luke Clennell, from a design by B. West, P.R.A. 1808; The Death of Dentatus, by William Harvey, from a painting by B. R. Haydon, 1821; and The Old Horse waiting for Death, left unfinished, by T. Bewick, and published in 1832.]

The art of imitating drawings--called chiaro-scuro--by means of impressions from two or more blocks, was cultivated with great success in Italy by Ugo da Carpi about 1518. The invention of this art, as has been previously remarked, is ascribed to him by some writers, but without any sufficient grounds; for not even the slightest evidence has been produced by them to show that he, or any other Italian artist, had executed a single cut in this manner previous to 1509, the date of a chiaro-scuro wood engraving from a design by Lucas Cranach. Though it is highly probable that Ugo da Carpi was not the inventor of this art, it is certain that he greatly improved it. The chiaro-scuros executed by him are not only superior to those of the German artists, who most likely preceded him in this department of wood engraving, but to the present time they remain unsurpassed. In the present day Mr. George Baxter has attempted to extend the boundaries of this art by calling in the aid of aquatint for his outlines and first ground, and by copying the positive colours of an oil or water-colour painting. Most of Ugo da Carpi’s chiaro-scuros are from Raffaele’s designs, and it is said that the great painter himself drew some of the subjects on the blocks. Independent of the excellence of the designs, the characteristics of Da Carpi’s chiaro-scuros are their effect and the simplicity of their execution; for all of them, except one or two, appear to have been produced from not more than three blocks. The following may be mentioned as the principal of Da Carpi’s works in this style. A Sibyl reading with a boy holding a torch, from two blocks, said by Vasari to be the artist’s first attempt in this style; Jacob’s Dream; David cutting off the head of Goliah; the Death of Ananias; Giving the Keys to Peter; the miraculous Draught of Fishes; the Descent from the Cross; the Resurrection; and Æneas carrying away his father Anchises on his shoulders from the fire of Troy;[V-82] all the preceding from the designs of Raffaele. Among the subjects designed by other masters are St. Peter preaching, after Polidoro; and Diogenes showing the plucked cock in ridicule of Plato’s definition of man, “a two-legged animal without feathers,” after Parmegiano. The latter, which is remarkably bold and spirited, is from four blocks; and Vasari says that it is the best of all Da Carpi’s chiaro-scuros. Many of Da Carpi’s productions in this style were copied by Andrea Andreani of Milan, about 1580. That of Æneas carrying his father on his shoulders was copied by Edward Kirkall, an English engraver in 1722. Kirkall’s copy is not entirely from wood-blocks, like the original; the outlines and the greater part of the shadows are from a copper-plate engraved in mezzotint, in a manner similar to that which has more recently been adopted by Mr. Baxter in his picture-printing.

[Footnote V-82: At the foot of this cut, to the right, after the name of the designer,--“RAPHAEL URBINAS,”--is the following privilege, granted by Pope Leo X. and the Doge of Venice, prohibiting all persons from pirating the work. “QUISQUE HAS TABELLAS INVITO AUTORE IMPRIMET EX DIVI LEONIS X. ET IL͞L PRINCIPIS VENETIARUM DECRETIS EXCOMINICATIONIS SENTENTIAM ET ALIAS PENAS INCURRET.” Below this inscription is the engraver’s name with the date: “Romæ apud Ugum de Carpi impressum. MDXVIII.”]

Lucas Dammetz, generally called Lucas van Leyden, from the place of his birth, was an excellent engraver on copper, and in this branch of art more nearly approached Durer than any other of his German or Flemish contemporaries. He is said to have been born at Leyden in 1496; and, if this date be correct, he at a very early age gave decided proofs of his talents as an engraver on copper. One of his earliest prints, the monk Sergius killed by Mahomet, is dated 1508, when he was only fourteen years of age; and at the age of twelve he is said to have painted, in distemper, a picture of St. Hubert which excited the admiration of all the artists of the time. Of his numerous copper-plate engravings there are no less than twenty-one which, though they contain no date, are supposed to have been executed previously to 1508. As several of those plates are of very considerable merit, it would appear that Lucas while yet a boy excelled, as a copper-plate engraver, most of his German and Dutch contemporaries. From 1508 to 1533, the year of his death, he appears to have engraved not less than two hundred copper-plates; and, as if these were not sufficient to occupy his time, he in the same period painted several pictures, some of which were of large size. He is also said to have excelled as a painter on glass; and like Durer, Cranach, and Burgmair, he is ranked among the wood engravers of that period.

The wood-cuts which contain the mark of Lucas van Leyden, or which are usually ascribed to him, are not numerous; and, even admitting them to have been engraved by himself, the fact would contribute but little to his fame, for I have not seen one which might not have been executed by a professional “formschneider” of very moderate abilities. The total of the wood-cuts supposed to have been engraved by him does not exceed twenty. The following is a reduced copy of a wood-cut ascribed to Lucas van Leyden, in the Print Room of the British Museum, but which is not in Bartsch’s Catalogue, nor in the list of Lucas van Leyden’s engravings in Meusel’s Neue Miscellaneen. Though I very much question if the original cut were engraved by Lucas himself, I have no doubt of its being from his design. It represents the death of Sisera; and, with a noble contempt of the unity of time, Jael is seen giving Sisera a drink of milk, driving the nail into his head, and then showing the body,--with herself in the act of driving the nail,--to Barak and his followers: the absurdity of this threefold action has perhaps never been surpassed in any cut ancient or modern. Sir Boyle Roach said that it was impossible for any _person_, except a _bird_ or a _fish_, to be in two places at once; but here we have a pictorial representation of a female being in no less than three; and in one of the localities actually pointing out to certain persons how she was then employed in another.

Heineken, in his account of engravers of the Flemish school, has either committed an egregious mistake, or expressed himself with intentional ambiguity with respect to a wood-cut printed at Antwerp, and which he saw in the collections of the Abbé de Marolles. His notice of this cut is as follows: “I found in the collections of the Abbé de Marolles, in the cabinet of the King of France, a detached piece, which, in my opinion, is the most ancient of the wood engravings executed in the Low Countries which bear the name of the artist. This cut is marked, _Gheprint t’ Antwerpen by my Phillery de figursnider_--Printed at Antwerp, by me Phillery, the engraver of figures. It serves as a proof that the engravers of moulds were, at Antwerp, in that ancient time, also printers.”[V-83]

[Footnote V-83: “J’ai trouvé dans les Recueils de l’Abbé de Marolles, au Cabinet du Roi de France, une piece détachée, qui, suivant mon sentiment, est la plus ancienne de celles, qui sont gravées en bois dans les Païs-Bas, et qui portent le nom de l’artiste. Cette estampe est marquée: _Gheprint t’ Antwerpen by my Phillery de figursnider--Imprimé à Anvers, chez moi Phillery, le graveur de figures_. Elle sert de preuve, que les graveurs de moules étoient aussi, dans cet ancien tems, imprimeurs à Anvers.”--Idée Générale d’une Collection complette d’Estampes, p. 197.]

In this vague and ambiguous account, the writer gives us no idea of the period to which he refers in the words “cet ancien tems.” If he means the time between the pretended invention of Coster, and the period when typography was probably first practised in the Low Countries,--that is, from about 1430 to 1472,--he is wrong, and his statement would afford ground for a presumption that he had either examined the cut very carelessly, or that he was so superficially acquainted with the progressive improvement of the art of wood engraving as to mistake a cut abounding in cross-hatching, and certainly executed subsequent to 1524, for one that had been executed about seventy years previously, when cross-hatching was never attempted, and when the costume was as different from that of the figures represented in the cut as the costume of Vandyke’s portraits is dissimilar to Hogarth’s. The words “_graveurs de moules_,” I have translated literally “engravers of moulds,” for I cannot conceive what else Heineken can mean; but this expression is scarcely warranted by the word “_figuersnider_” on the cut, which is almost the same as the German “formschneider;” and whatever might be the original meaning of the word, it was certainly used to express merely a wood engraver. Compilers of Histories of Art, and Dictionaries of Painters and Engravers, who usually follow their leader, even in his slips, as regularly as a flock of sheep follow the bell-wether through a gap, have disseminated Heineken’s mistake, and the antiquity of “_Phillery’s_” wood-engraving is about as firmly established as Lawrence Coster’s invention of typography. One of those “straightforward” people has indeed gone rather beyond his authority; for in a “Dictionary of the Fine Arts,” published in 1826, we are expressly informed that “_Phillery, who lived near the end of the fourteenth century, was the first engraver on wood who practised in the Netherlands_.”[V-84] It is thus that error on the subject of art, and indeed on every other subject, is propagated: a writer of reputation makes an incorrect or an ambiguous statement; other writers adopt it without examination, and not unfrequently one of that class whose confidence in deciding on a question is in the inverse ratio of their knowledge of the subject, proceeds beyond his original authority, and declares that to be certain which previously had only been doubtfully or obscurely expressed. In Heineken’s notice of this cut there is an implied qualification under which he might screen himself from a charge of incorrectness with respect to the time of its execution, though not from a charge of ambiguity. He says that, in his opinion, it is “the most ancient of the wood engravings executed in the Low Countries _which bear the name of the artist_;” and with this limitation his opinion may be correct, although the cut were only engraved in 1525 or 1526; for I am not aware of any wood engraving of an earlier date, executed in the Low Countries, that contains the _name_ of the artist, though there are several which contain the artist’s mark. It also may be argued that the words “_cet ancien tems_” might be about as correctly applied to designate the year 1525 as 1470: if, however, he meant the first of those dates, he has expressed himself in an equivocal manner, for he is generally understood to refer the cut to a considerably earlier period. It has been indeed conjectured that Heineken, in speaking of this cut, might intentionally express himself obscurely, in order that he might not give offence to his friend Monsieur Mariette, who is said to have considered it to be one of the earliest specimens of wood engravings executed in the Low Countries. This is, however, without any sufficient reason, merely shifting the charge of ignorance, with respect to the difference of style in wood engravings of different periods, from Heineken to Monsieur Mariette. As there is no evidence to show that the latter ever expressed any such opinion as that ascribed to him respecting the antiquity of the cut in question, Heineken alone is answerable for the account contained in his book. Impressions of the cut by “_Phillery_” are not of very great rarity; there are two in the Print Room at the British Museum, and from one of them the reduced copy in the following page has been carefully made.

[Footnote V-84: In a work of a similar kind, and of equal authority, published in 1834, we are informed that Ugo da Carpi was a historical painter, and that he died in 1500. He was only born in 1486.]

Any person, however, slightly acquainted with the progress of wood engraving could scarcely fail to pronounce that the original of this cut must have been executed subsequent to 1500, and in all probability subsequent to the cuts of the Triumphal Procession of Maximilian, to the general style of which, so far as relates to the manner of engraving, it bears considerable resemblance. The costume of the figures, too, also proves that it does not belong to the fifteenth century; and on carefully examining the inscription, a person accustomed to the old German or Dutch characters would be more likely to read “_Willem_” than “_Phillery_” as the name of the artist. To one of the impressions in the British Museum a former owner, after extracting Heineken’s account, has appended the following remark: “This is the print above described. There seems to be an inconsiderable mistake in the name, which I take to be D’villery.” It is to be observed that in the original, as in the preceding copy, the inscription is engraved on wood, and not set up in type; and that consequently the first character of the doubtful name is rather indistinct. It is however most probably a _W_; and the last is certainly an _m_, with a flourish at its tail. The intermediate letters _ille_ are plain enough, and if the first be supposed to be a _W_, and the last an _m_, we have the name _Willem_,--a very probable prenomen for a Dutch wood engraver of the sixteenth century. The inscription when carefully examined is literally as follows: “_Gheprint Tantwerpen Bij mij Willem de Figuersnider_.” Heineken’s mistake of _Phillery_ for _Willem_, or William, and thus giving a heretofore unheard-of name to the list of artists, is not unlike that of Scopoli the naturalist, who, in one of his works, has commemorated “Horace Head” as a London bookseller.[V-85]

[Footnote V-85: The sign of Mr. Benjamin White, formerly a bookseller in Fleet Street, was Horace’s Head. In Scopoli’s Deliciæ, Flora, et Fauna Insubriæ, plate 24 is thus inscribed: “Auspiciis Benjamini White et Horatii Head, Bibliopol. Londinensium.” The learned naturalist had mistaken Mr. White’s sign for his partner in the business.]

Though the cut which bears the name of the supposed “Phillery” contains internal evidence of its not having been engraved in the fifteenth century, there is yet further reason to believe that it is merely a copy of part of a cut of the same size by a Swiss artist of the name of Urse Graff, which is dated 1524. There is an impression of Urse Graff’s cut [V-86] in the Print Room of the British Museum; in the fore-ground are the figures which have obviously been copied by _Willem de Figuersnider_, alias _Phillery_, and immediately behind the middle figure, who holds in his right hand a large Swiss espadon, is a leafless tree with a figure of Death clinging to the upper part of the trunk, and pointing to a hour-glass which he holds in his left hand. A bird, probably intended for a raven, is perched above the hour-glass; and on the trunk of the tree, near to the figure of Death, is Urse Graff’s mark with the date as is here given. The back-ground presents a view of a lake, with buildings and mountains on the left. The general character of Urse Graff’s subject is Swiss, both in the scenery and figures; and the perfect identity of the latter with those in the cut “printed at Antwerp by William the figure-cutter” proves, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that one of those two artists has copied the work of the other. Urse Graff’s subject, however, is complete, and corresponds both in the landscape and in the costume of the figures with the country of the artist; while the cut of William of Antwerp represents merely an unrelieved group of figures in the costume of Switzerland. Urse Graff was an artist of reputation in his time; of “Willem,” who was probably only an engraver of the designs of others, nothing more is known beyond what is afforded by the single cut in question. From these circumstances, though it cannot be positively decided which of those cuts is the original, it is almost morally certain that the Flemish figure-cutter has copied the work of the Swiss artist.--Urse Graff resided at Basle, of which city he was probably a native. In one of his engravings with the date 1523, he describes himself as a goldsmith and die-sinker. Wood-cuts containing his mark are not very common, and the most of them appear to have been executed between 1515 and 1528. A series of wood-cuts of the Passion of Christ, designed in a very inferior manner, and printed at Strasburg in 1509, are sometimes ascribed to him on account of their being marked with the letters V. G., which some writers have supposed to be the mark of an artist named Von Gamperlin. Professor Christ, in his Dictionary of Monograms, says that he can find nothing to determine him in favour of the name Gamperlin; and that he is rather inclined to think that those letters are intended for the name Von Goar, which he believes that he has deciphered on an engraving containing this mark. The mark of Urse Graff, a V and a G interlaced, occurs in the ornamented border of the title-page of several books printed at Basle, and amongst others on the title of a quarto edition of Ulrich Hutten’s Nemo, printed there by Frobenius in 1519. At the end of this edition there is a beautifully-designed cut of the printer’s device, which is probably the work of the same artist.[V-87]

[Footnote V-86: This cut of Urse Graff is described in Bartsch’s Peintre-Graveur, tom. vii. p. 465, No. 16.]

[Footnote V-87: The device of Frobenius at the end of an edition of the same work, printed by him in 1518, is much inferior to that in the edition of 1519. In both, the ornamental border of the title-page is the same.]

A painter, named Nicholas Emanuel Deutsch, a contemporary of Urse Graff, and who resided at Bern, is said, by Sandrart, to have been of a noble English family, and the same writer adds that he left his own country on account of his religion. The latter statement, however, is not likely to be correct, for there are wood-cuts, with this artist’s mark, dated “Bern, 1518;” which was before the persecution in England on account of the doctrines of Luther had commenced. In J. R. Füssli’s Dictionary of Artists it is stated that he was of a French family, of the name of Cholard, but that he was born at Bern in 1484, and died there in 1530. He was a poet as well as a painter, and held one of the highest offices in the magistracy of Bern.

Within the first thirty years of the sixteenth century the practice of illustrating books with wood-cuts seems to have been more general than at any other period, scarcely excepting the present; for though within the last eight or ten years an immense number of wood-cuts have been executed in England and France, yet wood engravings at the time referred to were introduced into a greater variety of books, and the art was more generally practised throughout Europe. In modern German and Dutch works wood engravings are sparingly introduced; and in works printed in Switzerland and Italy they are still more rarely to be found. In the former period the art seems to have been very generally practised throughout Europe, though to a greater extent, and with greater skill, in Germany than in any other country. The wood-cuts which are to be found in Italian books printed between 1500 and 1530 are mostly meagre in design and very indifferently engraved; and for many years after the German wood engravers had begun to give variety of colour and richness of effect to their cuts by means of cross-hatchings, their Italian contemporaries continued to adhere to the old method of engraving their figures, chiefly in outline, with the shadows and the folds of the draperies indicated by parallel lines. These observations relate only to the ordinary wood engravings of the period, printed in the same page with type, or printed separately in the usual manner of surface printing at one impression. The admirable chiaro-scuros of Ugo da Carpi, printed from two or more blocks, are for effect and general excellence the most admirable specimens of this branch of the art that ever have been executed; they are as superior to the chiaro-scuros of German artists as the usual wood engravings of the latter excel those executed in Italy during the same period.

In point of drawing, some of the best wood-cuts executed in Italy in the time of Albert Durer are to be found in a folio work entitled Triompho di Fortuna, written by Sigismond Fanti, and printed at Venice in 1527.[V-88] The subject of this work, which was licensed by Pope Clement VII, is the art of fortune-telling, or of answering all kinds of questions relative to future events. The volume contains a considerable number of wood-cuts; some designed and executed in the very humblest style of wood engraving, and others, which appear to have been drawn on the block with pen-and-ink, designed with great spirit. The smallest and most inferior cuts serve as illustrations to the questions, and an idea may be formed of them from the three here given, which occur under the question: “Qual fede o legge sia di queste tre la buona, o la Christiana, l’Hebrea, o quello di Mahumeto?”[V-89] In English: “Which of these three religions is the best, the Christian, the Jewish, or the Mahometan?” Several larger cuts are executed in a dry hard style, and evidently drawn by a person very inferior to the artist who designed the cuts executed in the manner of pen-and-ink drawings. The following is a fac-simile of one of the latter. It is entitled “Fortuna de Africo,” in a series of twelve, intended for representations of the winds.

[Footnote V-88: The title of this book is, in red letters, “Triompho di Fortuna, di Sigismondo Fanti, Ferrarese.” The title-page is also ornamented with a wood-cut, representing the Pope, with Virtue on one side, and Vice on the other, seated above the globe, which is supported by Atlas, and provided with an axis, having a handle at each side, like a winch. At one of the handles is a devil, and at the other an angel; to the left is a naked figure holding a die, and near to him is an astronomer taking an observation. At the foot of the cut is the mark I. M. or T. M., for I cannot positively decide whether the first letter be intended for an I or a T. The following is the colophon: “Impresso in la inclita citta di Venegia per Agostin da Portese. Nel anno dil virgineo parto MD.XXVII. Nel mese di Genaro, ad instātia di Jacomo Giunta Mercatāte Florentino. Con il Privilegio di Clemente Papa VII, et del Senato Veneto a requisitione di l’Autore.” In the Catalogue of the British Museum this book is erroneously entered as printed at Rome, 1526. The compiler had mistaken the date of the Pope’s licence for the time when the book was printed. This trifling mistake is noticed here, as from similar oversights bibliographers have sometimes described books as having been twice or thrice printed, when, in fact, there had been only one edition.]

[Footnote V-89: The following questions, selected from a number of others, will perhaps afford some idea of this “Opera utilissima et jocosa,” as it is called by the author. “Se glie bene a pigliar bella, o bruta donna; se’l servo sara fidele al suo signore; se quest’ anno sara carestia o abundantia; quanti mariti havera la donna; se glie bene a far viaggio et a che tempo; se’l parto della donna sara maschio o femina; se’l sogno fatto sara vero; se’l fin del huomo sara buono.” The three small illustrations of the last query are of evil omen; in one, is seen a gallows; in another, a man praying; and in the third, the quarters of a human body hung up in terrorem.]

The following cut, which appears in folio 38, is intitled “Michael Fiorentino,”--Michael Angelo; and it certainly conveys no bad idea of the energetic manner in which that great artist is said to have used his mallet and chisel when engaged on works of sculpture. This cut, however, is made to represent several other sculptors besides the great Florentine; it is repeated seven times in the subsequent pages, and on each occasion we find underneath it a different name. The late T. Stothard, R.A. was of opinion that wood engraving was best adapted to express pen-and-ink drawing, and that the wood engraver generally failed when he attempted more. His illustrations of Rogers’s poems, engraved on wood by Clennell and Thompson, are executed in a similar style to that of the following specimen, though with greater delicacy.

Certain wood-cuts with the mark A. G., executed towards the conclusion of the fifteenth century, have been ascribed to an artist named Albert Glockenton. Bartsch, however, says that the name of the artist is unknown; and he seems to consider that Sandrart had merely conjectured that those letters might represent the name Albert Glockenton. For no better reason the letters I. V. on a tablet, with two pilgrim’s-staffs crossed between them, which are to be found on several old chiaro-scuro wood engravings, have been supposed to represent the name, John Ulric Pilgrim. This name appears to be a pure invention of some ingenious expounder of monograms, for there is not the slightest evidence, that I am aware of, to show that any artist of this name ever lived. The chiaro-scuros with this mark were probably executed in the time of Durer, but none of them contains a date to establish the fact. Heineken considers them to have been the productions of a German artist; and he refers to them in proof of the art of chiaro-scuro having been practised in Germany long before the time of Ugo da Carpi. It is, however, highly questionable if they are of an earlier date than 1518; and it is by no means certain that the artist was a German. By some persons he has been supposed to have been the inventor of chiaro-scuro engraving, on no better grounds, it would seem, than that his pieces are without a date.

Next to the Germans, in the time of Albert Durer, the Dutch and Flemings seem to have excelled in the art of wood engraving; but the cuts executed in Holland and Flanders are generally much inferior to those designed and engraved by German artists. In a considerable number of Dutch wood engravings, of the period under review, I have observed an attempt to combine something like the effect of cross-hatching and of the dotted manner mentioned at page 232 as having been frequently practised by French wood engravers in the early part of the sixteenth century. In a series of cuts from a Dutch prayer-book, apparently printed between 1520 and 1530, this style of engraving is frequently introduced. Where a German artist would have introduced lines crossing each other with great regularity, the Dutch wood engraver has endeavoured to attain his object by irregularly picking out portions of the wood with the point of his graver; the effect, however, is not good. In the border surrounding those cuts, a Dance of Death is represented, consisting of several more characters than are to be found in the celebrated work ascribed to Holbein, but far inferior in point of design and execution.

An artist, named John Walter van Assen, is usually mentioned as one of the best Dutch wood engravers or designers of this period. Nothing further is known of him than that he lived at Amsterdam about 1517. The mark supposed to be Van Assen’s is often ascribed by expounders of monograms to another artist whom they call Werner or Waer van Assanen.

A considerable number of French works, printed in the time of Albert Durer, contain wood engravings, but few of them possess much merit when compared with the more highly finished and correctly drawn productions of the German school of the same period. The ornamental borders, however, of many missals and prayer-books, which then issued in great numbers from the Parisian press, frequently display great beauty. The taste for surrounding each page with an ornamental border engraved on wood was very generally prevalent in Germany, France, and Flanders at that period, more especially in devotional works; and in the former country, and in Switzerland, scarcely a tract was printed--and the Lutheran controversy gave rise to many hundreds--without an ornamental border surrounding the title. In Germany such wood engravers as were chiefly employed in executing cuts of this kind were called _Rahmen-schneiders_--border-cutters,--as has been previously observed at page 190. In England during the same period wood engraving made but little progress; and there seems to have been a lack of good designers and competent engravers in this country. The best cuts printed in England in the time of Durer are contained in a manual of prayers, of a small duodecimo size. On a tablet in the border of one of the cuts--the Flight into Egypt[V-90]--I perceive the date 1523. The total number of cuts in the volume is about a hundred; and under each of the largest are four verses in English. Several of the smaller cuts, representing figures of saints, and preceding the prayers for their respective days, have evidently been designed by an artist of considerable talent. As most of the wood-cuts which constitute the ornaments or the illustrations of books printed at this period are without any name or mark, it is impossible to ascertain the names of the persons by whom they were designed or engraved.

[Footnote V-90: The following lines descriptive of this cut are printed underneath it:

+How Mary and Joseph with iesu were fayne. In to Egypte for socour to fle. Whan the Innocentes for his sake wer slayne. By com̄issyon of Herodes crueltie.+]

The manner of wood engraving in _intaglio_ so that the figures appear white on a black ground, so frequently adopted by early Italian wood engravers, was sometimes practised in Germany; and in one of the earliest works containing portraits of the Roman emperors,[V-91] copied from ancient medals, printed in the latter country, the cuts are executed in this style. The subject of the work is the lives of the Roman emperors, written by Joannes Huttichius, and the portraits with which it is illustrated are copied from medals in a collection which had been formed by the Emperor Maximilian, the great promoter of wood engraving in Germany. The first edition, in Latin, was printed by Wolff Köpffel, at Strasburg, in 1525; and a second edition, in German, was published at the same place in the succeeding year. The cut on the next page, of the head of Nero, will afford an idea of the style in which the portraits are executed, and of the fidelity with which the artist has in general represented the likeness impressed on the original medals.

[Footnote V-91: In a folio work entitled “Epitome Thesauri Antiquitatum, hoc est IMPP. Rom. Orientalium et Occidentalium Iconum, ex Antiquis Numismatibus quam fidelissime delineatarum. Ex Musæo Jacobi de Strada Mantuani Antiquarii,” Lyons, 1553, it is stated that the first work containing portraits of the Roman emperors engraved from their coins was that entitled “Illustrium Imagines,” written by Cardinal Sadolet, and printed at Rome by Jacobus Mazochius.--In Strada’s work the portraits are executed in the same manner as in that of Huttichius. The wood-cut containing the printer’s device, on the title-page of Strada’s work, is admirably engraved.]

Besides Durer, Burgmair, Cranach, and Schaufflein, there are several other German painters of the same period who are also said to have engraved on wood, and among the most celebrated of this secondary class the following may be mentioned: Hans Sebald Behaim, previously noticed at page 253; Albert Altdorffer; Hans Springinklee; and Hans Baldung Grün. The marks of all those artists are to be found on wood-cuts executed in the time of Durer; but I am extremely doubtful if those cuts were actually engraved by themselves. If they were, I can only say that, though they might be good painters and designers, they were very indifferent wood engravers; and that their time in executing the subjects ascribed to them must have been very badly employed. The common working _formschneider_ who could not execute them as well, must have been a very ordinary wood-_cutter_, not to say wood-_engraver_,--by the latter term meaning one who excels in his profession, and not a mere cutter of lines, without skill or taste, on box or pear-tree.

Albert Altdorffer was born at Ratisbon in 1480, and afterwards became a magistrate of his native city. The engravings on wood and copper containing his mark are mostly of a small size, and he is generally known as one of the _little masters_ of the German school of engraving.[V-92] Hans Springinklee was a painter of some eminence, and according to Doppelmayer, as referred to by Bartsch, was a pupil of Durer’s. His mark is to be found on several wood-cuts; and it occurs in one of the illustrations in the Wise King. Hans Baldung Grün was born at Gemund in Suabia, and studied at Nuremberg under Albert Durer. He excelled as a painter; and the wood-cuts which contain his mark are mostly designed with great spirit. The earliest wood engraving that contains his mark is a frontispiece to a volume of sermons with the date 1508; and the latest is a group of horses, engraved in a hard, stiff manner, with the name “BALDUNG” and the date 1534.[V-93] He chiefly resided at Strasburg, where he died in 1545. He is mentioned by Durer, in his Journal, by the name of “Grün Hannsen.”

[Footnote V-92: Heineken ranks the following in the class of _little masters_: Henry Aldgrever, Albert Altdorffer, Bartholomew Behaim, Hans Sebald Behaim, Hans Binck, Henry Goerting, George Penez, and Virgil Solis. Most of them were engravers on copper.]

[Footnote V-93: The following curious testimony respecting a lock of Albert Durer’s hair, which had formerly been in the possession of Hans Baldung Grün, is translated from an article in Meusel’s Neue Miscellaneen, 1799. The lock of hair and the document were then in the possession of Herr H. S. Hüsgen of Frankfort on the Mayn: “Herein is the hair which was cut from the head of that ingenious and celebrated painter Albert Durer, after his death at Nuremberg, 8th April 1528, as a token of remembrance. It afterwards came into the possession of that skilful painter Hans Baldung, burger of this city, Strasburg; and after his death, in 1545, my late brother-in-law, Nicholas Krämer, painter, of this city, having bought sundry of his works and other things, among them found this lock of hair, in an old letter, wherein was written an account of what it contained. On the death of my brother-in-law, in 1550, it was presented to me by my sister Dorothy, and I now enclose it in this letter for a memorial. 1559. SEBOLD BÜHELER.” To this testimony are subjoined two or three others of subsequent date, showing in whose possession the valued relic had been before it came into the hands of Herr Hüsgen.]

We may here conveniently introduce fac-similes on a reduced scale of two rather interesting wood engravings given by Dr. Dibdin in his Bibliomania, and copied from an early folio volume, entitled _Revelationes cœlestes sanctæ Brigittæ de Suecia_, printed at Nuremberg by Anthony Köberger, M CCC XXI. _mensis Septembris_, which some read 1500, on the 21st of September, others 1521, in the month of September. The first of these cuts is curious as representing the simplicity of an ancient reading room, with its three-legged joint stool, such as is so prettily described by Cowper, Task, I. v. 19; the other cut describes a punishment which is said to have been revealed to St. Bridget against those ladies who have “ornamenta indecentia capitibus et pedibus, et reliquis membris, ad provocandam luxuriam, et irritandum Deum, in strictis vestibus, ostensione mamillarum, unctionibus, &c.” The artist is unknown, but seems to be among the best of the Nuremberg school.

It cannot be reasonably doubted that Durer and several other German painters of his time were accustomed to engrave their own designs on copper; for in many instances we have the express testimony of their contemporaries, and not unfrequently their own, to the fact. Copper-plate engraving for about sixty years from the time of its invention was generally practised by persons who were also painters, and who usually engraved their own designs. Wood engraving, on the contrary, from an early period was practised as a distinct profession by persons who are never heard of as painters. That some of the early German painters--of a period when “artists were more of workmen, and workmen more of artists”[V-94] than in the present day--_might_ engrave some of the wood-cuts which bear their marks, is certainly not impossible; but it is highly improbable that all the wood-cuts which are ascribed to them should have been executed by themselves. If any wood-cuts were actually engraved by Durer, Cranach, Burgmair, and other painters of reputation, I conceive that such cuts are not to be distinguished by their superior execution from those engraved by the professional _formschneider_ and _brief-maler_ of the day. The best copper-plates engraved by Albert Durer can scarcely be surpassed by the best copper-plate engraver of the present day,--that is, supposing him to execute his work by the same means; while the best of the wood-cuts which he is supposed to have engraved himself might be readily executed by a score of modern wood engravers if the subject were drawn for them on the block. In the age of Durer the best wood-cuts are of comparatively large size, and are distinguished more from the boldness and freedom of their design than from any peculiar excellence of engraving: they display, in fact, rather the talent of the _artist_ than the skill of the _workman_. Though wood engraving had very greatly improved from about the end of the fifteenth century to the time of Durer’s decease, yet it certainly did not attain its perfection within that period. In later years, indeed, the workman has displayed greater excellence; but at no time does the art appear to have been more flourishing or more highly esteemed than in the reign of its great patron, the Emperor Maximilian.

[Footnote V-94: Evidence of Dr. G. F. Waagen of Berlin before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Arts and their Connexion with Manufactures, 1835.]