Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Dürer by Furst Herbert
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page
Ebook has 152 lines and 12981 words, and 4 pages
Masterpieces in Colour
Edited By
T. Leman Hare
D?RER
"MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR" SERIES
D?RER
HERBERT E. A. FURST
Illustrated with Eight Reproductions in Colour
London: T. C. & E. C. Jack New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co.
Plate
This is a wonderful world! And not the least wonderful thing is our ignorance of it.
I would chat with you, reader, for a while; would discuss D?rer, whom I have known and loved for many a year, and whom I want to make beloved by you also. Here I sit, pen in hand, and would begin.
Begin--where?
With the Beginnings?
The Beginnings? Where do things begin; when and why?
So our ignorance, like a many-headed monster, raises its fearsome heads and would bar the way.
There are so many things we shall never know, cries the poet of the unsaid, Maeterlinck.
Let us venture forth then and grope with clumsy fingers amongst the treasures stored; let us be content to pick up a jewel here and there, resting our minds in awe and admiration on its beauty, though we may not readily understand its use and meaning. Foolish men read books and dusty documents, catch a few dull words from the phrasing of long thoughts, and will tell you, these are facts!
Wise men read books--the books of Nature and the books of men--and say, facts are well enough, but oh for the right understanding!
For between sunrise and sunset, between the dusk of evening and the dusk of dawn, things happen that will never happen again; and the world of to-day is ever a world of yesterdays and to-morrows.
Reader, I lift my torch, and by its dim light I bid you follow me.
For it is a long journey we have to make through the night of the past. Many an encumbrance of four and a half centuries we shall have to lay aside ere we reach the treasure-house of D?rer's Art.
From the days of the Maxim gun and the Lee-Metford to the days of the howitzer and the blunderbuss. When York was farther away from London than New York is to-day.
When the stranding of a whale was an event of European interest, and the form of a rhinoceros the subject of wild conjecture and childish imagination.
When this patient earth of ours was to our ancestors merely a vast pancake toasted daily by a circling sun.
When the woods were full of hobgoblins, and scaly Beelzebubs were busily engaged in pitching the souls of the damned down a yawning hell-mouth, and the angels of the Lord in crimson and brocade carried the blessed heavenward. In those days scholars filled their books with a curious jumble of theology, philosophy, and old women's talk. Dr. Faustus practised black magic, and the besom-steeds carried witches from the Brocken far and wide into all lands.
Then no one ventured far from home unaccompanied, and the merchants were bold adventurers, and Kings of Scotland might envy Nuremberg burgesses--so AEneas Sylvius said.
And that a touch of humour be not lacking, I bid you remember that my lady dipped her dainty fingers into the stew, and, after, threw the bare bones to the dogs below the table; and I also bid you remember that satins and fine linen oft clothed an unwashed body.
Cruel plagues, smallpox, and all manner of disease and malformations inflicted a far greater number than nowadays, and the sad ignorance of doctors brewed horrid draughts amongst the skulls, skeletons, stuffed birds, and crocodiles of their fearsome-looking "surgeries."
In short, it was a "poetic" age; when all the world was full of mysteries and possibilities, and the sanest and most level-headed were outrageously fantastic.
There are people who will tell you that the world is very much the same to-day as it was yesterday, and that, after all, human nature is human nature in all ages all the world over. But, beyond the fact that we all are born and we all must die, there is little in common between you and me--between us of to-day and those of yesterday--and we resemble each other most nearly in things that do not matter.
Frankly, therefore, Albrecht D?rer, who was born on May 21, 1471, is a human being from another world, and unless you realise that too, I doubt you can understand him, much less admire him.
For his Art is not beautiful.
Germans have never been able to create anything beautiful in Art: their sense of beauty soars into Song.
But even whilst I am writing these words it occurs to me that they are no longer true, for the German of to-day is no longer the German of yesterday, "standing peaceful on his scientific watch-tower; and to the raging, struggling multitude here and elsewhere solemnly, from hour to hour, with preparatory blast of cow-horn emit his 'H?ret ihr Herren und lasst's euch sagen' ..." as Carlyle pictures him; he is most certainly not like the Lutheran German with a child's heart and a boy's rash courage.
Frankly I say you cannot admire D?rer if you be honestly ignorant or ignorantly honest.
We of to-day are too level-headed; our brains cannot encompass the world that crowded D?rer's dreams.
For the German's brain was always crowded; he had not that nice sense of space and emptiness that makes Italian Art so pleasant to look upon, and which the Japanese employ with astonishing subtlety. You remember Wagner's words in Goethe's "Faust"--
"Zwar weiss ich viel; doch m?cht ich Alles wissen."
It is not only his eagerness to show you all he knows, but also his ravenous desire to know all that is to be known. Hence we speak of German thoroughness, at once his boast and his modesty.
Here again I have to pull up. Generalisations are so easy, appear so justified, and are more often than not misleading.
D?rer was not a pure-blooded Teuton; his father came from Eytas in Hungary.
Eytas translated into German is Th?r , and a man from Th?r a Th?rer or D?rer.
That German music owes a debt of gratitude to Hungary is acknowledged. Does D?rer owe his greatness to the strain of foreign blood?
Possibly; but it does not matter. He was a man, and a profound man, therefore akin to all the world, as Dante and Michelangelo, as Shakespeare and Millet. Born into German circumstances he appears in German habit--that is all.
His idea then of Art was, that it "should be employed," as he himself explained, "in the service of the Church to set forth the sufferings of Christ and such like subjects, and it should also be employed to preserve the features of men after their death." A narrow interpretation of a world-embracing realm.
The scope of this little volume will not admit of a detailed account of D?rer's life.
We may not linger on the years of his apprenticeship with Michael Wolgemut, where he suffered much from his fellow-'prentices. We must not accompany him on his wanderjahre, these being the three years of peregrination which always followed the years of apprenticeship.
Neither may we record details, as of his marriage with Agnes Frey--"mein Agnes," upon his return home in 1494. "His Agnes" was apparently a good housewife and a shrewd business woman, to whom he afterwards largely entrusted the sale of his prints.
He had a great struggle for a living. And here an amusing analogy occurs to me. Painting does not pay, he complains at one time, and therefore he devotes himself to "black and white."
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page