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Of these I would take two as typical typical of individual fancy most strangely contrasting with the conventionalism of the Italians. Let the reader think of any of the scores of Flights into Egypt, and of Resurrections by fifteenth-century Italians, or even Giottesques; and then turn to two prints, one of each of these subjects respectively, by Martin Schongauer and Altdorfer.
Erasmus being taken out with a windlass, or Jael, as Altdorfer has shown her in his romantic print, neatly hammering the nail into the head of the sprawling, snoring Sisera. But there is also and Holbein's Dance of Death, terrible, jocular, tender, vulgar and poetic, contains it all, this German world a great tenderness.
There then resulted the Indian equivalent of pictures by El Greco, Grunewald or Altdorfer paintings in which the artist's own religious emotions were the direct occasion of a new manner. In other cases, the patron might adhere to Krishna, pay him nominal respect or take a moderate pleasure in his story but not evince a burning enthusiasm.
Probably it did not move him, and neither does he us. Peter Breughel and Albrecht Altdorfer would certainly have done far better so far as the conception of the picture is concerned, though neither of them had so much skill to waste on its realisation.
In other parts of Germany, particularly in Nuremberg, Ulm, Augsburg, and Basle, various names of painters of the latter half of the fourteenth century have survived, but their works are of little interest except to the connoisseur as showing the influence under which the two great artists of the sixteenth century, Albert Dürer and Hans Holbein, and one or two lesser lights like Lucas Cranach, Albert Altdorfer, and Adam Elsheimer, were formed.
One copy which Maximilian intended for his own use was sent to Duerer that he might decorate the margins with pen-drawings in various coloured inks. Of this work there exist forty-three pages by Duerer himself and eight by Cranach at Munich, and at Besancon thirty-five pages by Burgkmair, Altdorfer, Baldung Grien, and Hans Duerer.
Again, there are the German masters the great engravers, Kranach, Altdorfer, Aldegrever, especially; of whom, for their absolute pleasure in ugly women, for their filthy delight in horrors, I have said an immense amount of ill; and of whom, for their wonderful intuition of dramatic situation, their instinct of the poetry of common things, and their magnificently imaginative rendering of landscape, I hope some day to say an equal amount of good.
From the unhappy location of his life Duerer was debarred from any such obvious and overwhelming effect on after generations. The influences which helped to shape him were no doubt at work on all the more eminent artists, his fellow-countrymen; on Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach, or Baldung Grien, to mention only the elect.
The legend concerning him, however, is of world-wide celebrity, for the tale associated with the founding of the famous edifice is replete with that grisly element which has always delighted the Germans, and figures largely in their medieval literature, and more especially in the works of their early painters for example, Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Albrecht Altdörfer.
This art is the great German art of the early sixteenth century; the art of Martin Schongauer, of Aldegrever, of Altdorfer, of Wohlgemuth, of Kranach, of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein, whom they resemble as Pinturicchio and Lo Spagna resemble Perugino, as Palma and Paris Bordone resemble Titian.
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