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Updated: May 23, 2025
It is often didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's, Michael Angelo's, Dürer's, and hundreds more; but that is not its special function; it is didactic chiefly by being beautiful; but beautiful with haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of myths that can be read only with the heart.
Some shepherds to whom the angel, who is still seen hovering in the air, has announced the tidings, are already entering from without the walls." The picture is the central panel of an altar-piece now in the Old Pinakothek at Munich. Durer's oil painting of the four apostles John, Peter, Mark, and Paul is in the same gallery.
Very often, one of the letters generally the initial of the surname is enclosed within the lines of the other. This peculiarity is also observable in Albert Dürer's signature; and we only know one single instance, among the numberless ones that occur, in which he has not maintained it.
This entire absence of posing on the part of the German Virgin is one of the most admirable elements in this art. This characteristic is perfectly illustrated in Dürer's portrait Madonna of the Belvedere Gallery, at Vienna. This is an excellent specimen of the master, who, alone of the Germans, is considered the peer of his great Italian contemporaries.
Compare Sanchez Coello's Philip II. and Don Carlos; what monomaniacs. Compare even Dürer's magnificent head of Willibald Pirkheimer: how the swine nature is blended with the thinker. And the swine will be subdued, the thinker will triumph. Why? Just because there is a contest because the thinker-Willibald is conscious of the swine-Willibald.
And now, I trust, you will feel that it is not in mere yielding to my own fancies that I have chosen, for the first three subjects in your educational series, landscape scenes; two in England, and one in France, the association of these being not without purpose: and for the fourth Albert Dürer's dream of the Spirit of Labour. And of the landscape subjects, I must tell you this much.
This is not a representation of the actual reality of the crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco, or Dürer's print, or so many others, which show the hill, the people, the hangman, the ladders and ropes and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of mystic repetition of it; subjective, if I may say so; existing only in the contemplation of the saints on the opposite side, who are spectators only in the sense that a contemplative Christian may be said to be the mystic spectator of the Passion.
Ceilings, windows, doors and door-handles, chests, locks, candlesticks, banisters, waterpots, the very cooking utensils, all betray the fine taste and skilled labor, the personal interest of the man who made them. So in Dürer's house, as it is preserved to-day, we can still see and admire the careful simplicity of domestic furniture, which distinguishes that in the "Birth of the Virgin."
After his death, the widow treated his brothers and sisters generously, giving them properties of Durer's and being of much help to them. During the artist's life he and she had travelled everywhere together and had appeared to love each other tenderly; hence we may conclude that the old Pirkheimer was simply a disgruntled, gouty old man without a good word for anybody.
The lofty Gothic interior, dating from the late fifteenth century, is lighted by some sixteenth and seventeenth-century stained glass, and among the pictures that have escaped transportation to the Louvre may be noted a lunette over the clergy stalls R. of the nave, God the Father, by Perugino; and a remarkable tempera painting, The Passion, attributed to Dürer's pupil, Aldegräver, in the fifth chapel, L. aisle.
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