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Updated: May 6, 2025
Another day, his wretched family, who watched him with terror, overheard him talking to his gardener: "What a magnificent piece of work you are laying out, my good boy," said Durer; "a garden admirably designed, if there ever was such a thing."
We find it in what, of all things, are the apparently most different to the quiet and placid outline illustration of the Giottesque: in the terrible portfolio of Goya's etchings, called the Disasters of War. Like Dürer and Rembrandt, the great Spaniard is at once extremely realistic and extremely imaginative.
In the plastic arts, vocation and creative aptitude are shown perceptibly later, on the average about the fourteenth year: Giotto, at ten; Van Dyck, ten; Raphael, eight; Guerchin, eight; Greuze, eight; Michaelangelo, thirteen; Albrecht Dürer, fifteen; Bernini, twelve; Rubens and Jordaens being also precocious. In poetry we find no work having any individual character before sixteen.
Yet as we look at his portraits of himself and no man except Rembrandt has painted himself so often it is difficult to understand how any one could have been angry with Albert Dürer. Never did the face of man bear a more sweet, benign, and trustful expression. In those portraits we see something of the beauty, of the strength, of the weakness of the man so beloved in his generation.
They could not, indeed, be rendered in line engraving, unless by the hand of Albert Durer; and I have, therefore, abandoned, for the present, all endeavor to represent any more important mass of the early sculpture of the Ducal Palace: but I trust that, in a few months, casts of many portions will be within the reach of the inhabitants of London, and that they will be able to judge for themselves of their perfect, pure, unlabored naturalism; the freshness, elasticity, and softness of their leafage, united with the most noble symmetry and severe reserve, no running to waste, no loose or experimental lines, no extravagance, and no weakness.
At this period Dürer was also engaged in experimenting upon the art of copper-plate engraving, in which he restricted himself mainly to reproducing copies of the works of other artists, among them those of Jacopo de Barbari, a painter of the Italian school, who was residing in Nuremberg, and who among other things gave the great artist instruction in plastic anatomy.
The death of the emperor in the following year, the outbreak of an epidemic in Nuremberg, together with the coronation of Charles V. at Aix-la-Chapelle, led Dürer to undertake a journey to the Low Countries, in which he was accompanied by his faithful wife. He was present at the coronation and was one of the distinguished civilians whose appearance added dignity to the occasion.
Thus lived and laboured Dürer in the city of his adoption, studying nature most diligently, and combining therewith high imaginings of his own. In 1506 he undertook a journey to Venice, and its influence improved him greatly. In the letters he wrote on this journey to his intimate friend Pirkheimer he acknowledges this; in one of them he declares “the things which pleased me eleven years ago please me no longer.” He also notes the popularity which had preceded him, and says, “the Italian artists counterfeit my works in the churches and wherever else they can find them, and yet they blame them, and declare that as they are not in accordance with ancient art they are worthless.”[223-
Sixty-seven pictures adorned the walls of this magnificent apartment, among them the four masterpieces, the loss of which is the most tragic incident in the melancholy story of poor old Pons. There were a "Chevalier de Malte en Priere," by Sebastian del Piombo; a "Holy Family," by Fra Bartolommeo; a "Landscape," by Hobbema; and a "Portrait of a Woman," by Albert Durer.
There are also some of his works in the Louvre, and in the royal collections in England. As a painter, it has been observed of Durer that he studied nature only in her unadorned state, without attending to those graces which study and art might have afforded him; but his imagination was lively, his composition grand, and his pencil delicate.
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