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Updated: June 6, 2025
Cannot we stop a few hours, at least, in Nuremberg, and see the meadow by the Pegnitz where the Meistersingers held their contest of song and the wooden, gabled house where Albrecht Durer lived? That will teach you Germany, too. The bud of their dream was opening then; and what flower, even in the magnificence of its full-blowing, is so lovely?
It seems to me, that there is considerable exaggeration in these stories, for granted that Agnes Dürer was a shrew and a miser, was Albrecht Dürer the man to be entirely, or greatly, at such a woman's mercy? Taking matters at their worst, dishonour and disgrace did not come near the great painter.
One of Gutenberg's workmen went up to Nuremberg and taught others how to design and cast type. This man Alberto Durer helped them, designing the initials and making title- pages by cutting the design on a wooden block, then covering this block with ink, laying a sheet of paper upon it, and placing it in a press; then when the paper is lifted off it looks exactly like the original drawing.
He had it, therefore, in his power to aid Dürer greatly; he did so, and Dürer returned it with a gratitude which ripened to affection, he declares in one of his letters that he had “no other friend but him on earth,” and he was equally attached to Dürer. The constant intercourse and kindly advices of his friend were the few happy relaxations Dürer enjoyed.
It was not conceit, nor humility, nor pride. One could not have named the sweetness that hovered in it hauntingly. He laid down the brush with a quick breath and sat gazing at the picture. It returned the gentle, inevitable look. He raised a finger to the portrait, speaking softly. "It is Albrecht Dürer his work," he said under his breath. "None but a fool can mistake it.
A pleasant, Oxfordish room, with the brown paper and plain green curtains of the college days of these women, and Dürer engravings, and sweet peas in a bowl, and Frances Carr stirring bread and milk over a gas ring. Frances Carr was small and thirty-eight, and had a nice brown face and a merry smile.
Now, the fame of this most noble craftsman, by reason of the aforesaid works and many others, having passed into France and Flanders, Albrecht Dürer, a most marvellous German painter, and an engraver of very beautiful copperplates, rendered tribute to Raffaello out of his own works, and sent to him a portrait of himself, a head, executed by him in gouache on a cloth of fine linen, which showed the same on either side, the lights being transparent and obtained without lead-white, while the only grounding and colouring was done with water-colours, the white of the cloth serving for the ground of the bright parts.
How far more such a man as Dürer would have been appreciated in Italy or in the Netherlands is further evidenced in the above-mentioned writing, where he states that he was offered 200 ducats a year in Venice and 300 Philips-gulden in Antwerp, if he would settle in either of those cities.
Looking again at the other works of the school, he found that the one mistake in the "Mariana" was the only error in perspective in the whole series of pictures; which could not be said of any twelve works, containing architecture, by popular artists in the exhibition; and that, as studies both of drapery and of every other minor detail, there had been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since the days of Albert Dürer.
"I thank you many times!" was all that he could say; but in his dark eyes there beamed a fire of joy whose sparks of love and gratitude electrified the Emperor. "Would you like to go to your cousins in Nurnberg, and help them in plate-engraving! There's plenty of work there." "I would like to go to Durer in Nurnberg, but I don't want to be a plate-engraver.
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