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Updated: May 24, 2025
The two knights are represented against black grounds, and their silhouettes form a very fine arabesque, which the streamers of their lances, artificially arranged, complete and emphasise. This black ground points probably to the influence of Jacopo de' Barbari, whom Duerer had met and been mystified by. No doubt there was much in such a background that appealed to the draughtsman in Duerer.
Still, in the following rhymes, Duerer shows himself a true child of the Renascence, at least in intention; and was proud of a desire for universal excellence. With this he tries to make me smart, Because he thinks it is for me To paint, and not write poetry.
To the honourable and accomplished Albrecht Duerer, burgher of Nuernberg, my dear Master and Friend. LONDON, October 24, 1524. Honourable, dear Sir, I am very glad to hear of your good health and that of your wife. I have had Hans Pomer staying with me in England. Now that you are all evangelical in Nuernberg I must write to you.
Mantegna is certainly the painter with whom Duerer has most affinity, and whose method of employing pigment is least removed from his; but Mantegna is a born colourist a man whose eye for colour is like a musician's ear for melody while Duerer is at best with difficulty able to avoid glaring discords, and, if we are to judge by the "ordinary pictures," did not avoid them.
The employment he found for the greatest artist north of the Alps was sufficiently ludicrous; and perhaps Duerer showed that he felt this, by treating the major portion as studio work; though, no doubt, the impatience of his imperial patron in a measure necessitated the employment of many aids. It is difficult to do justice to the fine qualities of Maximilian.
In this portrait of his father, Duerer has developed a shaken brushline, admirably adapted to suggest the wrinkled features of an old man, but in complete contrast to the rapid sweep of the caligraphic work in the Oswolt Krel; and it is to be noticed how in both pictures the touch seems to have been invented to facilitate the rendering of the peculiar curves and lines of the sitter's features, and further variations of it developed to express the draperies and other component parts of the picture.
Are there any other resources of German art and thought which can account for the advent of the great musician? In art Duerer stood by the side of Luther. In him again we find a man. Thought, thought! help me to express my native thought.
Lastly, it is in his drawings, perhaps, even more than in his copper engravings, that Duerer proves himself a master of "the art of seeing nature," as Reynolds phrased it; and the following sentence makes clear what is meant, for he says of painting "perhaps it ought to be as far removed from the vulgar idea of imitation, as the refined, civilised state in which we live is removed from a gross state of nature"; and again: "If we suppose a view of nature, represented with all the truth of the camera obscura, and the same scene represented by a great artist, how little and how mean will the one appear in comparison of the other, where no superiority is supposed from the choice of the subject."
The Dore gallery indeed proved his Capua, the long-stop to his fame. As a personality the would-be Titian, Duerer, Thorwaldsen and Benvenuto Cellini in one presents an engaging figure. His domestic life makes very pleasant reading.
I shall be glad to do anything I can to help him. He is to buy glass and materials here. He tells me that near Freistadtlein he was robbed and had twenty florins taken from him. He has asked me to send him to you, for his gracious lord told him if he wanted anything to let you know. I send him, therefore, to your Wisdom with my apprentice. Your Wisdom's, ALBRECHT DUeRER.
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