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Updated: May 24, 2025
Or, as Duerer says in another place, "difference such as maketh a thing fair or foul." But further, it lieth in each man's choice whether or how far he shall make use of all the above written "Words of Difference."
And it is the impressiveness of an image, not the impressiveness of an idea or situation, as in the case of the Knight, Death, and the Devil, by which almost as much bad literature has been inspired. There is nothing to choose between the workmanship of the two plates; both are absolutely impeccable, and outside the work of Duerer himself, unrivalled.
Duerer stands alone beside an inscription in a gentle pastoral landscape beneath the vision of the Virgin's Assumption seen over the heads of the Apostles, who gaze up in rapture; and again he is alone beside a broad peaceful river beneath the vision of the Holy Trinity and All Saints. I know of no parallel to these little portraits.
Thausing tells us his work shows certain resemblances to that of Luca Pacioli, a companion of Leonardo's, who may have been the "man who is willing to teach me the secrets of the art of perspective," and whom Duerer in 1506 travelled from Venice to Bologna to see; it is even possible that he saw Leonardo himself in the latter town.
About the same time Duerer recommenced painting in tempera in a manner resembling the early Dresden Madonna and the Hercules, as we see by the rather unpleasant heads of Apostles in the Uffizi and the tine one of an old man in a vermilion cap in the Louvre, &c. &c. Gardner, of Boston. All three were probably painted at Antwerp.
And Duerer all his life long continued to produce pictures and engravings which were intended to preach such sermons. Goethe admirably remarks: "Superstition is the poetry of life; the poet therefore suffers no harm from being superstitious."
But not only is Duerer praised for "great thoughts," but he is praised for realism, and sometimes accused of having delighted in ugliness; or, as it is more cautiously expressed, of having preferred truth to grace.
This person had also tinkered the centre picture, painting out two heraldic groups of donors, far smaller in scale than the actual personages of the scene, but very useful in the composition, as giving a more ample base to the masses of broken and fretted quality; useful also now as an additional proof of how free from the fetters of an impertinent logic of realism Duerer ever was.
Besides Spengler, there were "Christopher Kress, a soldier, a traveller, and a town councillor;" and Caspar Nuetzel, of one of the oldest families, and Captain-general of the town bands. Both of these went with Duerer to the Diet at Augsburg in 1518. One of them is supposed to figure as St. George in the All Saints picture.
But we recognise with Duerer that we do not know what the true measure of goodness and beauty is, and all that we can do is to choose always the good and the beautiful according to the measure of our reason to the fulness of the light at present granted to us.
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