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"While the artist worked, the Emperor often visited his studio; and as Durer's pet cats often visited it at the same time, the expression arose, 'a cat may look at a King!" On the occasion of one of these kingly visits, Maximillian tried to do a little art-work on his own account. Taking a piece of charcoal he tried to sketch, but the charcoal kept breaking and he asked Durer why it did so.
The various scenes in which the Apostles appear are modeled more or less after the great religious paintings, especially those of the Bavarian artist, Albrecht Dürer. The Last Supper is a living representation of the famous painting of Leonardo da Vinci in the refectory at Milan. Peter and Judas are here brought into sharp contrast. Next to Christ, is the slender figure of the beloved disciple.
The painter and his friend Pirckheimer are seen standing in the background on the right; the painter holds a tablet with the inscription, "Albertus Dürer Germanus, MDVI." This picture, which is one of his largest and finest, was purchased from the church at a high price by the Emperor Rudolph II. for his gallery at Prague, where it remained until sold in 1782 by the Emperor Joseph II. It then became the property of the Præmonstratensian monastery of Stratow at Prague, where it still exists, though in very injured condition and greatly over-painted.
His Madonna was the Madonna of Raphael, not that of Albert Dürer: the woman whose placid grace of countenance creates an emotion more subtly voluptuous than desire; not she in whose face can be discerned the human mother of the Man of Sorrows and of Him divinely acquainted with all grief.
The strongest whose work I can show you in recent periods is Holbein; next to him is Lionardo; and then Dürer: but of the three Holbein is the strongest, and with his help I will put the two schools in their full character before you in a moment. Here is, first, the photograph of an entirely characteristic piece of the great colour school.
A little later Albrecht Dürer, accompanied by his wife, visited the Netherlands. The Emperor Maximilian treated the painter with great favour, and a legend survives of their relations: Dürer was painting so large a subject that he required steps to reach it.
While he was still very small he could speak to his tutor in French, to his mother in Flemish, and to his father in Latin. Besides these languages he spoke also Italian and English. Before he was an artist, Rubens, like Durer and Leonardo da Vinci, was a child of rare intelligence.
How different, these two pictorial dodges of the purely mechanical Catholicism of the fifteenth century from the tender or harrowing gospel illustrations, where every detail is conceived as happening in the artist's own town and to his own kinsfolk, of the Lutheran engravers of the school of Dürer!
Jacopo, having to paint at the corners of those cloisters scenes from the Passion of the Saviour, thought to avail himself of the above-named inventions of Albrecht Dürer, in the firm belief that he would satisfy not only himself but also the greater part of the craftsmen of Florence, who were all proclaiming with one voice and with common consent and agreement the beauty of those engravings and the excellence of Albrecht.
Vasari's simple description is best: "Una donna nuda che dorme, tanto bella che pare viva, insieme con altre figure." Moritz Thausing's Albrecht Dürer, Zweiter Band, p. 14. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Life and Times of Titian, vol. i. p. 212.
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