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To talk about "beauty" being sacrificed to "truth," with Prof. Thausing; or the ideal of the North being "strength" in works of art as in life, with Sir Martin Conway; is to confuse the issue and deceive oneself. To have mistaken the proper end of art, beauty, by thinking it was "truth" or "strength," is to have failed to labour in the right direction; that is all-who-ever may condone the failure.
Thausing tells us that his "widow entered into possession of his whole fortune;" a fourth part belonged, according to Nuremberg law, to his brothers, but she was not bound to render it to them before her death.
What I there said will explain Duerer's choice in this matter; and also that what Thausing felt bow in him was not taste, but his prejudices in regard to womanly attractiveness, and his misconception as to where the beauty of an engraving should be looked for and in what it consists. These same prejudices and misconceptions render Mrs.
Thausing shrewdly remarks, "This love of fame and naive delight in the glorification of his own person are further proofs that the Emperor Max was the true child of his age. No one was so akin to him in this respect as the painter of his choice, Albert Duerer."
Moritz Thausing had already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he described the Borghese picture as The Maiden with Venus and Amor at the Well.
Thausing suggests that this "other Quadro" is the "Christ among the Doctors" in the Barberini Gallery at Rome a picture containing seven life-size half-figures or heads, and dated 1506. The inscription states it to have been opus quinque dierum. At Brunswick there is an old copy of it. The original studies for the hands are likewise in existence.
Thausing insists on the fact that in this letter there is no mention of Duerer's death having been caused by his wife's behaviour; but as the relation of Ulrich to the deceased seems to have been well-nigh as intimate as his own, there may have been no need to mention a fact painfully present to both their minds.
Thausing says admirably, "A happy imagination and a great idea of his exalted position made up to him for any want of success in his many wars and political negotiations," and elsewhere calls him the last of the "nomadic emperors," who spent their lives travelling from palace to palace and from city to city, beseeching, cajoling, or threatening their subjects into obedience.
The Great Fortune or Nemesis is a case in point. The remarks of critics on this superb engraving are very strange and wide. Professor Thausing said, "Embodied in this powerful female form, the Northern worship of nature here makes its first conscious and triumphant appearance in the history of art."
Duerer made up a rhinoceros from a sketch and description sent to him from Portugal, whither the uncouth creature had been brought in a ship from Goa. Duerer's drawing was engraved and became the parent of innumerable rhinoceroses in lesson-books, doing service right down well into the late century, as Thausing assures us.
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