The Dawn Of The Reformation

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

In a letter to his friend Pirkheimer, Durer relates how the Doge and the Patriarch of Venice came to see his picture, and still more interesting in his account how the veteran Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini praised the picture in public and further proved his admiration for the work of the Northern painter. Bellini, Durer wrote, ‘wanted to have something of mine, and himself came and asked me to paint him something and he would pay well for it. All men tell me what an upright man he is, so that I am really friendly with him. He is very old, but is still the best painter of them all.’ It was at this time that the incident about the paintbrush already narrated occurred.

Altogether this visit to Venice was a success. It definitely established Durer’s reputation as a painter, his small panels sold well, and later he went to Bologna, where he received a great ovation, but even the flattery of a Bolognese who declared he could ‘die happy’ now he had seen Durer did not turn the artist’s head, and he returned to Nuremberg the same modest, conscientious artist he had always been.

The succeeding years were very fertile in paintings, his principal productions being the ‘Crucifixion,’ now at Dresden, the ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ in which he tried to give his ideal of beauty of form, and the important altarpiece which he painted for the Frankfurt merchant Jacob Heiler.

But the artist still found that painting did not bring him in so much profit as engraving, and after he had completed his great ‘Adoration of the Trinity’ in 1511 he gave most of his time to engraving, continuing the first ‘Passion’ series and the ‘Life of the Virgin.’ It was after the death of his mother in 1514 that he produced his famous print ‘Melancholia’ a composition full of curious symbolism in which a seated female figure is shown brooding on the tragedies of existence.

Equally famous and still more difficult wholly to understand is the copper engraving known as ‘The Great Fortune’ or ‘Nemesis’. It is supposed that this engraving was suggested by a passage in Poliziano’s Latin poem, which may be thus translated:

There is goddess who, aloft in the empty air, advances girdled about with a cloud....She it is who crushes extravagant hopes, who threatens the proud, to whom is given to beat down the haughty spirit and the haughty step, and to confound over-great possessions. Her the men of old called Nemesis.....In her hand bears bridles and a chalice, and smiles for ever with an awful smile, and stands resisting mad designs.

No work has aroused more controversy than this design; some have regarded it as a splendid rendering of the physical attributes of mature womanhood, but others have pronounced the ugliness of the figure to be ‘perfectly repulsive’ while others again have found it hard to reconcile the extreme realism of the woman’s form with the fanciful imagination shown in her environment.

But however many opinions there may be as to the success of this engraving as an illustration, there is only one view about its merits as a decoration. Mr T Sturge Moore, himself an expert and gifted engraver, has well emphasized this point by reminding the readers of his book on Durer ‘that it is an engraving and not a woman that we are discussing: and that this engraving is extremely beautiful in arabesque and black and white pattern, rich, rhythmical and harmonious.’ If the experiment be made of turning the print upside down, so that attention is no longer concentrated on its meaning as an illustration, its extraordinary ingenuity and interest as a pattern will at once become apparent.

In 1518 Durer again resumed his activity as a painter: in that year he was summoned by the Emperor Maximilian to Augsburg, where he was employed in painting portraits of the emperor and of many of his nobles. In 1521 he visited the Netherlands and received much attention in Brussels and Antwerp; though he drew and painted several portraits during his travels, he took up engraving again when he returned to Nuremberg. The series he then began is known as the ‘Second Passion’; this set he did not live to complete. He died in 1528. Two years earlier he painted his celebrated ‘Four Apostles,’ which have a peculiar interest not only as Durer’s last effort in picture making, but also as an indication of the artist’s attitude towards the Reformation.

The Dawn Of The Reformation (continued)