CHAPTER XII.

GERMAN PAINTING IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH

CENTURIES.

TURNING from Flanders to Upper and Western Germany, we discover that the awakening to a sense of beauty or power, which is a nation's first basis of art, was later and more gradual in the remoter cities of the North than in the fertile Netherlands. Rumors of the artists of Cologne and Bruges had penetrated into the provinces, but no hearty response was given till the genius of Albrecht Dürer developed, at the close of the fifteenth century, an entirely distinct school of German painting. A few of his predecessors had indeed displayed some of his own characteristics at a little earlier date; but they are forgotten, and his fame survives. Martin Schongauer anticipated him as an engraver, while Michael Wohlgemuth was his instructor as a painter.

Schongauer, or Martin Schön, born about 1420, and dying in 1488, was a native of Colmar, in Franconia. His earliest work, a "Death of the Virgin," is in the National Gallery, London; his best is an altar-piece at Colmar, of the “Virgin and Child seated beneath a Rose-hedge." Some of his pictures are also at Munich and Vienna, especially a Crucifixion," where blue angels hover in sorrow round the cross.

He has, too, a figure of "St. Agnes with her Lamb," which is unusually beautiful; but it is to his prints we must look for the clearest evidence of his talents. These were celebrated, and gained for him the epithet of " Schön," or "beautiful," an adjective by no means applicable to his personal appearance, as his portrait at Munich proves that he was far from handsome. Yet even the Italians called him " Bel Martino." His engravings were imported into Italy, and a "Temptation of St. Anthony," treated in the same style as Teniers's subsequent paintings, had the honor of being admired and copied by Michael Angelo in his youth. A collection of these engravings may be found in the British Museum.

The school of Nuremberg, or Nürnberg, now comes prominently forward. Sculpture had long flourished in this quaint city, and the noble carvings and statues of its churches and monuments are still the delight of travelers; but painting had advanced with much less rapidity, being comparatively neglected, and partaking more or less of the stiffness and sharpness of wooden or stone figures. Michael Wohlgemuth, born about 1434, became the most important artist of the period, and has been correctly said to stand in the same. relation to Albrecht Dürer as Perugino to Raphael. Yet the realistic spirit of Germany, joined to the fantastic element so blended with its art and poetry that it almost seems a love of weirdness and ugliness for its own sake, effectually distinguishes both teacher and pupil from the great masters of Italy. There is no more real resemblance between Dürer and Raphael than between a ballad of Bürger and a sonnet of Petrarch, while one would smile indeed to contrast the altar-pieces of Perugino and Wohlgemuth. In fact, the altar

pieces of the latter are little calculated to raise the spectator's enthusiasm, though it is now charitably supposed that the worst of them were executed by his numerous apprentices, and that the best, which exhibit some beautiful and wellcolored heads, with an occasionally tender type of female sainthood, are all that can be positively attributed to his own hand. Among these, the large picture in many compartments, representing the “Life and Death of Christ," painted for the high-altar of St. Mary's Church, Zwickau, is regarded as his masterpiece; though some prefer the "St. Jerome," at Vienna. Several more are in the Pinakothek, Munich, and in the churches of Nuremberg and Zwickau. When Wohlgemuth had reached the age of eighty-three, Dürer painted his portrait, now in the Munich Gallery-“a pale and worn, but noble, artist-like head, very German, with strong under jaw, Roman nose, and keen gray eye full of unquenched fire, a delicate ear, half hid under the tight black cap; every vein and wrinkle is given, yet with a freedom and ease that admit of nothing painful or disagreeable.”

Albrecht or Albert Dürer, born in 1471, was the son of a goldsmith of Nuremberg, in whose large family of nineteen children Albrecht appears as the only genius. Apprenticed at first to his father's trade, the bent of his genius was so decided that he was transferred to the tuition of Michael Wohlgemuth, and, after three years' study, started out in 1490 upon the delightful Wanderjahre, or wandering years of travel, so congenial to every young German heart. No account of these years can be discovered, but they were doubtless far more of an education than the limited influences of a Nuremberg studio. Returning in 1494, he married in a few

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months the pretty but shrewish and miserly Agnes Frey, who proved a Northern Xantippe, and embittered all his days with her temper and her tongue. The match was made by the respective fathers, but speaks little for the sagacity of the artist's family. Dürer was eminently uncomfortable during his wedded life, and certainly not from his own faults, for all contemporaries grow eloquent in praise of his virtues. He was, we are told, a man of stately figure and gentle bearing, of melodious voice, dignified address, and cordial benignity. Yet his wife never appreciated the matrimonial prize which had fallen to her share, even though he paid her the compliment of occasionally painting her face in his pictures, and left her at his death a sum of several thousand florins.

For ten years after his marriage, Dürer remained at Nuremberg, developing with peculiar originality the qualities which make him the representative German painter. Nothing in his surroundings was calculated to kindle the fire of genius. It was fed from his own spirit, and burned with steady yet increasing brightness. His earliest known works are the portraits of himself and his father, in the Uffizi, Florence, and also at Munich. These were painted between 1497 and 1500. His own likeness is very interesting. He looks like a Christian knight as he stands, in half-length, at a window, in a pointed cap and brown mantle, his hair falling in long ringlets around a grave and noble face. A few other portraits were, soon after, executed, marked either with his name or the monogram of a small D in a large A; as well as a series of remarkable woodcuts of the Apocalypse; but his labors were happily interrupted by a journey to the north of Italy in 1505, where, judging from his letters, he must have

found the most unclouded enjoyment, heightened by warm appreciation and friendship. The visit of Albrecht Dürer to the Venetian studio of Gian Bellini is a subject picturesquely rendered by artists of more modern date. The charm of his person as well as of his talents strongly attracted the susceptible Italians, and their admiration of his engravings and pictures was all the more grateful to him because contrasted with the apathy or measured praise of his fellow-citizens. He writes to Pirkheimer: "Here I am a gentleman, while at home I am only a parasite. Oh, how I shall freeze after this sunshine!" But the friendships then formed continued a source of pleasure to the close of his life. The painters of Venice always held him in remembrance, and even Raphael afterward exchanged portraits and drawings with him in token of his regard.

Yet the influences of Italian art, deeply as they must have stirred a temperament like Dürer's, led him to no imitation of a foreign style. To the classic school he never showed the least inclination. Even his pictures now in Italy, most of which were painted during his residence in Venice, or a year or two afterward, are full of strong individuality. Indeed, the "Christ among the Doctors," in the Barberini Palace, Rome, is disagreeably German, with its realistic, repulsive Pharisees and full-faced Saviour whose eyes look out from a true Teutonic profusion of hair. He is said to have executed it in five days. The "Adoration of the Magi,” in the tribune of the Uffizi, Florence, is much more pleasing, brilliant in color, and carefully finished. The picture of the "Feast of Roses," hanging in the monastery of Strahof, Prague, was painted by him in Venice at this time, at the