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YALE • UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Bought with the income
of the
ANN S. FARNAM FUND

ALTDORFER BY T. STURGE MOORE : NUMBER
THREE OF THE ARTIST'S LIBRARY EDITED
BY LAURENCE BINYON AND PUBLISHED
AT THE SIGN OF THE UNICORN LONDON

ALTDORFER

*
,<*>

BY T.° STURGE MOORE

LONDON MDCCCC
AT THE SIGN OF THE UNICORN

EDINBURCH : PRINTED DY MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED

PREFACE
This little book has been delayed by the attempt to make the
illustrations as representative as possible. In the meantime Dr.
Schmidt has published a photograph in the Munich Handzeich-
nungen Alter Meister of both surfaces of a wood block on which
is a design by Altdorfer partly cut, the reverse being a few slight
sketches. Examination of this photograph strengthens my
opinion that Mr. C. S. Ricketts is justified in considering
Altdorfer as his own interpreter on the wood block ; nevertheless
it can hardly be held to furnish an absolute proof that he was so.
The illustrations, seven at least of which now appear for
the first time, give, I believe, a far more adequate view of
Altdorfer's work than has hitherto ever been presented to the
public ; and when the volume of the proposed series entitled
Little Engravings, which is to contain the whole of his work on
wood, is added, as the Unicorn Press intends it soon shall be,
every artist will have to hand ample material for a profitable
study of our artist.
I have now only to express my thanks to Mr. Campbell
Dodgson of the British Museum for generously laying the stores
of his erudition on this and similar subjects at my disposal, and,
with Mr. L. Binyon, supplying my deficiency in German. I
must also thank Dr. Lippmann of Berlin, the Ritter von Lanna
of Prague, Dr. Dornhoffer of the Imperial Library, and Director
Joseph Schonbrunner of the Albertina at Vienna, Pater Czerny
of St. Florian, Dr. Boll of the Munich Library, and many others,
for the kindness with which they furthered me towards the attain
ment of the object of my travel, in the various lands through which
the pictures or drawings of Altdorfer led me. The Directors of
the Galleries at Bremen and at Sigmaringen have also kindly
helped in the photographing of pictures under their charge.
The biographical part of the book owes much to the work of
Dr. Friedlander (1891), and to the very full article by Dr.
Schmidt in Meyer's Kiinstler- Lexicon.
T. Sturge Moore.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
A. PICTURES AND DRAWINGS.
i. Pyramus Dead; a drawing in the Berlin Print Room.
2. The Holy Family at the Fountain ; Berlin Gallery.
3. The Birth of the Virgin ; Augsburg Gallery.
4. Susanna at the Bath ; Munich Gallery.
5. The Battle of Arbela ; Munich Gallery.
6. The Satyr Family ; Berlin Gallery.
7. The Nativity ; Vienna Gallery.
8. The Sacrifice of Abraham ; a drawing in the Albertina, Vienna.
9. Departure of Quirinus ; Siena Gallery.
10. St. George ; Munich Gallery.
n. The Agony in the Garden ; a drawing in the Berlin Print Room.
12. The Adoration of the Magi ; Sigmaringen Gallery.
13. Martyrdom of Quirinus ; Siena Gallery.
14. The Adoration of the Magi ; a drawing in the Berlin Print Room.
15. Poverty and Riches ; Berlin Gallery.
16. Madonna and Child ; Munich Gallery.
17. The Nativity; Bremen Gallery.
B. ENGRAVINGS ON COPPER.
18. The Madonna with the Cradle; St. Christopher.
19. The Death of Dido; The Centaur; The Virgin in the Synagogue.
20. The Crucifixion.
C. WOODCUTS.
21. Four subjects from the Passion.
22. Four subjects from the Passion.
23. The Return of the Spies.
24. The Adoration of the Shepherds.
25. St. Christopher.
The photographs for Nos. 4, 5, 10, and 16 were supplied by Messrs. Bruckmann,
those for Nos. 2 and 6 by Mr. F. Hanfstaengl, those for Nos. 9 and 13 by
Signor Lombardi of Siena; those for Nos. 1, 11, and 14 were specially made by the
Imperial Press, Berlin; and those for Nos. 7 and 8 by Messrs. Angerer and Goschl
of Vienna.

INTRODUCTION I
What is the vital question before a picture — who painted it,
when and where it was painted, how it was painted ; or, why it
was painted, what it does for us, how it does this ? For my
own part, I confess that the first three questions seem of minor
importance. Doubtless the best pictures were all painted by the
best artists. It is no great matter what names they bore, when
and how they lived, where and with whom. So we but know
great pictures, we cannot fail to know great artists in a direct
and satisfying manner ; not, indeed, face to face, but spirit to
spirit. What are the master motives that should govern the painting
of pictures ? Some cry, a desire to imitate nature — to deceive the
eye, — a sad avowal. "We're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times,"
as Browning makes Fra Lippo Lippi say ; but can it be a rational
end to love things unworthy of our love, or can all things really
deserve love ? Common sense will not, I fancy, be easily convinced
of either of these propositions. Meanwhile others cry, a desire to
please must be the master motive. This seems more plausible
and is certainly more common ; but we find a great modern artist
quoting from Epictetus with approval : "If thou seekest to please,
behold, thou art straightway fallen ! " and I also must side with
Epictetus and not with Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and his many
friends. Other some there are who cry, the desire to improve
7

others and one's-self. Now, although Ruskin has been much decried,
this does appear a worthy motive ; the improvement is so obviously
needed. Yet unfortunately there are a multitude of ways in which
we could bear improving, and apparently little reason for preference
of betterment by means of art. Have the great artists been those
who most strenuously strove to improve others or even themselves ?
Have they not rather shown a tendency to be contented by
advancing art ? Lastly, what improvement is it that does result
from art ? These questions, except the last, leave me utterly in
the lurch ; but for that last I find an answer at the tip of my
tongue : Beauty improves by educing elevation, delicacy, and
refinement, and it also exhilarates; and in Greece, and even
once or twice since, you might have found whole companies
that would have stared at you, if you had suggested that art
had any other business than the discovery and revelation of the
beautiful. And now can we not reform this demand, that art should seek
to improve, by saying, that art seeks to reveal beauty, and that
contemplation of beauty exhilarates, refines, and elevates ? Reveal
beauty! that, then, is for the artist the sovereign command.
Contemplate beauty ! obedience to that is for all men a prime
assistance towards exhilaration, refinement, elevation ; and what

do we more need ?

II

"The Battle of Arbela," by Altdorfer, "so captivated
Napoleon, that it was carried off and hung in his bathroom at
St. Cloud." This is testimony indeed to the power of painting!
But some will carp that they do not judge the mind of
Napoleon to have been distinguished for delicacy, refinement, or
elevation ; and though I would not take the judgment of such
charitable souls for more than it is worth, yet perhaps one may
admit that Napoleon was more noteworthy for the exhilaration
that overflowed from him and which may still be received from
the records of his life, than for delicacy, refinement, or eleva
tion. "The eye loses itself in a wilderness of landscape, valleys,
plains, mountains, capes, and promontories, azure in the distance,
with the sea beyond them and islands beyond that again, still
8

extending and expanding as if we gazed with Satan from the top
of Niphates." This description is from the pen of Lord Lindsay :
and I think it will not be denied that for him the picture had
evoked elevated - recollections ; and perhaps even our charitable
friends will not refuse some elevation to Napoleon akin to that in
which Milton's conception of Satan may be said to be lofty. The
man did tower ; and this towering, exhilarating man was captivated
by a picture : the subject of the picture helps to explain why.
Here is Alexander in golden mail with all the chivalry of Macedon
pricking closely behind, their lances in rest. Here is Darius
turning to observe them from his massy car that rolls too slowly
for escape ; his charioteer lies dead across the splash-board at his
feet ; but from under the hoofs of his great foe's charger blood
spurts up, while his lance strikes across a space of gloom wherein,
if the eye searches, it discovers bodies of men and horses cumber
ing the ground. Farther off there are fortresses, ballistas, engines,
towns, wharves, and ships, to convey yet more of alertness, effort,
hazard, and purpose huge. And all is painted with the utmost
delicacy of the camel-hair pencil, as though an insect had done it.
A whole-hearted faith in the magnanimous splendour of the
incident has harmonised the vast motives of landscape and war at
their richest, and captivates the attention. Like the sudden sense
of isolation and stillness, almost of silence, that may be borne in
upon one who is in the heart of some surging uproar, so is the
presence of beauty felt amid the overcharged excitement of this
picture, where cloud and mountain, light and darkness, sea and
land join in chorus. And this beauty, this stillness, this isolation
is not the tragic crown of a great soul's effort, of dripping thorns
and radiant suffering, it is a romantic, dreamlike charm unstraitened
by reality. This heaven of romance is perhaps oftener visited by
the man of the world, and certainly of easier access, than the high
heaven of aspiration and fortitude. Here the soul of Napoleon
may well have entered to repose and recreate, and to enter here
might be a benefit even for those who look and strive for
better. Gustave Flaubert in one of his letters tells us that a man
servant of his who took snuff habitually murmured, as though to
excuse himself, " Napoteon prisait" ("Napoleon took a pinch"); and
he adds that, in effect, this common habit of theirs did establish a
bond between them, which, without much degrading the great man,
9

greatly raised the rascal in his own esteem. To find ourselves
admiring what .so living and effective a' man had admired, would
be pleasant to many of us who might not care to contract all his
minor habits. And to know that he was charmed by what we are
invited to study may, and I think rightly should, lend us some
additional eagerness and curiosity.

io

• ALTDORFER'S LIFE
When we ask where and how our artist lived, we are rewarded
by few facts and many uncertainties. The place and date of his
birth remain doubtful. In 1505 he was registered a burgher of
Ratisbon, being described as " painter of Amberg, twenty-five
years of age." His father may have been an Ulrich Altdorfer
registered burgher in 1478 ; who may afterwards have removed to
Amberg, in which case Albrecht could either have been born before
his removal or after it.
An engraving (Bartsch VI. p. 416, No. 1), dated 1506, is by a
brother Erhard, and is very like Albrecht's work of the same
period ; both may therefore have been 'prentices to their father,
and both were already capable craftsmen. The manner in which
their work is executed has been supposed to be developed from the
Ratisbon illuminators of that date ; and certain analogies must be
admitted : however, it is a strikingly bold and advanced develop
ment by the year 1506 ; and as no links are extant, we may
ascribe the honour of the progress to the problematic Ulrich or to
the young men, his sons, or to Albrecht alone, whose after achieve
ments yield some real purchase for thus prophesying backwards.
Erhard became court painter to Duke Henry of Mecklenburg,
and several books published at Lubeck and Rostock contain
woodcuts by him : other plates and cuts exist ; but, separated
from his brother, his work falls away to mediocrity.
In 1509 the Council of Ratisbon contributed ten gulden towards
a picture by Albrecht for the choir of St. Peter's. In 15 13 he
bought a house with tower and courtyard in the Obere Bach Gasse,
hard by the Austin Friary ; this house still stands, though con
siderably modified. A second house in the Spiegelgasse was
11

bought in 1518, but he retained it only four years. In 1532 a
third house was bought. This house has been less modified than
that in the Obere Bach Gasse, and now bears an inscription:
"Wohn und Sterbehaus des Malers und Baumeisters Albrecht
Altdorfer geb. 1488, gestorben 1538." This house wherein he
dwelt and died, No. A 169 Weitolz Strasse, is in comparison with
Durer's house what Ratisbon is to Nuremberg— more homely,
less ornamented, and not so lofty. And " Little Albrecht's " work
stands in something of the same relation to his great namesake's :
nor can one help concluding, from the magnificence of Durer's
physical presence, that a like difference had held in regard to their
persons. Yet as the smaller older city with its long bridge and
lake - like affluence of waters where Danube and Regen meet,
possesses a repose and charm all its own, so it is to Altdorfer
we must turn for a sweetness of fancy, a homely pathos and
romantic poetry of conception, which Dtirer himself fails to yield.
Collector of goblets curiously chased or of fantastic forms, as
we know him to have been, he must be regarded as "a rich
man furnished with ability, living peaceably in his habitation";
industrious and of a consummate patience his work bespeaks him ;
and when we add to this his being fountain-head of a numerous
school of artists, his having performed the functions of Baumeister
and Councillor apparently to satisfaction ("very busy" in 1528,
having been officially appointed to compose quarrels), and again
find him studying Italian engravings and nielli, or in his will
asseverating that, as he had embraced the Reformed faith, he neither
"desired nor permitted" masses to be said for his soul, but instead
bequeathed for the benefit of the needy poor in the public almshouse
a goblet, "that one with the little foreign head," which had been his
wedding gift to his wife — when we reflect on all this, shall we not
conclude him to have been both of a capable and magnanimous
nature ? While a further study of his works will bring us to
acknowledge, I believe, that his was a spirit winsome, delicate,
and cordial beyond that of any other artist of his time or country.
All sunshine it would be natural to picture that man's life
who so painted, did we not know it to have been passed in
troublous and cruel times. Not only threatenings of Turkish
invasion but civil conflicts were in the air. Luther, the Peasants'
War, the League, Calvin, — heavy muttering thunderclouds
beyond the horizon ! He himself as Councillor signed a decree

12

for the expulsion of the Jews, whose synagogue had been burned
by the fury of a mob, declaring that this severity was regarded
as a just judgment of God. Nor did he scruple to take from
their burial-ground a quantity of the gravestones for the pave
ment of his house. Such times, indeed, would of necessity be
a perilous snare even for a soul gifted with rare delicacy ; however,
Altdorfer made two etchings of this synagogue before its destruc
tion, and has introduced it as a background more than once ;
which may perhaps indicate a certain compunction, at least, for
the vandalism of the deed.
Michael Ostendorfer, one of the school, cut a large wood
block representing a temporary wooden church, which was erected
on the site of the synagogue, that a preliminary pilgrimage
might be organised with a view to providing funds for a new
church to the Beautiful Mary. It shows us a large space in front
of this timber building : in the midst is a gaudy statue of the
Virgin set up on a pillar, around whose base seven or eight persons
of both sexes, whom one might suppose from their attitudes to
be drunk, are seen writhing as the little candles stuck on nails
half-way up the pillar writhe in the sunlight.
The porch behind is covered with a multitude of offerings,
hanks of rope, ladles, netting shuttles, cauldrons, sickles, pitch
forks, hay-rakes, the builder's square and plummet line, baskets,
jack-boots, etc. etc. ; both inside and outside they are hung all
about. A procession headed by huge cierges and a cardinal's
hat on a pole encircles the whole building; those in the procession
carry other offerings or else candles, two men are naked save
for scanty hair shirts. The cross keys of Regensburg wave over
it all, and on the margin of the copy, which is now at Coburg,
Diirer has written the following note and signed it: " 1523 this
Spectre contrary to Holy Scripture has set itself up at Regensburg
and has been dressed out by the Bishop. God help us that we
should not so dishonour His precious mother but (honour her?)
in Christ Jesus. Amen." Did Altdorfer view this with similar
feelings ? who can tell ? It may have been an object-lesson in
priestcraft for him, and so have helped to change his convictions.
As is also the case with Diirer, his art bears no witness to this
change, but remains throughout of the old religion. We must not
suppose his creed to have resembled that of Reformed Churches
since. The superior man of those days shaped his own faith, and
13

it became him as an easy robe, and had nothing of the pinch of
an uniform. Altdorfer and Diirer no doubt continued to ejaculate
prayers to the Virgin as they had learned to do when little
knaves ; just as in their work pictures of her occur and reoccur
quite naturally. The infection of hatred for the old faith, born
of sedition, raged first among mobs who had been exploited by
the Church, and it spread but slowly upward, impeded by family
ties and good-breeding, and was only fixed there by persecutions
on both sides. People in Altdorfer's position had not been con
vinced by an antagonist dogma, but freed politically and by means of
Reason, who refreshed them, and whose children they were for a time
more truly, perhaps, than ever before or than they have been since.
In treating sacred subjects, wherever a homely pathos does
not carry him right to the heart of the incident, as in the chief
scenes of his Fall and Redemption of Man, he lets his fancy play
over and about his theme, as in the picture of the birth of Mary
at Augsburg, where Anna has been installed in a cathedral,
and has her bed set up in the ambulatory, circling round the
pillars of which is a wreath of happy child-angels all holding
hands and dancing in the air ; three women attend to the needs
of the newly-born and her mother. Joachim, who has just been
out for provisions, returns in pilgrim's garb with a bundle slung
from his staff across one shoulder. Renan has suggested that
in the magnificat we have the first notes of the music to which
the great cathedrals rose, a thought which may help some to find
true propriety in this flight of Altdorfer's ; which is fanciful, but
with a fancy that brings the underlying sentiment suddenly to
the surface instead of elaborately cloaking it. In such a winsome
guise perchance the old Hebrew had heard wisdom proceed out of
the lips of a babe, when wise heads had been in a brown study to
no purpose ; for the quaint and dreamlike notion of a child made
them all at once aware of what was natural and right. Such
legends indeed natively belong to the people and should always
be clothed in their racy folk-fancies.
But to return to our arid facts : of the Christian name of
Altdorfer's wife, " Anna," we are informed from a deed of purchase
by which he bought the house in the Spiegelgasse ; she is also
mentioned in the like document concerning his first house,
so it has been supposed that she may have brought him
considerable means. 14

In 1526 he was elected to the Inner Council, and became one of
the city architects. He built the market Thurm, now vanished,
but which till recently held its place, the youngest of a company
of brother-towers that watch over Ratisbon, the eldest dating from
the time of the Romans. The Neue Kirke is supposed to have
been begun on his designs ; but probably, funds falling short, it
was modified, and can now scarcely be held to represent his
intentions. He added two bastions and other works to the walls
of the town, but these also have been swept away ; still standing,
however, is a public Meat and Slaughter House which he built.
In 1528 they wanted to make him " Cammerer " for the
quarter of St. Emmerams. Altdorfer made urgent entreaty to be
excused, on the ground that he had undertaken to finish a large
work (The Battle of Arbela) for Duke William of Bavaria, and had
promised to deliver the same in a short time. " Much against
their wills," the chronicler Gumpelzhaimer tells us, " they exempted
him from accepting the honourable position to which they had
appointed him."
On the 27th of July 1532 his wife died, and perhaps in order
to shun the emptiness of his home he then bought the house
in the Weitolz Strasse.
Mr. Bell Scott has supposed that he added to his numerous
avocations that of paper-miller, because of a water-mark discovered
in the paper of one of his prints, while other Ratisbon prints are
on imported paper, but it is only the duplication of the letter A in
the mark that has made him suppose it was milled at Ratisbon
and by Albrecht Altdorfer.
In 1534 he was made the Warden of the Austin Friary. In
1537 he bought a fourth house, outside the walls, with a large
garden and situated on a canal, to serve as a summer retreat. In
1538 he made his will; his principal heirs were Erhard and
two sisters, Magdalena and Aurelia, both married. Beside his
collection of silver goblets, the inventory mentions nineteen books,
some pictures, rings, weapons, chests, scales, coins, twenty Eimer
of Bavarian wine, and a horse with trappings.
There are two portraits : one asserts that it presents him to
our eyes, and it is open to us to suppose that the other may do so.
The first, a small engraving, at least a century later in date, not
only bears his name beneath, but copies his signature on the back
ground ; however, the style of dress and cut of beard and hair give
'15

it the lie by upwards of fifty years. There may have been none
the less some miniature or drawing after which it was made, by an
engraver whose hand was freer in dealing with history than with
his burin. Impressions may be seen in the Print Room at Paris
and in the Libraries at Munich and Vienna.
The second represents quite a different individual in authentic
costume, and is either the work of the painter himself or done in
his workshop. Here certainty ends ; for this goodly burgher of
rather a Jewish cast of features heads a procession invented, by
way of adulation, for Maximilian, which is painted on about four
hundred strips of parchment from two feet to a yard in length and
about a foot in breadth ; of these, one hundred and eighty-eight
are in the Imperial Library at Vienna, the rest are lost. The
derivation of this labour of loyalty from Altdorfer's workshop,
which has been made by Dr. Dornhoffer, and the attribution of
considerable portions to the very hand of that artist, cannot be
doubted. Many of the pictures carried on poles and representing
victories which never occurred, mingle motives of landscape and
seascape with the countless spears of plumed and gilded chivalry
in the same spirit and prodigality as The Battle of Arbela, and
being less laboured as a rule, yield a better insight into the
Turneresque audacity and deftness of handling which such
subjects could call forth from the enthusiasm of our artist. But
that we have here a portrait of Altdorfer is too doubtful a supposi
tion to draw from this, and the fact that the function of the worthy
and his companion at the head of the procession remains
unexplained, unless we explain it by supposing them severally to
be the artist and the author of the verbal description which also
still exists.
This procession, unfinished and so probably never presented, is
the chief evidence that remains of Altdorfer's dealings with the
Court and Emperor. There are, besides, the marginal drawings
in pink, violet, or green ink on ten out of thirty-five leaves of the
Emperor's Prayer-Book now at Besancon ; the major portion of the
book, on which Diirer and Cranach worked, is in the Library at
Munich ; but, with the exception of a few missing leaves, the rest is
at Besancon, and contains, besides those by Altdorfer, margins by
Baldung Griin, Hans Diirer, and Jorg Breu of Augsburg. For
his commerce with the highest dignitary of art there is only
Heller's statement, that at Nuremberg, the print-dealer Frauenholz's
16

collection, in 1822, contained a red chalk drawing of an old man
by Albrecht Diirer, bearing an inscription stating that it was pre
sented by him to Altdorfer at Ratisbon in 1509. He has copied
the lion out of Durer's St. Jerome into one of his margins for the
Prayer-Book. Other motives are taken from Burgkrnair and Hans
Diirer. It has been suggested, also, that a panel described by the
inventory as painted by Albrecht fhrer should be read Diirer.
Of course legend and tradition have had their way, and Diirer
has been honoured with the pupil who best could honour him,
yet though a small copy of a plate by Diirer, B. 24, is ascribed
to Altdorfer, their having been namesakes is the better basis for
the rumour.
In 1538 he not only made his will but finished a picture of
Christ taking leave of His mother. This work is now lost ; indeed,
of twenty- five pictures said to have been in his native city in 18 19,
only one of doubtful authenticity now remains. That this subject,
which is also that of one of the happiest woodcuts in The Fall
and Redemption of Man, should have been the last he treated,
may please those who hunger for symbolical significance in the
events that perplex us. Altdorfer could have been but little more
than fifty, and still enjoyed unimpaired powers.
On the 1 2th or 14th of February he died, and was laid beside
his wife in the Augustinian Church, which now serves as lumber-
shed to a barracks. Most of the inscribed flagstones have been
removed, but a few are leant against the south wall. A piece of
one was discovered when the church was dismantled, bearing the
words Albrecht Altdorffer Paum. . . . Soldiers tramp through to
their parade-ground on which the chancel gives, or a bevy of
noisy children wake up the echoes of the vaulted roof and enliven
dusty gloom, on which tall dirty windows look down, many of them
broken and in part boarded up. A desolate, desecrated place !
Almost as vacant as this shell of a church are the records of
that man's life before whose felicitous picture of Alexander the
Great the great Napoleon may on many a morning have stood
refreshed from his bath, naked as Achilles, and mused unconscious
in a return of boyish reverie, smiling at beauty, valour, and
magnificence because they pleased him, quit of the cost and care
as his olive Corsican limbs were quit of the stiff and gaudy
uniform — healthy and at ease.
B 17

TRADITION
Art historians are in the habit of speaking of " tradition." What
is meant by this word when used in reference to the history of
art ? I think that to answer this question will help to an under
standing of Altdorfer's relation to the art of Germany and the
world. At the outset art and craft are one and the same thing. The
work is so difficult to do, that nobody dreams but what it is to be
done as well as possible. Genius has been described as the
capacity for taking pains ; not a complete description, but true as
far as it goes, and in early epochs it thus, most probably, revealed
itself. The man that had imagined the thing to be done in its
perfection, so vividly that he loved, ensued it, and forgot it never ;
to him improvised tools and obdurate substances yielded at
last all they could possibly yield. There stood shield, helmet,
bowl, or flagon such as had never been seen before. How had
he done it ? Did he not smile as Diirer once smiled, presenting
to an admirer that ordinary camel-hair brush with which had been
painted such wonderful hair ? Yes ; but could he feel surely able
to do it again ? He must try : tremblingly he did try, and at last
knew how to do it by heart.
The boy that watched, breathed hard at his elbow, and stayed
away from play ; with what pains he would teach him if only he
might teach him all before death came !
Doubtless even these first love-chosen apprentices would not
learn all ; something was lost, something that gave a stamp to
the work, made it in a dim way different, personal, old-fashioned.
Yet the 'prentices did advance ; if not the first, his successor :
though always the man who made the stride left something
impressed on his work which was not carried on, but its place was
18

now left blank, now taken up by a new character, according as his
'prentice was craftsman or artist. Still, the main achievement was
not lost, for both alike learned the method by rote, treasured
their master's tools, made others as like them as they could, or
furtively tried to improve on them.
The effort and attention necessary that one may conform to
a not fully grasped method of employing difficult substances results
in an economy of energy which can spare little or nothing for
the realisation of caprices, and which, like duty become habit,
does not "feel the weight of chance desires." Yet it would be
a mistake to suppose that art traditions work directly to the
discovery of beauty. They do not. In proportion to the authority
they have acquired, they test the strength of conviction behind
every departure from routine, but every advance is such a departure.
At the same time traditions imply qualities of orderliness, clean
liness, definite purpose, and the absence of waste, which all enhance
the presence and splendour of beauty and help to make it effective.
Yet beauty, in art, is always the discovery or creation of an artist —
an artist whose integrity, however, has only tradition for defence
against the promptings to innovation that are born of caprice ;
though he may at times be rendered by the same tradition, in this
case a hindrance, unresponsive to such promptings when quickened
by the contemplation of beauty and free from mere wilfulness.
In early periods art is commissioned, responds to an exterior
demand ; therefore the craftsman can have no advantage over the
artist, but must remain always obviously his inferior. And yet well-
nigh from the commencement the penury of half-developed souls
must have created a demand for the makeshift — for a class of
articles designed to no more than barely serve their purpose. This
canker would grow up, the offspring of the spiritually poor who
were not poor in spirit — of the man who did inferior work
unabashed, and of the man who pretended, and hoped to buy off
the future.
Bad art as distinguished from merely inefficient art is the
result of a tacit compact between the artist and his public, a
compact degrading to both. In the same way good art presumes
on the existence of a demand for what is noble and faultless in
elevated souls. But the opposition of these two spirits of work
can never become acute while the tradition is still binding.
When tools have been rendered efficient and the shortest
19

and best method of subjugating the obdurate materials has been
so firmly grasped as to be an item not difficult for the born artist
to learn ; exhilarated by the ease of his power, this last triumphs,
revels, uses his skill as a poet uses language, breaks down all the
old restrictions, attempts the impossible well-nigh with success : so
easy is it for this Homer who really begins where his forerunner
left off; for this Titian who, still a youth, surpasses his aged and
laborious master. Besides the inheritance of an almost perfected
practice, he lives in an age that has woken up and come out of
doors, nay, has travelled farther than men had heretofore ; every
young man about him has received, in good time, more or less of
an effective secret from his father or his father's friend. Things
no one had dreamed of appear all at a rush within reach. The
epoch expects Shakespeare, and is not surprised at his success.
In Greece and in the Italy of the Renaissance many isolated
traditions arrived at ripeness all in a heat. Changed conditions
enable them to communicate with a fulness and ease till then out
of the question, and what do we see — the work of Phidias, the work
of Titian ! This new lord of the air has not added to the trade
secrets ; he has been too much in advance to teach, too occupied
with discovery and with novelty. He has done what only he
could do — what only such as he are right to attempt ; he has very
likely done more than can be done soundly — more than even he
was right to attempt. Who is to judge him ? who is to follow ?
such another man will not occur for generations ! All is at sixes
and sevens ! The tradition is lost !
Here comes a gifted man having half learned a method gleaned
between whiles in his haste to produce — gleaned from pupils of
that great master who were chosen not because they could, but
because they would, and paid — gleaned hypothetically from those
glorious, intoxicating masterpieces themselves. Such an one
makes his pictures speak, they are poems ; but not with the
grand assurance and serenity of him who had inherited the
tradition. Anon there comes a conscientious, diligent man who
well-nigh refinds the tradition with a lifetime of pains, but who
has nothing to say and no one to say it to, that can for a moment
be compared to the subject-matter and audience of the grand
master, who lived in that stirring, not this somnolent age.
So art becomes the affair of the unsupported, isolated individual
who speaks to a sect, a clique ; or if, by reason of strength, to the
20

, world, speaks in a half-learned language, on subjects of which the
I real nature has been disguised by inferior attempts and received
ideas, as Goethe complained he had to : till, alas ! he must correct
and withstand as well as create.
Then tradition is that which keeps in mind the best and
most direct method of employing the means at hand. The means,
the materials, the men, vary with the conditions ; but a best and
most direct method there must always be, either known or to be
found. This best way, when it has been laboriously found by
experience, is endangered and lost by new aims, not native to the
conditions, being entertained, and by such special endowments
being relied on, through the example of some exceptional man,
that they cannot recur with sufficient frequency to prevent a
practice based on the presumption of their presence from falling
into decay and oblivion.
Where then is Altdorfer's place in regard to this sequence ?
was he born in the spring, summer, autmn, or winter of an art
tradition ? Germany at the close of the fifteenth century presented
a closer analogy than it had ever done before, or has done since,
to the grand art periods of Greece and Italy. Many traditions
were approaching ripeness in different centres. Altdorfer is the
great artist of one of these. At Ratisbon none before him, none
after him, can be called his rivals. Yet he did not break down
the tradition by the force of a stupendous personality, he was not
a Michael Angelo. No, he appears, like a happy child that has
climbed a rock, smiling with success yet trembling ; for a moment
he yearns towards display, but not as Diirer did, to yield : though
he grew sufficiently at ease, he remained too modest, and died, it
seems, unspoiled.

21

GERMAN TRADITION
Every art tradition has been nursed by the traditions of some
race, traditions whose effectiveness consists in that they foster
its characteristic virtues.
In modern times the atmosphere maintained by racial traditions
has become, as a rule, almost entirely engrossed by the mere
machinery of society. The lungs that are wholly given only to
sustain the actual state of things have become altogether too
numerous. The world of men was never before upheld at such a
vast expense of energy — never before has mere existence been so
guarded, so respected and cherished by mankind. Not the fulness
of life but the bare fact of it is regarded with a well-nigh super
stitious reverence. That noble point of view, which estimates
life as worth little in comparison with the virtues it may be
expended on, is always being overshadowed not only by the
greed of the materialist but by the fondness of socialism and
philanthropy. While no one asks for beauty none will be found, but to those
who knock with importunity, the gate of her garden never remains
fast closed. Effort should be led aside from the mere mill-work of
material production and directed towards the true goal of humanity,
virtue, and beauty. It is because the traditions of life in early
ages did this that there then were living art traditions and not
merely isolated artists.
Among those who desire aesthetic advance, the arch enemy
of progress is the pretension that Beauty has been found in
this or that popular resort, where people plume themselves
on being her friends, or her guests, who have never even
dreamed of air so bracing as is that which she must breathe
or languish.

Great need then is ours to plunge back into the past, and
refresh ourselves with contemplation of conditions that allowed
art a national or at least urban importance.
At Ratisbon, against the north-east corner of the north transept
of the old church, stands the famous Esel Tower, which is no
staircase, but wherein a road winds slowly to the level of the
roof; such was the characteristic expedient of the early builders
for getting their material up to the desired height — very
circuitous, very ponderous, but very sure! It was a multitude
of asses that did this work ; almost in the dark, in loose, damp
earth, their trains trudged painfully up or trotted and stumbled
down — a symbol, we may please ourselves with fancying, of that
old German empire which, though apparently the most incoherent
of feudal systems, yet got to the top in the days of Maximilian,
when it enacted a law which has proved to be the basis of the law
of nations, and moulds the world to-day, and which then enabled
it to become the last European empire save that short summer
of Napoleon's glory.
It was not the nobles or the Church which effected this, it was
the cities, and they did it in spite of the nobles and the Church, as
they also effected their more boasted Reformation.
" From the time that Henry the Fifth admitted their artisans to
the privileges of free burghers, they became more and more
prosperous ; while the steadiness and frugality of the German
character compensated for some disadvantages arising out of their
inland situation." So says Hallam : and let us realise what it
meant to be lost in the central laps of a mighty land. Our
English stock, as islanders, have become the men of accident, of a
crisis. We depend on chance, and no other race is perhaps so to
be relied on to take advantage of the turn of the tide, or of flotsam,
jetsam, and lag end after a storm. We boast that we are lords of
the sea, but we have rather been its scholars, and as such almost
bound to neglect any elaborate foresight, but, on the other hand,
to be ready for emergency. Our representative men have hung
on happy moments ; they have not, in general, laboriously learned
to achieve, but been equipped with ability to make the most of
what turned up.
"We know how long the outlaws of Sherwood lived in
tradition — men who, like some of their betters, have been
23

permitted to redeem by a few acts of generosity the just
ignominy of extensive crimes. These, indeed, were the heroes
of vulgar applause; but when such a judge as Sir John
Fortescue could exult that more Englishmen were hanged for
robbery in one year than French in seven, and that ' if an
Englishman be poor, and see another having riches which
may be taken from him by might, he will not spare to do so,'
it may be perceived how thoroughly these sentiments had per
vaded the public mind."
It should perchance nettle us, when we notice how this view of
what were our leading sentiments in 1463 agrees with that current
on the Continent of what they still are as a nation if no longer as
individuals. Not only the foreign journals but calmer judges
contrast our philanthropy, always most to tfcie fore where least
called for and farthest from home, with our commercial close-
fistedness and imperial greed. However, the words quoted above
are the mature sentence of an unimpeachable English gentleman,
a severer judge than Sir John Fortescue, but one who, we may
hope, is also representative of something extant in the national
character. A faith in the ordeal of strength, distrust of elaborate
precaution, the union of a lion-like indolence with a rapidly
calculated and successful daring, are just the characters to look for
in men who have indeed had the winds and waves, with their long
sleeps and reckless violence, for nursing mothers and nursing
fathers. Our art astonishes, by the suddenness of its developments and
the desultoriness and lack of method with which it has been in
general pursued. We have had our Elizabethan drama, and minor
burst of foison, but what we have had always with us is singularly
aimless and somnolent.
But to an inland continental people nothing comes ; what they
want, they must go and fetch. They cannot indolently ride across
the waves ; and if they may, at times, glide down some majestic
river, all the labour of" tow-path and lock must be resorted to in
order to reascend, not to mention mail and blackmail by the way.
It is such things that form the temper of a race ; that school
foresight, industry, and application.
The constitution of the imperial cities or those of the Hanseatic
League is evolved as by the science of bees. It is the workers
24

who really govern ; and they have constantly to kill off the
drones and repair loss from foreign pillage ; but, with a mar
vellous fidelity to instinct, they succeed. There is not the
invigorating response to inspiring ideas that makes the glory of
French history ; there is not the adventurous assumption of
responsibility, and reliance on the gifts of nature and fortune, that
distinguishes English achievements : they seem to coagulate ;
and if their work is broken up or falls in, they begin again with
a wonderful patience, but apparently born more of instinct than
of hope. They conceive perfection, it would seem, first as sound
units; the harmony of the whole can wait; and this conception
belongs to the unit, and preserves the whole from corruption
and overweening, however incoherent it remain. Their history
has the pathos of those long trains of asses winding up and
down that dark tower, with its infrequent windows and its too
short rests at the top, where one is overtired for enjoyment of the
prospect. But let us return to our historian. " Spire, Nuremberg, Ratisbon,
and Augsburg were not, indeed, like the rich • markets of London
and Bruges, nor could their burghers rival the princely merchants
of Italy ; but they enjoyed the blessings of competence diffused
over a large class of industrious freemen, and in the fifteenth
century one of the politest of Italians could extol their splendid
and well-furnished dwellings, their rich apparel, their easy affluent
mode of living, the security of their rights and just equality of their
laws." And we learn from a footnote that this polite Italian was
^Enias Sylvius, who in his treatise — De Moribus Germanorum —
declared that the kings of Scotland would rejoice to be so well
lodged as the second-class citizens at Nuremberg. Better
furnished ! the Museums of Munich and Nuremberg attest it.
" Skipton Castle, the great honour of the Earls of Cumberland,
and among the most splendid mansions of the north," had only
seven or eight beds in 1572 ; no chairs, looking-glasses, or carpets :
but Altdorfer thirty years earlier had all he needed of these and a
house in the country to boot.
The houses of Nuremberg and Ratisbon tell their own tale.
The richer their inhabitants the taller they grew, and many seem
even to have swollen in their upper storeys. Under the immense
sloping roof was the storeroom or warehouse, in the chambers
beneath lived the family, the counting-houses and workshops came
25

next, and- last the retail shop, coach-house, or stable, giving on to
the street. Immediately beneath the gable protrudes a crane,
often a fixture, with its own little pent-house reaching on struts
half across the street, to protect the pulley wheel, over which
there still hangs, in many cases, rope's end and iron hook. The
whole front of a flour or forage merchant's would be whitened or
bearded by the constant hoisting and lowering of sacks or trusses.
On a street disturbance the upper storeys could be shut off from
the more public offices below, and safest of all would be the hoard
under the tall roof.,
A small wooden skeleton model of such a house may very
possibly have been constructed by Altdorfer on his way to become
architect ; all who were registered master builders had first to
submit such a model to the Guild, and a collection of them is still
on view in the Rath-house, though it includes none attributed to
him. It was this burgher affluence that commissioned and inspired
the art which, at Ratisbon, culminates in the work of the "Little
Albrecht," as the French have styled him by contrast with the
great Diirer. Every such local German school in truth resembled
a caddis-worm, building its house, choosing the little bright stones
in the sand, or catching a stray shred of silk or wool borne past
by the stream. So we may picture it to have worked — very
industrious, very homely, very snug — always in the main bent on
shielding its too soft body, but often chuckling to think how fine,
how enviable a house it had made. And then follows the pathos
of the result. A May-fly, that lives but a day, falls and is no more.
A few works of the great lonely Diirer tower up toward the sun
as on dragon wings, and Holbein seems to pause and sail in the
warmth and light; there is, beside, the happy shimmering innocence
of Altdorfer, and the gnat-like dance of a lewd and elegant
Cranach, but that is all. Thus, too, it fared with German poetry, a
great lonely Goethe, a Schiller, a Heine, and a crowd of May-flies.
The integrity of the race endures, and still lends aspirants the
fostering strength of its virtues, prudence, industry, and application;
but fortune has been blind to their great deserving ; the graces that
are taught by success, the felicities of genius, of these they have
been stinted indeed. Yet are they not on the eve of acquiring
them ? Their newly-won coherence is becoming stable ; and if
the contagion of foreign ideals, which they can never make their

own, is stayed, if they trust in their own vision, and believe that
beauty, not force nor knowledge, still less display or the desire to
astonish, is the proper aim of art, what artists may they not make !
Then will they seek Altdorfer and learn of his happy spirit to
abandon theory and follow loveliness.

27

ALTDORFER'S ART
What objects served as models for this art? Architecture,
gardens, bonny children, fine clothes and goldsmiths' work — as
in Italy, as in Flanders, so in Germany, these were the chief
plastic motives of the painting that culminated in the glories of
the Renaissance. Landscape and the life of country folk were
added as proficiency was approached. Religion furnished the
subject-matter, classical mythology supplying her part as time
went on.
Architecture — the splendid apogee of this was over before
those conditions obtained which created the art of which we
speak ; at least this was so north of the Alps, where, already
softened by time, and shut back into an age of gold by newer, less
successful, buildings, the Gothic masterpieces remained the most
appropriate of backgrounds for every really graceful or elevated
imagination. Gothic had a tendency always to run up into an
ecstasy of aspiration, becoming unreal and over slender, over
rich, in the degeneracy with which it everywhere sickened when
once the axe had been laid to the root by the English wars in
France. On German soil a pure and sound Gothic had never existed ;
but for this reason the separation between the best and what
followed is less marked. Altdorfer was an architect, and a
fondness for the backgrounds which architecture supplied is
characteristic of him ; while the German tendency to over-dream
in architecture, which had existed even in the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries, is peculiarly his. Gothic melts with him into
newer styles, and these again into styles that are pure fantasies.
He plays with it. Van Eyck feels the authority of aisles and

choirs, even though he knew them only in overwrought Flemish
examples. Diirer reports gravely what he saw, and has no fond
ness for the pointed, but rather is haunted by the round arches and
less imaginative if more reasoned architecture he had seen in Italy.
Holbein is only at home in Renaissance buildings. Altdorfer,
who lived close to one of the purest of German churches, loves it ;
but as an amateur who brings some foreign vase into his own world,
setting it beside other treasures, half puzzled, half amused by the
contrasts or affinities revealed.
Gardens are no more for him the prim plots and walks of the
early painters : he loves that the wilderness be admitted, and
encircles with weeds the highly-groomed flowers of horticulture,
and makes the elegant exotic rear its head from among the
grasses of the fields.
Children are treasure-trove, and more often than not have
cherub wings in the works of this apparently childless husband ;
they are happy and busy, not merely quaint, stolid, or occupied, like
those of Diirer. Angels had always been less solemn north of the
Alps, more fairy-like, or even good-humouredly impish ; popular
imagination had given them first rainbow-hued wings, then every
kind of elaborate musical instrument, and at last, loving to consider
them as ministers, it represents them performing offices which
would have been below the dignity of Italian angels ; as in
Durer's early picture at Dresden, where the cherubs sweep the
floor and water it, and show themselves the most willing little
menials. Since grown-up people, or even grown girls, are less
likely to do such things gracefully, with a spontaneous freedom
from every hint of the mere performance of duty, it is an exquisite
justness that lights in the end on little children, for whom the
whole business is really play. And this tendency perhaps finds in
Altdorfer its most adequate expression. There is a ladder in the
Nativity at Bremen up which and along a rafter the little winged
knaves bustle to fetch hay and straw to make a bed for the Child
and its Mother. One has just fallen off, and lies, his useless wings
beneath him, on top of a bundle of straw, while another runs to
his aid with the most comical expression of grieved concern. The
resourceful invention of Sandro Botticelli has shown us baby fauns
and sylvans playing with the armour of sleeping Mars, but in the
,29

Museum of Nuremberg is a statuette cast in iron of a mailed
cherub which makes "arms ridiculous " in quite a new sense, with
an eloquence almost as winsome and irresistible as that " Consider
the lilies of the field," which smiled worldliness out of countenance
fifteen hundred years before. And it is this nai'vet^ of practical
wisdom, so different from the grave Florentine's most playful
conceit, which distinguishes German humour when it is felicitous,
such as that in which Altdorfer delighted, and such as Wagner
has rediscovered with the childlike gaiety of his wise Hans
Sachs. Fine clothes and goldsmiths' work — in treating these, he is in
the same way more at home than even artists like Van Eyck and
Diirer, more Venetian one might say, assorting the wardrobes of
queens and shepherdesses, of beggars and princes, and with an
invention worthy of Hans Andersen summing up the sense of this
contrast so often productive of beauty, by representing Poverty as
a beggar family swept along on the trains of a noble lord and
dame as on a magic carpet, to the contentment apparently both of
those who draw and those who are drawn.
If he dwells delightedly on gay brocades and feathered hats, it
is still more because of the confident, hopeful air of such things, or
because his dexterity with camel - hair and sable brushes made
them such refreshing exercises, than because he was a rich man
with probably some superstition in regard to expense.
His landscapes nearly always convey the luminous freshness
of a moist atmosphere. Though his dramatic intuition dictates
a sunset, he always imposes at the same time a sense of the advent
of night, and one feels that dew is forming in the shadows, every
green thing is breathing once more, and the suffering and pain
depicted will soon be relieved by tears and the invasion of
that great stillness. In The Battle of Arbela it is surely a
sunrise, not a sunset. The crescent moon is waning and fading
over Darius, but over Alexander the sun mounts marvellous with
glory. It is true that this happy optimism has deep resources ot
pathos, as in the Flagellation of The Fall and Redemption of Man,
or the copperplate of the Virgin peering through the temple cloisters
at her lost twelve-year-old disputing among the doctors. In this
3o

last, with a gesture that brings the heart into the mouth, he seems
to anticipate Rembrandt. And I have heard a distinguished
artist remark what a welcome treasure the woodcuts of The
Fall and Redemption of Man must have been to the giant
Dutchman, who has treated the same noble theme with more
dramatic power and intimate emotion than it has evoked in any
other soul.

3i

PAINTINGS
The paintings by Altdorfer divide themselves into two classes —
A class on which no pains has been spared, which are in their
own way as accomplished as the work of Van Eyck or Diirer ;
and a class of works which, however interesting the design may be,
are more or less coarsely and carelessly carried out.
It is also remarkable that, while the dewy aerial colour makes
one of the chief charms of the first class, heavy opaque or crudely
harsh tones are the rule and not the exception in the second.
As there is no division between the dates of the two classes, it
seems natural to conclude that the latter are commercial pictures,
executed in the workshop but not entirely by the hand of the
master ; and even where his hand must certainly be recognised, it
was no doubt a foregone conclusion that he would not expend
more than a certain measure of care over such works.
The first class is of course the most important, and I think fully
justifies the mention of Van Eyck's name. Not that I for a
moment want to pretend that Altdorfer can rank with this great
and august painter of little pictures ; there is a harmony, dignity,
and restraint in the works of the great Flemish artist which the
playful, whimsical Bavarian never rises to. But much has been
ignorantly written about Altdorfer's technical insufficiency, in
English as well as in other tongues. Now this technical inferiority
never existed save in the imaginations of the uninformed. A
scarcely more wonderful skill goes to the use of pigment in the
pictures of the great Van Eyck than is shown in such pictures
as Susanna at the Bath, the Flight into Egypt, or the little St.
George. There is even in the two latter instances an imagin
ative invention of handling to which Van Eyck presents no
parallel. Diirer certainly did not paint so well, had less intuition
32

in the treatment of pigment. If he rises far above Altdorfer, it is
by that high seriousness of conception and that impeccable mastery
of drawing wherein he has no rival, not in the handling of pigment
or the wedding of colours. No doubt the master of Ratisbon had
never studied the human form profoundly ; but then he never
treated it but as a secondary motive. And is not the great
Albrecht a child in the treatment of aerial colour and .perspective
compared with his little namesake ? Perhaps no gift of Altdorfer's
is so unique as Durer's control over his wrist, yet not only has he
first-rate gifts, but, he has a marvellous proficiency, and needs no
pity when compared with the little masters with whom he has
been ignorantly classed, and not one of whom can for a moment
hold a candle to his achievement.
One or two of his engravings show that he was not out of all
danger from the decadence in taste and power which holds them.
A hint of later unhappy developments of painting may be traced
perhaps in the " Wealth and Poverty," the latest in date of the
pictures remaining to us, which shows, besides a tendency, already
noticeable in the lace-like sky of the Susanna, to an over-elabora-
ion, a finicky delicacy ; besides this, it shows that the sense of
mass and proportion in the composition as a whole has loosened.
However, to mention this is probably to overstate its importance.
The " Wealth and Poverty " would most likely seem quite as
exceptional, could we recover other works of those last years, as
it now does.
His is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the third name in
German art ; and the distance between him and Cranach, not to
mention any lesser name, is more considerable than that which
separates him from Diirer and Holbein. For variety of gifts and
resource, he stands alone ; and when one considers the poetry with
which his works are instinct, it is not fanciful to style him the
Giorgione of the North, a Giorgione, alas ! little loved and nigh
forgotten, but whom, now that the carefulness of science has begun
to leaven the treatment of historical art criticism, his countrymen
commence to appreciate as with a balance, though their eyes and
hearts had failed to recognise and love.
A picture once in the Vienna Gallery, now said to be lost,
is described as a pure landscape. By an inferior hand a picture
which is a pure landscape hangs as pair to the little St. George at
Munich, which last itself consists almost entirely of the foliage of
c 33

trees. There is besides a moon-lit landscape behind the saintly
persons in one of the pictures at Siena. Diirer had made
studies in water-colours after nature, drawings of localities and^
buildings, and his etching of the Cannon is practically a landscape "
Nevertheless Altdorfer is originator, north of the Alps, of landscape
as a branch of painting, the rival of others. Backgrounds such
as that beneath The Coronation of the Virgin, or the wood in the
St. George, or the grey Danube broadly sweeping through the dark
wooden piers of a temporary bridge as in the other St. Quirinus
picture at Siena, or the same river rounding the hills in that at
Nuremberg, when the willow wood shudders at sundown, or the
dawn at peep behind the ruins and skeleton bushes of the
Nativity at Bremen ; such backgrounds are as novel, as genuine, ¦
as refreshing, as those divine two among the frescoes by Titian
at Padua. To take a short-lived effect of light, to treat water
because it was water, trees because they are trees, directly aiming
at their most individual beauties, this was to open new ground,
and this Altdorfer does. He does more ; for there are some
dozen landscapes etched in outline of great delicacy which show
a tendency to the conventional and balanced compositions that
have since lost all novelty, though here they are joined to a
curiosity and resource that can never age. The set at Vienna has
been coloured by hand — Dr. Dornhoffer would like to think by
the artist himself ; in any case, they are but little advanced by
it towards giving that satisfaction that we look for from his
works. Shallow water loiters under the brick arches that support a mill
or warehouse, and out of it frightened women lift the slender body
of the youthful St. Florian. A baby angel swims in the basin of
The Fountain at Berlin ; and one of two angels almost out of
their teens holds both hands under the spouts of that in the
engraving of the same name ; the holy travellers are forgotten in
silent joy to feel the cold water flow. Moss streams from ruins and
from the branches of trees whose gracious swaying makes beautiful
vast spaces of sky. His buildings, his fountains, though the most
treacherous ground for his imagination, are often retrieved by the
way they are knit up with out-of-doors or by homely figures
reclaimed for the realm of use and wont. Little more can be
attempted than to give some notion of the radical love of beauty
which is revealed by his choice of motives. The pictures must be
34

seen. The Susanna must be peered into, with its amazing
fore -ground, where monkshood, hollyhocks, poppy, buttercup,
cowslip, ragged - robbin, yellow snap - dragon, clover, violets,
forget-me-not, and bluebells spring up, together with the grass,
and its wonderful snail-shell, and, farther off, the little table with
a box and two dice on it.

35

DRAWINGS
In his drawings Altdorfer is probably most fortunate in his
medium, most alive to what it requires of him. He approaches
paper with reverence ; far from regarding it as so much space,
whereon to disgorge crude fancies or cruder observation, but as
a thing already endowed with fine qualities which should be
respected — and whence Beauty calls to him, as she is said to have
cried to Michael Angelo from her prison in the block. He must
liberate and enhance ; if there is creation, the paper, paint-brush,
subject dictated to him ; he was little more than their servant :
even his own hand taught him more than he could have divined.
Herein his are in striking contrast to Albert Durer's drawings
in the same mediums.
He tints his sheets amber, green, brown, pale and dull blue,
or grey. The line he employs is curved and rapid, though not
so curved as that of Diirer, and with a wilfulness very different
from his assured composure. Foliage is transformed : becomes
fan -like, seaweed - like, feathered, plumed, to respond to the
exigencies of the crisp, swift, tapered, or taloned stroke. Some
times a similar transformation overtakes drapery, at other times
the suppleness of the quill-point leads him into a loving finish,
that not even a sixteenth-century pinking of finery can over-weary.
In rapid sketches, roofs and walls take a mountain or wave-like
curve, and when he is at leisure pebble after pebble will be rounded
and perfected as though by the sedulous water's caress.
No. 83 in the Print Room at Berlin is a drawing on dull-
blue paper both in black and white line. It represents a forest.
At the foot of the larches lies a young man with all the appear
ance of wealth and fashion, — he is dead, his curly hair is straggled
on the moss, his upturned face is juvenile ; on the right hand is
36

a ruin with mouldering arches of stone leading inwards through
unfathomable gloom, over them the rapacious verdure has climbed
and towers aloft. Hither comes a bird, sings, and flits off once
more ; here is the dew exhaled, and the magical undertones of
the forest are prolonged through their eternal symphony, but
always the blood stiffens in the clothes it has sopped, and cold
takes possession of the body that was once Prince Pyramus, as
Altdorfer may well have intended that we should know.
No. 3 in the same collection, on umber paper, is also perfect.
It represents the Agony in the Garden. In the immediate fore
ground lie the sleeping apostles. Jesus kneels above them on
the right, and again on either side of the picture trees tower
up. In the middle distance is a cliff, on the brow of which
sits the angel holding the emptied cup, and with eyes riveted
by the gaze of Christ ; at the foot of the cliff and immediately
beneath the angel approaches the traitor with the high priest's
servants, unseen, unheard of Him they come to take, who gazes
constantly over their heads. The whole scene is bathed in a sad
dignity as by a hidden moon. These two drawings are not less
admirable as poetical inventions and for dramatic propriety than
they are for exquisite delicacy of workmanship.
There are at Berlin other drawings of great beauty — thirteen
in all. I might mention No. 113, an Adoration of the Magi, in
perfect preservation, which is, alas ! too rarely the case. The
workmanship is rather over-caligraphic, though the foreground —
pebbles, etc. — is worthy of notice for the way in which the treat
ment is adapted to the objects. No. 93, a hunting scene, in
which the horses recall Pisanello. And on rougher paper, a
landscape representing a water-mill shows an admirable variation
of treatment to meet new conditions.
In the Albertina at Vienna are eleven drawings ascribed to
him, but many of very doubtful attribution. No. 43, Vol. I. A. A.,
a Sacrifice of Abraham, is, however, first-rate, though somewhat
damaged ; the paper may have been cut down, as the drawing
appears to have continued beyond it.
At Munich there are three important drawings in the Print
Room, and one in the Library.
Brunswick has two, one a most interesting design representing
Curtius leaping into the abyss. The dark-olive paper seems to
suggest a night scene, as does also the empty street. The gulf
37

has opened at the foot of a ruined Gothic porch ; and, magnifi
cently plumed, the hero on horseback leaps into it. If conscious,
the poetry that insists on the loneliness which must be the real
condition of every heroic action, however crowded the actual
scene, is remarkable ; and can one doubt its being conscious, so
many unmistakable instances of real imagination as are found
in our artist's work?
A drawing in the possession of Ritter von Lanna, originally
from Dr. Lippmann's collection, dated 1509, the Judgment of
Paris ; rather rubbed, on red paper ; black lines faint, and
white blurred ; is a most important work. The head of Paris,
who lies in a trance, is turned away from the three goddesses,
while Hermes in the furred robe of a Faust or Paracelsus
stands over him. The three fair rivals, otherwise naked, wear
the grand feathered hats which are so dear to this artist,
and lend themselves so admirably to his workmanship, and
in the mid-distance on the right, with surely not an accidental
symbolism, a little figure crosses an arched wooden bridge :
the usual great feathered firs and larches wave their boughs
against the expanse of sky above, while, at the foot of an
elaborate monument which rises like a fountain in the centre
mid - distance, the Prince of Troy's charger attends ready to
bear him away to his fate.

38

ENGRAVINGS
In his engraved work, also, Altdorfer is truly original ; he is eminently
the scholar of burin and knife, and more concerned about what
should be done than what it was usual to do. There is no sign
of an effort to eclipse former achievements or to outdo others in
mastery, and so in a very definite sense he may be said to be more
convinced and more earnest than Diirer, whose stupendous manual
dexterity is apt to become tyrannical and fall into merely frigid
display. It is the presence of this earnestness and docility which
gives his work so original and spontaneous an air, and which has
led to the conviction that he engraved his Fall and Redemption
of Man himself, although there is no material evidence to prove
that this was the case ; and, considering the mastery of many
engravers of his school whom he might have employed, the
supposition is hardly to be called necessary, despite the intuitive
calculation on the knife's capacities which the design and
workmanship betray. Whether he did engrave them or not, they
are more truly wood engravings and less merely pen drav/ings
facsimiled than any others of his time or country, with the sole
exception of those by Wolf Huber, his most distinguished pupil,
who, it is certainly still less possible to doubt, was his own
interpreter. The wood engraving of the Return of the Spies (B : 42), I think
we shall not be wrong in describing as inspired by some plate
after or by Mantegna, and we ought in any case to add, most
happily inspired.
His work with the burin is experimental without being im
patient ; and the minuteness and delicacy of his technique are as
remarkable as in his best paintings. He seems to have above all
aimed at a sort of coloured glow. To the superlative qualities of
39

monumental build and august design which mark the chief master
pieces of Diirer, he can of course lay no claim, and perhaps it is
his highest praise to say, that only occasionally with the burin, and
never in work on the wood block, does Diirer surpass him in rich
ness of black and white effect.
No doubt the influence of Diirer is traceable through his work
in this medium, but the thing to be remarked is how slight the
traces are ! how unimportant ! The same may be said of several
adaptations that he, in common with other artists of the time,
has made from Italian nielli. In the case of Diirer it would be
wise to desire that Altdorfer should in some respects have been
more genuinely his imitator ; and yet how can we tell ? it might
have made him pompous and absurd, as was often the case with
Wordsworth imitating Milton.
It is among his works with the burin that are found the chief
evidences of his commerce with Italy — copies of figures from
Italian engravings very much reduced, and generally with a more
intimate charm added, and a composition humoured from bald and
rhetorical effect into some kinship with his own more snugly laid-
out little plates.
Often it is the treatment of the nude that leads him to study
these engravings, such subjects as Venus and Cupid, Lucretia,
Apollo and Diana. The sense of harmony in regard to the
human figure has been always weak north of the Alps ; and
early German or Flemish works often seem grotesque, from the
absence of any perception that the body is beautiful, as though
the blinding power of the Christian superstition in regard to it
had been confirmed by the cold which made nudity itself timid
and as it were shamefaced. So we can readily understand the
fascination such work had for him.
It would be fruitless to go into detailed observations on his
technical excellencies ; there exists no vocabulary suited to such
a purpose, and the uneasy jargons which one is tempted to resort
to bring a kind of ridicule upon a subject that those who best
understand will be most careful to respect.
There is a considerable use of etching in a few of his plates,
and he may probably have often sketched his subject in the
first instance thus. The Crucifixion, B. 8, is the most important
of those plates which show no trace of an etched line. It has
been left unfinished ; the figures are exceptionally stately ; while
40

the conception of this lonely cross in the pine wood may serve to
bring us back to Altdorfer the poet, the Giorgione of the North,
who has banished the two thieves, and banished the soldiers, out
of respect for the heart-stricken mourners over whom the beloved
Master, Friend, and Son hangs and speaks in his latest solicitude for
the disciple whom he best loved, and the mother whom his victory
bereaves. Behind, the Franconian mountains have come near,
and an old German town, where a memento of this scene will be
carved or painted beside every torrent's bridge and wayside
fountain, in every bedroom, every council hall, and windowed
church.

4i

CONCLUSION
Everything difficult or laboured must lessen the beauty of a
work of art. There must be no trace of more constraint than
goes to a labour of love as entrancing and more beneficent than
any pleasure.
It is wisdom to go the shortest way to work, and if there is
paper and camel's-hair pencil, the easiest line that can be made
with the one on the other is that which the true artist will choose
as the basis of his workmanship. Of course the easiest line for
one hand is not the easiest for another, for one star differs from
another star in glory ; but it is the same light, the same felicity.
Whatever cannot be so rendered, such an one will set aside and
determine not to attempt. This delicacy of economy that will
never in the least strain the means it employs, is the main con
dition of that beauty which depends on the handicraft ; and there
is a kind of artists always inclined to regard this as the only
legitimate beauty to be aimed at ; and they have reason by just
so much as it is true that, however sincerely other beauties may
be striven after, if this be neglected or beyond the reach of the
aspirant, there can be no real aesthetic success. Even design will
be found to depend, in a, far greater degree than might seem
probable, on a nice appreciation of the capacity of means and
material employed. None the less there are other beauties that
appeal solely to thought and imagination, a dramatic insight
and a dignity of conception which are wholly proper to, and
perhaps necessary for, the loftiest flights of art.
Though I have enlarged interpretatively on the beauty of
plastic work, there is no need to foster the faintest illusion as to
the futility of attempting to render in words the very beauty
conveyed in drawing or picture. Bad works of art may furnish
42

admirable descriptions, as with Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn " was
the case. And many beautiful pictures have illustrated works of
no account in literature, as did Titian's so-called Sacred and
Profane Love. However, the greatest artist of modern Germany
has shown us that we need not be deterred by this from trying to
interpret plastic beauty. He says : " The achievement of the
artist — the work of art — is apprehended by others purely in
accordance with their own intuitions. How can an artist expect
that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realised by
others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of his work, if
it is true art, that he is confronted by a riddle, about which he
too might have illusions, just as another might? Now, would
you suppose it possible for an artist to be helped to a clear
understanding of his own work by an intelligence other than his
own ? . . . For I must confess to having arrived at a clear under
standing of my own works of art through the help of another,
who has provided me with the reasoned conceptions corresponding
to my intuitive principles."
Now very likely we may think that " reasoned conceptions " and
"intuitive principles "underlying "things of beauty "amuse Germans,
even such Germans as Wagner himself, a great deal more than
they help or forward them. Yet it is quite true that another's
description, or even his mere cry of pleasure, may reveal a
beauty that had hitherto remained sealed from us. Even this
may be the case, on some quite foreign encounter with thought
or phrase or spectacle ; the beauty we have studied in vain is
suddenly melted in the mind, and afar from the shrine, for a
first time we yield heart's worship to its arcana. Then let it not
be judged impertinent to say anything about things of beauty
which we have been genuinely moved to say. For Chance is a
great goddess, and the tone of a voice, a mood, or a smile may
better bring beauty home than the most exact analysis. We are
in the same case as little children, who must be taught how best
they can learn, and not merely in that way which makes exposition
most methodical.
What then is it that we may consider ourselves to receive from
contemplation of this artist and his works ?
' First, as with all the less ambitious masters, assurance that
attention to the suggestions to be drawn from the materials, the
tools, the facilities native to hand and mind, as also to the spirit
43

really active for him in the chosen subject— that attention to these
things results in a man working on in the spirit of tradition even
after he has attained to power with which he might set it at nought,
and win freedom to express not only the beauty revealed to him,
but every eccentricity, desire, or caprice with which he has been
saddled by nature. For a tradition is, from the manner of its
growth, necessarily founded on experience, and though it may
be advanced can never be safely discarded — however it, to an
eager and capable intelligence, appear associated with a purblind
conservatism of trade-jealousy and craft-bigotry.
Secondly, may we not be thankful that the beauty revealed to
Altdorfer, like that of the best tales by Hans Andersen, breathes a
spirit of such winsome and cordial homeliness that it actually seems
to invite and welcome our study ; and that we find it blended
with a playfulness which, however fanciful, seems to be saved
from the obstinacy and violence of caprice ? For these qualities
refresh us while they enchant. We are not jaded by the pleasure
they impart ; nor do they leave us "high-sorrowful and cloyed."
Thirdly, his work, with its profound pathos and exhilarating
landscape beauty, frequently raises us towards the region of the
most lofty, most serious art ; while his skill with pencil, burin, knife,
and pigment introduces us into the near neighbourhood of masters
of the highest rank, such as Rembrandt, Diirer, and Van Eyck,
however much he may fall short of their intellectual range, their
unflagging seriousness, their exhaustive science.
His worldly success no doubt depended on yet other qualities
and on the stirring spirit of the times in which he lived, that was
ready to welcome every adventurous effort directed towards truth,
goodness, or beauty, with an enthusiasm which is apt to win from
us nowadays a disillusioned smile such as the middle-aged too often
award to virtues of the young which put them to shame.
If a thought for our warning should be added to the consider
ation of the excellencies of this helpful artist, let it be in the words
of him who with most authority has written in English upon
painting : "Art has its boundaries though imagination has none."
Yes, Reynolds is right, and artists "need not be mortified or
discouraged at not being able to execute the conceptions of a
romantic imagination." We feel how right he was, when, on
turning to the works of Arnold Bocklin, so admired to-day in
Germany, we see that the vulgarising and ignorant licence too
44

often characteristic of modernity has played havoc with endowments
which, though always perhaps more vigorous than delicate, might
originally have claimed some kinship with those of Altdorfer. But
Altdorfer himself would undoubtedly not have been so secure from
similar temptations had he not been safeguarded by the discipline
of a living tradition.
To Germany, who sustained him with her characteristic
prudence, humble industry, and patient application, he should
appear as a prophet — even as all those who, in the past, have
gone on before, should rightly be considered — a prophet who
promises that their virtues of industry and application shall be
united not only, as Diirer and Holbein proclaim, with supreme
dignity and perfect balance, but with that sweetness and buoyancy
which form the charmed atmosphere of the noblest efforts of
Greece and Italy.

45

Note I. Page 32.
The Pictures which form the first class of Paintings are : —
1. The Battle of Arbela. Dated 1529. Altdorfer's largest work, measuring
141 x 119 centimetres. In the Pinakothek, Munich, 290.
2. Susanna at the Bath. Dated 1526. Also in the Pinakothek at Munich, 289
(75x61). 3. St. George. A tiny picture, measuring 27x21, and dated 1510. Munich
Pinakothek, 288.
4. The Flight into Egypt. The Holy Family are resting by a fountain. Dated
1510. Berlin Museum, 638B (57 x 38).
5. The Coronation of the Virgin. No date ; monogram. At Munich, 291
(66 x 38). The Resurrection Morning, a sketch, is on the back of the panel.
6. A classical subject representing a Satyr, a naked woman, and a child.
Possibly Dejaneira and Nessus. This picture should be compared with the St
George. It is dated 1507. Berlin, 638A.
7. A Nativity in the Snow. No date; monogram. At Vienna, No. 1427.
8. St. Joseph, the Virgin and Child, and St. John. Dated 1515; monogram
(23 x 21). No. 1422 in Vienna Gallery. It is to be remarked that the figures in
this little panel being quite as large in scale as the more part in pictures of the
second class, difference in scale cannot account for the wide divergence in skill
and method which divides the two classes.
9. Crucifixion (41x33). Nuremberg, German Museum, 213. Dated 1526
(ace. to Friedlander; formerly read 1506). Monogram.
10. Two panels, St. Francis and St. Jerome. At Berlin, No. 638. Dated
1507 ; monogram (32 x 19 each panel).
n. Wealth and Poverty. Dated 1531 ; monogram (30x42). At Berlin, No.
638D. 12. Crucifixion. Berlin Museum, 6380. No date ; no monogram.
13. Two tall panels in the Convent of St. Florian, near Enns. Nos. 46 and
47. Commissioned in 1525. They represent the Entombment and the Resurrec
tion, and appear excellent, though hung high in the dark.
14. Nativity. Berlin. No date ; no monogram.
15. The Beheading of John the Baptist, in the collection of Ritter von
Lanna, which has been attributed to Altdorfer's most distinguished pupil,
Wolf Huber, by Dr. Schmidt, but I incline to give it to his master. It is
much more finished on the left hand than on the right, and probably reveals
something of Altdorfer's method. It is very pleasant in colour, and bears neither
date nor monogram. 46

The Pictures which form the second class are : —
i. The Birth of Mary. Augsburg Gallery, 2, already described, page 14. No
date ; no monogram.
2. A picture representing Bathsheba washing her feet in the Danube. In the
Museum at Ratisbon it is hung high and in the dark. The colour seems to place
it in the second class, but it seems carefully worked. Though it has been
attributed to Ostendorfer, both design and invention are of the first order, and I
have no hesitation in ascribing it at least in these particulars to Altdorfer. Neither
signed nor dated.
3. Three pictures at Nuremberg, and two at Siena, supposed to illustrate the
legend of Florian or of Quirinus. These vary much among themselves in point
of skill and also of interest as designs. No. 248 at Nuremberg is full of Altdorfer's
spirit, and so painted as to make it almost deserve a place in the first class. No.
246 in the same Gallery one would be glad to think he had nothing to do with,
though the architectural background is similar in treatment and colour to that in
the wonderful Augsburg picture, over which Altdorfer must have presided, and
which in point of composition and invention yields to none of his works. I have
not seen the pictures of this series at Siena.
4. The St. Florian pictures. Besides the two mentioned in the first class,
there are in this beautifully situated Dominican convent eight compositions,
measuring 110x93, representing the scenes of the Passion. They are very
direct, though careless in handling, crude in colour, and not matured as composi
tions. That representing the Crucifixion has the same arrangement of crosses
as in the Jpen and wash drawing in the Albertina, No. 49, of which there are
replicas or copies in Ritter von Lanna's collection, at Berlin, and in the Louvre.
In my opinion none of these drawings are by Altdorfer, but they represent the
composition of a picture far more worthy of him than this Crucifixion of St.
Florian's. The types of feature, etc., in these pictures are closely allied to or identical
with those in Altdorfer's work, and I believe them to have been produced in his
workshop. There are besides four other pictures of like proportions, two of which,
the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, and the Finding of the Body of St. Florian, are
very superior in design and invention. The other two deal with the life of the
latter saint.
The whole twelve .pictures formed an altarpiece a. doubles battants, and until
forty years ago were joined together in couples, one above the other. They were
then cleaned by Enders of Vienna, sawn apart, and reframed. Two large and tall
panels, forming together a Gothic arch, represent, that on the left St. Margaret
and St. Barbara enthroned, that on the right Dom-Petrus Prepositus kneeling before
them in prayer. He it was who commissioned this picture during a journey to
Augsburg which he undertook in 1525. The whole altar, which apparently
included the two small panels, was erected as a protection against the plague and
sudden death, St. Sebastian being joined with the local patron because of his
violent end, and SS. Margaret and Barbara as representing the desired triumph
over temptations and a happy death. The portrait of Petrus Prepositus is more
carefully executed than any other part of the large panels.
In these lists only those pictures which I myself have examined are mentioned ;
however, I have little doubt that the St. Hubert at Glasgow and the Nativity at
47

Bremen would make important additions to the first list, and that there are several
of minor importance which belong to it as well.

Note II. Page 38.
Ritter von Lanna owns several Altdorfer drawings, which,
as Dr. Friedlander did not see this collection, I shall enumerate : —
No. 1 8 in the catalogue of the Klinkosch sale. A small upright drawing. A
woman standing on a man in a landscape ; she holds flowers caught up with the
folds of her skirt. White and black line on fawn-coloured paper. Dated 1509,
and signed with monogram. Probably St. Margaret and the Demon.
No. 24 in the catalogue of the Klinkosch sale. A man in slashed sleeves with
a spear and sword. On red-brown paper in white and black line. Dated 15 12 ; no
monogram. Very beautiful in workmanship.
No. 22 in the catalogue of the Klinkosch sale. A woman with a huge flag,
and floating skirts and feathers in her hat ; she is dancing. No date ; no monogram.
A drawing, black and white line on reddish paper. Dated 1508 ; no monogram.
Open, bold workmanship. A young man with an uprooted sapling on his shoulder
coming forward from between two large trees.
A St. George. Dated 1512. On brown paper in black and white line. Very
delicate. A drawing formerly in the Camesina collection. Is probably by Altdorfer. It
represents two soldiers, in fine clothes, talking.

Note III. (List of Illustrations).
1
The Adoration of the Magi at Sigmaringen, if it is by
Altdorfer, must undoubtedly take its place in the first class ;
Dr. Friedlander and Mr. Campbell Dodgson, who have examined
it, consider it to be his, the latter basing his impression on a
strong colour resemblance. Dr. Schmidt, however, has doubted
it, and from examination of a photograph I am inclined to agree
with him. In any case, it would seem hardly possible that it
should have been painted ten years before The Coronation of the
Virgin, at Munich, as Dr. Friedlander supposes ; the drawing of
the Child is so much more academical in conception and aim.

48

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Susanna at the Bath: in the Munich Gallery.

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