The genius of Albert Dürer cannot be rightly estimated without taking into account the position which the art of engraving thus held in the culture of his time. He was, indeed, first of all a painter; and though in his methods he was too scrupulous and laborious to produce many great works, and though one of his greatest, the Assumption of the Virgin, has been destroyed by fire, and another, the Feast of Rose-Garlands, has suffered irreparably between injury and repair, yet the paintings which remain by hi3 hand are sufficient to place him among the great masters of the world. He has every gift in art except the Greek and the Italian gift of beauty or ideal grace. In religious painting, he has profound earnestness and humanity, and an inexhaustible dramatic invention; and the accessory landscape and scenery of his compositions are more richly conceived and better studied than by any painter before him. In portrait, he is equally master of the soul and body, rendering every detail of the human superficies with a microscopic fidelity, which nevertheless does not encumber or overlay the essential and inner character of the person represented. Still more if we judge him by his drawings and studies, of which a vast number are preserved in private as well as public collections, shall we realize his power in grasping and delineating natural fact and character, the combined gravity and minuteness of his style, the penetration of his eye, and the almost superhuman patience and accuracy of his line in drawing, whether from persons, animals, plants, or landscape, whether with pen, pencil, charcoal, or (which was his favourite method) in colour with the point of the brush. But neither his paintings nor his drawings could by themselves have won for him the immense popular fame and authority which have been his from his own time to ours; that fame and that authority are due to his pre-eminence in the most popular and democratic of the arts, that of which the works are accessible to the largest number, the art of engraving. In an age which drew a large part of its intellectual nourishment from engravings, Dürer furnished the most masterly examples both of the refined and elaborate art of the metal engraver, as well as the most striking inventions for the robust and simple art of the wood engraver.

The town of Nuremberg in Franconia, in the age of Dürer, was a home most favourable to the growth and exercise of his powers. Of the free imperial cities of central Germany, none had a greater historic fame, none a more settled and patriotic government, none was more the favourite of the emperors, none was the seat of a more active and flourishing commerce. Nuremberg was the great mart for the merchandise that came to central Europe from the East through Venice and over the passes of the TyroL She held not only a close commercial intercourse, but also a close intellectual intercourse, with Italy. Without being so forward as the neighbour city of Augsburg to embrace the architectural fashions of the Italian Renaissance,—nay, continuing to be profoundly imbued with the old German burgher spirit, and to wear, with an evidence which is almost unimpaired to this day, the old German civic aspect,—she had imported, before the close of the 15th century, much of the new learning of Italy, and numbered among her citizens a Willibald Pirkheimer, a Sebald Schreyer, a Hartmann Schedel, and others fit to hold a place in the first rank of European humanists. The life into which Albert Dürer was born was a grave, a devout, a law-loving, and a lettered life, in the midst of a community devoted to honourable commerce and honourable civic activities, proud of its past, proud of its wealth, proud of its liberties, proud of its arts and ingenuities, and abounding in aspects of a quaint and picturesque dignity. His family was not of Nuremberg descent, but came from the village of Eytas in Hungary. The name, however, is German, and the family bearing—an open door—points to an original form of Thürer, meaning a maker of doors, or carpenter. Albrecht Dürer the elder was a goldsmith by trade, and settled soon after the middle of the 15th century in Nuremberg. He served as assistant under a master goldsmith of the city, Hieronymus Holper, and presently married his master’s daughter, Barbara. This was in 1468, the bridegroom being forty and the bride fifteen years of age. They had eighteen children, of whom Albert was the second. The elder Dürer was an esteemed craftsman and citizen, sometimes, it seems, straitened by the claims of his immense family, but living in virtue and honour to the end of his days. The accounts we have of him proceed from his illustrious son, who always speaks with the tenderest reverence and affection of both his parents, and has left a touching narrative of the deathbed of each. He painted the portrait of his father twice, once about 1490, the second time in 1497. The former of these two pieces is in the Uffizj at Florence; the latter, well known by Hollar’s engraving, is in the possession of the duke of Northumberland. A third “Portrait of his Father” by Dürer, in the gallery at Frankfort, is probably so called in error. The young Albert was his father’s favourite son. “My father,” these are his own words, “took special delight in me. Seeing that I was industrious in working and learning, he put me to school; and when I had learned to read and write, he took me home from school and taught me the goldsmith’s trade.” By-and-by the boy found himself drawn by preference from goldsmith’s work to painting; and after some hesitation, his father at first opposing his wishes on the ground of the time already spent in learning the former trade, he was at the age of fifteen and a half apprenticed for three years to the principal painter of the town, Michael Wohlgemuth. Wohlgemuth furnishes a complete type of the German painter of that age. At the head of a large shop with numerous assistants, his business was to turn out, generally for a small price, devotional pieces commissioned by mercantile corporations or private persons to decorate their chapels in the churches,—the preference being usually for scenes of our Lord’s Passion, or for tortures and martyrdoms of the saints. In work of this class, the painters of upper Germany before the Renaissance show considerable technical knowledge, and a love of rich and quaint costumes and of landscape, but in the human part of their representations often a grim and debased exaggeration, transgressing all bounds in the grotesqueness of undesigned caricature.

Wohlgemuth and his assistants also produced woodcuts for book illustration, and probably—though this is a vexed question—engravings on copper. In this school Dürer learnt much, by his own account, but suffered also not a little from the roughness of his companions. At the end of his term under Wohlgemuth, he entered upon the usual course of travels—the Wandβτjahre— of a German youth. The direction of these travels we cannot retrace with certainty. It had been at one time his father’s intention to apprentice him to Martin Schongauer, of Colmar in Alsace, incomparably the most refined German painter and engraver of his time. To Colmar, among other places, Albert Dürer went in the course of his travels; but Schongauer had already died there in 1488. We also hear of him at Strassburg. It is a moot point among biographers whether towards the end of his Wanderjahre— about the year 1494—the young Dürer did or did not cross the Alps to Venice. On the one hand it is argued that he did; first, because, on the occasion of an undoubted visit to Venice in 1506, he speaks of admiring no longer that which he had vastly admired “eleven years before;” secondly, because several careful drawings by his hand from the engravings of Mantegna and other Italian masters, bearing the date 1494, show that in this year he was making a special study of Italian art; and thirdly, because he has left a number of coloured drawings of the scenery of Tyrol, such as he would have to traverse on the road between Bavaria and Venice, and these show a technical finish and minuteness of execution, characteristic of his studies at this early period but not later. Those who do not believe in this early visit to Venice reply, first, that the allusion interpreted as above in Dürer’s correspondence is too vague and uncertain, and that what Dürer, in 1506, had really “admired eleven years ago” was probably not the work of Venetians seen at Venice, but of a Venetian artist known as Jacopo de’ Barbari, or Jacob Walch, who resided about that time in Nuremberg, and who, we know, had a very considerable influence on the art of Dürer; secondly, that the prints of Mantegna and other Italians, undoubtedly copied by Dürer in 1494, may very well have been brought to Germany with other wares on sale from Venice, or have been shown him by the same Jacopo de’ Barbari; and thirdly, that other landscapes, bearing the date of 1506 or later dates, do in fact show the samθ technical characteristics as those which are assigned, by the other side in the argument, to 1494. The question will probably remain open to the end. With reference, however, to the third head of the argument, the character of Dürer’s early landscape work, it has not been sufficiently observed that his ideal of scenery shows itself fully formed and developed by the time of the publication of his Apocalypse woodcuts and his earliest engravings on copper, that is, about the year 1497; that this ideal background, of a lake with castled and wooded headlands sloping down from either side, and sloops afloat in the distance, is taken not from the neighbourhood of Nuremberg but from the northern borders of Tyrol—it is the scenery, not of the banks of the Pegnitz nor even the Danube, but rather of the Würmsee or the Tegernsee; that to the alps and lakes, therefore, of the Northern Tyrol, whether on his way to Venice or otherwise, Dürer must certainly have come during these travels of his youth.

At the end of May 1494, being twenty-three years old, Albert Dürer returned, at his father’s summons, to his native Nuremberg, and within two months was married to Agnes, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant of the town named Hans Frey. It is probable that the marriage had been arranged between Hans Frey and the elder Dürer while Albert was on his travels; and possible that a portrait of the young painter very richly habited, executed by himself in the previous year 1493, and showing him in the first bloom of that admirable manly beauty for which he was afterwards renowned, may have been destined to recommend him to the good graces of the lady. Their marriage was childless. Agnes survived her husband. The petulance of an old friend of her husband’s has unjustly blackened her reputation. Her name has for centuries been used to point a moral, and among the unworthy mates of great men the wife of Dürer was as notorious as the wife of Socrates. The origin of this tradition must be sought in a letter written a few years after Dürer’s death by his close friend and lifelong companion, Willibald Birkheimer, in which Pirkheimer accuses Agnes of having plagued her husband to death with her parsimonious ways, of having made him over-work himself for money’s sake, of having given his latter days no peace. But a closer study of facts and documents shows that there is not a jot of evidence to support these splenetic charges. Pirkheimer, when he made them, was old, broken with gout, and disgusted with the world, and the immediate occasion of his outbreak was a fit of peevishness against the widow because she had not let him have a pair of antlers— a household ornament much prized in those days—to which he fancied himself entitled out of the property left by Dürer. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence of the close confidence and companionship that subsisted between Dürer and his wife; she accompanied him on his journey to the Low Countries in 1521; after his death she behaved with peculiar generosity to his brothers; it is perfectly probable that Dürer had in her a kind and beloved as well as a careful partner; the old legend of his sufferings at her hands must be regarded as completely discredited. So far from being forced to toil for money to the end, he died well off, though he had in his latter years occupied himself more and more with unremunerative pursuits—with the theoretical studies of Perspective, Geometry, Fortification, Proportion, for which he shared the passion of Leonardo, and on which, like Leonardo, he has left written treatises.

For more than eleven years after his marriage, Dürer lived at Nuremberg the settled and industrious life of his profession. Within this period his masterly powers unfolded and matured themselves. Two important devotional pictures are attributed to his early practice; one a large triptych painted in tempera on linen, now in the gallery at Dresden, the other also an altar-piece with wings, now in the summer palace of the archbishop of Vienna at Ober St Veit; both probably painted for the Elector Frederick of Saxony. These pictures have been executed, like those of Wohlgemuth, hastily, and with the help of pupils. (Of painters trained in the school of Dürer, we know the names and characters of Schaüfelein, Springinklee, Hans Baldung Grün, and Hans of Culmbach). A finer, and somewhat later, example of the master’s work in this class is the altar-piece painted for the family of Baumgartner, having a Birth of Christ in the centre and the figure of a knight on either side; this is now at Munich. The best of Dürer’s energies, both of mind and hand, must have been given in these days to the preparation of his sixteen great woodcut designs for the Apocalypse. The first edition illustrated with this series appeared in 1498. The Northern mind had long dwelt with eagerness on these mysteries of things to come, and among the earliest block-books printed in Germany is an edition of the Apocalypse with rude figures. But Dürer not only transcends all efforts made before him in the representation of these strange promises, terrors, and transformations, these thaumaturgie visions of doom and redemption; the passionate energy and undismayed simplicity of his imagination enable him, in this order of creations, to touch the highest point of human achievement. The four angels keeping back the winds that they blow not; the four πders; the loosing of the angele of the Euphrates to slay the third part of men; these and others are conceptions of such force, such grave or tempestuous grandeur in the midst of grotesqueness, as the art of no other age or hand has produced. At the same time, Dürer was practising himself diligently in the laborious art of copper engraving. In the years immediately about or preceding 1500, he produced a number of plates of which the subjects are generally fanciful and allegorical, and the execution is more or less tentative and uncertain. Of several of these, other versions exist by contemporary masters, and it is disputed in most of such cases whether Dürer’s version is the original, or whether, being at that time young and comparatively unknown, he did not rather begin by copying the work of older men; in which case, the originals of such engravings would have to be sought in versions bearing other signatures than Dürer’s. One signature of frequent occurrence on German engravings of this time, and among them, on several subjects which are also repeated by Dürer’s hand, is the letter W. As to the identity of this W, criticism is much divided. He has been generally identified with one Wenzel of Olmütz, whom we know to have engraved copies after Martin Schongauer and other masters. Others, again, attribute some at least of the prints signed W to Dürer’s teacher Wohlgemuth, and when the same composition is found engraved by each of the two masters, conclude that the younger has copied the work of...