DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.48092#0057
III.]
durer’s childhood and youth.
39
to God...Albrecht had some horns, and amongst them a very fine pair
which I should like to have had, but she secretly gave them away for a
mere trifle along with many other beautiful things.”
It is clear that Pirkheimer was angry when he wrote this
letter ; he was not in a condition to weigh his words carefully,
and he certainly had no idea that what he thus wrote in haste
would be the only written character of Mistress Agnes that
would descend to posterity. But to argue, as modern writers
have done, that the exact contrary of what Pirkheimer records
is the truth, seems rather Quixotic. Thausing, with his ardent
enthusiasm, enters the lists on Frau Durer’s behalf, like Froude
for Mrs Carlyle. Thausing would have us believe that his client
was an angel, and that the marriage was a love match from
beginning to end. Diirer has been dead these three and a half
centuries, and whether he was happy or not makes no difference
now to him or us. His work survives, and proves his life
triumphant, whether or no a share of that triumph was his wife’s.
She was a pretty girl when he married her, though he does not
trouble himself to record the fact. He speaks of his ‘ dear
father’and his ‘dear mother,’ and even his ‘dear father-in-law,’
but he never couples that adjective with his wife’s name. The
portraits he drew of her show a face growing harder and less
loveable with the advancing years, from the listless ‘ my Agnes ’
of about 1500 to the frigid shrew whose likeness fills a page
of the Netherlands sketch-book. It must however be borne in
mind what the Niirnberg ‘Hausfrau’ of those days was like.
You find her depicted to the life in the plays of Hans Sachs.
She was uneducated, narrow-minded, a good housekeeper, busy
always with household affairs. Except in cases so rare that I
cannot remember a single recorded instance, she could not be
the equal intellectual companion and self-obliterating, sympa-
thetic friend that the advance of civilization has since produced.
It would be a marvel if the Diirerin had sympathised in any way
with her husband. His thoughts and works were as far beyond
her horizon as could be, and the only point where they could
come within her range was in the question of their money value.
She sold his prints at the fairs, she cooked and looked after the
house, and doubtless worried him to work many and many a
time when work was impossible to him. In all his written
durer’s childhood and youth.
39
to God...Albrecht had some horns, and amongst them a very fine pair
which I should like to have had, but she secretly gave them away for a
mere trifle along with many other beautiful things.”
It is clear that Pirkheimer was angry when he wrote this
letter ; he was not in a condition to weigh his words carefully,
and he certainly had no idea that what he thus wrote in haste
would be the only written character of Mistress Agnes that
would descend to posterity. But to argue, as modern writers
have done, that the exact contrary of what Pirkheimer records
is the truth, seems rather Quixotic. Thausing, with his ardent
enthusiasm, enters the lists on Frau Durer’s behalf, like Froude
for Mrs Carlyle. Thausing would have us believe that his client
was an angel, and that the marriage was a love match from
beginning to end. Diirer has been dead these three and a half
centuries, and whether he was happy or not makes no difference
now to him or us. His work survives, and proves his life
triumphant, whether or no a share of that triumph was his wife’s.
She was a pretty girl when he married her, though he does not
trouble himself to record the fact. He speaks of his ‘ dear
father’and his ‘dear mother,’ and even his ‘dear father-in-law,’
but he never couples that adjective with his wife’s name. The
portraits he drew of her show a face growing harder and less
loveable with the advancing years, from the listless ‘ my Agnes ’
of about 1500 to the frigid shrew whose likeness fills a page
of the Netherlands sketch-book. It must however be borne in
mind what the Niirnberg ‘Hausfrau’ of those days was like.
You find her depicted to the life in the plays of Hans Sachs.
She was uneducated, narrow-minded, a good housekeeper, busy
always with household affairs. Except in cases so rare that I
cannot remember a single recorded instance, she could not be
the equal intellectual companion and self-obliterating, sympa-
thetic friend that the advance of civilization has since produced.
It would be a marvel if the Diirerin had sympathised in any way
with her husband. His thoughts and works were as far beyond
her horizon as could be, and the only point where they could
come within her range was in the question of their money value.
She sold his prints at the fairs, she cooked and looked after the
house, and doubtless worried him to work many and many a
time when work was impossible to him. In all his written