DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0032
RAPHAEL
The manner of Van der Weyden was communicated to a wider sphere by
MARTIN SCHONGAUER as a most faithful, well-intending follower. In his
pictures one seems to trace the reason why a people that kept to Gothic and
practised glass-painting 150 years longer than any other, was of necessity
devoted to this class of painting as the peculiar expression of their nature. A
freely selected tracery of small trees or mullions divides up the surfaces, and the
spaces so marked off are filled with the figures, beautifully outlined and
restrained in their movements, as with delicate decorative patterns. The
harmony of their contours contains and separates the great unbroken but not
discordant surfaces of the colours. In the whole and in details the eye takes its
fill of a music reminiscent of stained-glass windows—certainly not by accident.
Both indeed derived their language from the same source, the poetry of the
Church. How wide the influence of this art must have been when Schongauer,
as engraver, found the means of speaking to the whole world! It is superfluous
to ask whether the Colmar Master stands at the beginning or the end of an
epoch. His contemporaries felt the Gothic he brought, which was nothing
else than the eternal law of unity, to be a release from prosaic and therefore godless
confusion. To follow the majestic sweep of his lines and their fine ramifications,
which never get out of touch with the framework, the limits of the copper
plate or paper, fills the consciousness with a melody which detaches it from
the trivial, as compelling, within the narrow confines of the sheet, as in the
gloom of a church filled with coloured light from its windows. Van der
Weyden’s disciple, as an engraver, with his gentler but more widely intelligible
art, became his teacher’s herald to the world; in this German Master, lovingly
engraving on his copper plate lines of melodious pattern, there arose out of
the Gothic goldsmith’s workshop one who proclaimed to all, the greatest con-
centrated art. In his modest sheets the teaching of his profound forerunner made
its way through the world; the greatest in North and South proved worthy to
learn it.
For us to-day it is one of the most exciting moments in the history of art
to see the young Michael Angelo copying Schongauer’s Temptation of St
Anthony (Plate 5). Distinction by schools along the lines of racial temperament
is forgotten; out of the chaos of diversity there suddenly arises, leaping together
from North and South, one giant flame. It illuminates a wildly agitated
spectacle in art: the two strongest natures of North and South, the “Men of
Destiny”, encounter one another here; out of the daemonic age of mankind
creative power, unimpaired, in all its primordial force, becomes at moments
visible and comprehensible as in a vision. This was the message, echoed back
in manifold ways to Italy and across the Alps. When Van der Weyden himself
had travelled through the peninsula in the Year of Jubilee, he found the time
not yet ripe, in Ferrara, in Florence or in Rome, for the austere greatness of his
style; but a generation later the Northern gospel of Gothic announced itself,
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The manner of Van der Weyden was communicated to a wider sphere by
MARTIN SCHONGAUER as a most faithful, well-intending follower. In his
pictures one seems to trace the reason why a people that kept to Gothic and
practised glass-painting 150 years longer than any other, was of necessity
devoted to this class of painting as the peculiar expression of their nature. A
freely selected tracery of small trees or mullions divides up the surfaces, and the
spaces so marked off are filled with the figures, beautifully outlined and
restrained in their movements, as with delicate decorative patterns. The
harmony of their contours contains and separates the great unbroken but not
discordant surfaces of the colours. In the whole and in details the eye takes its
fill of a music reminiscent of stained-glass windows—certainly not by accident.
Both indeed derived their language from the same source, the poetry of the
Church. How wide the influence of this art must have been when Schongauer,
as engraver, found the means of speaking to the whole world! It is superfluous
to ask whether the Colmar Master stands at the beginning or the end of an
epoch. His contemporaries felt the Gothic he brought, which was nothing
else than the eternal law of unity, to be a release from prosaic and therefore godless
confusion. To follow the majestic sweep of his lines and their fine ramifications,
which never get out of touch with the framework, the limits of the copper
plate or paper, fills the consciousness with a melody which detaches it from
the trivial, as compelling, within the narrow confines of the sheet, as in the
gloom of a church filled with coloured light from its windows. Van der
Weyden’s disciple, as an engraver, with his gentler but more widely intelligible
art, became his teacher’s herald to the world; in this German Master, lovingly
engraving on his copper plate lines of melodious pattern, there arose out of
the Gothic goldsmith’s workshop one who proclaimed to all, the greatest con-
centrated art. In his modest sheets the teaching of his profound forerunner made
its way through the world; the greatest in North and South proved worthy to
learn it.
For us to-day it is one of the most exciting moments in the history of art
to see the young Michael Angelo copying Schongauer’s Temptation of St
Anthony (Plate 5). Distinction by schools along the lines of racial temperament
is forgotten; out of the chaos of diversity there suddenly arises, leaping together
from North and South, one giant flame. It illuminates a wildly agitated
spectacle in art: the two strongest natures of North and South, the “Men of
Destiny”, encounter one another here; out of the daemonic age of mankind
creative power, unimpaired, in all its primordial force, becomes at moments
visible and comprehensible as in a vision. This was the message, echoed back
in manifold ways to Italy and across the Alps. When Van der Weyden himself
had travelled through the peninsula in the Year of Jubilee, he found the time
not yet ripe, in Ferrara, in Florence or in Rome, for the austere greatness of his
style; but a generation later the Northern gospel of Gothic announced itself,
14