DOI issue:
Vol. 4, No. 1 (February, 1914)
DOI article:Ivins, William Mills: The woodcuts of Albrecht Altdorfer (1480?-1538)
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.49981#0083
THE WOODCUTS OF ALBRECHT
ALTDORFER (i48o?-i538)
By WILLIAM M. IVINS, JR.
■ERMAN art of the Renaissance must be
looked at through quite another pair of
spectacles than Italian. The things that
the artists knew, the things in which they
were interested, were so diverse that a completely
different set of critical Standards must be brought into
play. As compared with the Italians, they knew little
of formal beauty, of composition, or of color, and Mr.
Berenson’s tactile values and movement were to most
of them a sealed book. But they had other qualities
and a naivete that to some extent are recompenses for
their failures in these respects. Many of them were
good Illustrators, not so many of them good draughts-
men, and two of them at least really great ones. All
of them had a certain almost journalistic feeling for
the little details of the immediate life about them that
many of the Italians lacked, and that lends to their
work much of the charm and interest that inheres in
crotchety memoirs and old letters. Properly speak-
ing, their study probably belongs more to the history
of manners than the history of art, and it has to be
approaehed in a correspondingly different way, for,
31
ALTDORFER (i48o?-i538)
By WILLIAM M. IVINS, JR.
■ERMAN art of the Renaissance must be
looked at through quite another pair of
spectacles than Italian. The things that
the artists knew, the things in which they
were interested, were so diverse that a completely
different set of critical Standards must be brought into
play. As compared with the Italians, they knew little
of formal beauty, of composition, or of color, and Mr.
Berenson’s tactile values and movement were to most
of them a sealed book. But they had other qualities
and a naivete that to some extent are recompenses for
their failures in these respects. Many of them were
good Illustrators, not so many of them good draughts-
men, and two of them at least really great ones. All
of them had a certain almost journalistic feeling for
the little details of the immediate life about them that
many of the Italians lacked, and that lends to their
work much of the charm and interest that inheres in
crotchety memoirs and old letters. Properly speak-
ing, their study probably belongs more to the history
of manners than the history of art, and it has to be
approaehed in a correspondingly different way, for,
31