DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68073#0264
238
OLD WORLD MASTERS
after Easter, so I returned in 1494 after Whitsuntide. And when I
returned home Hans Frey treated with my father and gave me his
daughter, Agnes, and he gave me with her two hundred florins; and
the marriage was celebrated on the Monday before St. Margaret’s
Day in the year 1494.”
The story that Diirer’s wife was a shrew who led him an unhappy
life is now exploded.
In 1505 Diirer went to Italy and spent some time in Venice, where
he painted for the Guild of German merchants and their Fondaco dei
Tedeschi, The Feast of the Rosary, which is now in the monastery of
Strahow near Prague.
Returning to Nuremberg in 1507 Diirer painted some of his finest
altar-pieces. In 1511 he began his fine sets of wood-cuts and etchings—-
the Apocalypse, the Great Passion, the Little Passion, the Life of the
Virgin and St. Jerome in his Study. To this period belongs the large
altar-piece Adoration of the Trinity, in the Belvedere at Vienna. In
1518 Diirer was in Augsburg and in 1520-1521 he travelled in the
Low Countries. Once back in Nuremberg, he seems to have worked
quietly and industriously until his death in 1528.
In forming any estimate of Diirer it is essential to remember that
Diirer was a great expression and a great flowering of the German race.
Mrs. Heaton has well summed up his characteristics: “We do not
find,” she says “in Diirer’s art the classic ideal of the perfection of
man’s physical nature, nor the spiritual ideal of the early religious
painters, nor the calm dignity and rich sensuous beauty of the great
masters of the Italian Renaissance, but in it we find a noble expression
of the German mind, with its high intellectual powers, its daring
speculative philosophy, its deep-seated reverence, its patient labori-
ousness, and above all its strange love for the weird and grotesque.
Diirer was the companion of some of the most learned and thoughtful
men of his day. Luther and Melancthon were among the number
of his friends, and there is no doubt but the reforming spirit of the
age was powerfully at work within him, affecting his thought and
art. Melancthon bears testimony to his rare worth as a man by say-
ing: ‘his least merit was his art.’”
OLD WORLD MASTERS
after Easter, so I returned in 1494 after Whitsuntide. And when I
returned home Hans Frey treated with my father and gave me his
daughter, Agnes, and he gave me with her two hundred florins; and
the marriage was celebrated on the Monday before St. Margaret’s
Day in the year 1494.”
The story that Diirer’s wife was a shrew who led him an unhappy
life is now exploded.
In 1505 Diirer went to Italy and spent some time in Venice, where
he painted for the Guild of German merchants and their Fondaco dei
Tedeschi, The Feast of the Rosary, which is now in the monastery of
Strahow near Prague.
Returning to Nuremberg in 1507 Diirer painted some of his finest
altar-pieces. In 1511 he began his fine sets of wood-cuts and etchings—-
the Apocalypse, the Great Passion, the Little Passion, the Life of the
Virgin and St. Jerome in his Study. To this period belongs the large
altar-piece Adoration of the Trinity, in the Belvedere at Vienna. In
1518 Diirer was in Augsburg and in 1520-1521 he travelled in the
Low Countries. Once back in Nuremberg, he seems to have worked
quietly and industriously until his death in 1528.
In forming any estimate of Diirer it is essential to remember that
Diirer was a great expression and a great flowering of the German race.
Mrs. Heaton has well summed up his characteristics: “We do not
find,” she says “in Diirer’s art the classic ideal of the perfection of
man’s physical nature, nor the spiritual ideal of the early religious
painters, nor the calm dignity and rich sensuous beauty of the great
masters of the Italian Renaissance, but in it we find a noble expression
of the German mind, with its high intellectual powers, its daring
speculative philosophy, its deep-seated reverence, its patient labori-
ousness, and above all its strange love for the weird and grotesque.
Diirer was the companion of some of the most learned and thoughtful
men of his day. Luther and Melancthon were among the number
of his friends, and there is no doubt but the reforming spirit of the
age was powerfully at work within him, affecting his thought and
art. Melancthon bears testimony to his rare worth as a man by say-
ing: ‘his least merit was his art.’”