DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.60474#0012
meaning for them. Y et it was from the artistic aridity of Nuremberg that Albrecht
Dürer set forth for Italy to seek for Mantegna and to find Bellini. On his way,
passing through the Tyrol, in the shadow of the Alps and over the Brennerpass
the young artist was awakened to an understanding of the inner meaning of the
majesty around him. He saw and understood nature’s changing moods, the
mystic combination of colour and air, of light and shade which mingled in har-
mony. But is was for his eyes alone; another hundred years were to pass before
in a softer climate these magie harmonies were seen again.
This awakening to a new vision cannot be explained as the logical develop-
ment of a tendancy present in the art of all ages; it is a phenomenon unforesee-
able and uncontrollable, the manifestation of an intimate individual gift.
The landscapes here reproduced must be regarded only as sketches even
though they have a place among Dürer’s immortal works. The character of
contemporary art makes it clear that he could never have regarded as finished
work, ready for the world, pure landscape empty of the human element. They
represent rather his rawmaterial, impressions springing from his intuitive per-
ception of nature; they are a notebook, almost a diary of the beauty seen in each
day’s wanderings and stored for use in the future. Nature and nature-worship
were as yet unrecognised as the true source of artistic inspiration, yet Dürer
expressed nature pictorially in sketches devoid of human action having no legen-
dary or historic theme, no religious symbolism, but taking wind and air, sun-
shine and shadow, colour and mist and weaving them into a mighty epic. There
was no place for such work in the contemporary artistic world, yet it was in these
sketches that Dürer, then barely twentyfive years old founded German landscape-
painting.
It is clear that Dürer was born between the desire to obtain his general effect by
means of perspective on one handandcolouron theother. By the endof the fifteenth
century he was striving to master linear perspective and all his pictures of that
period bear the stamp of the attempt. The lines are drawn with a consciousness
of the perspective of vistas and the buildings are drawn with geometrical precision
but the result is a failure. In the Mill and St. John at Nuremberg the relative
distances are not clear, the different objects are placed on the paper side by side
or one behind the other in such a relation that they never form a coherent whole.
There is no focus, no centre from wich the picture radiates, or it is wrongly
4
Dürer set forth for Italy to seek for Mantegna and to find Bellini. On his way,
passing through the Tyrol, in the shadow of the Alps and over the Brennerpass
the young artist was awakened to an understanding of the inner meaning of the
majesty around him. He saw and understood nature’s changing moods, the
mystic combination of colour and air, of light and shade which mingled in har-
mony. But is was for his eyes alone; another hundred years were to pass before
in a softer climate these magie harmonies were seen again.
This awakening to a new vision cannot be explained as the logical develop-
ment of a tendancy present in the art of all ages; it is a phenomenon unforesee-
able and uncontrollable, the manifestation of an intimate individual gift.
The landscapes here reproduced must be regarded only as sketches even
though they have a place among Dürer’s immortal works. The character of
contemporary art makes it clear that he could never have regarded as finished
work, ready for the world, pure landscape empty of the human element. They
represent rather his rawmaterial, impressions springing from his intuitive per-
ception of nature; they are a notebook, almost a diary of the beauty seen in each
day’s wanderings and stored for use in the future. Nature and nature-worship
were as yet unrecognised as the true source of artistic inspiration, yet Dürer
expressed nature pictorially in sketches devoid of human action having no legen-
dary or historic theme, no religious symbolism, but taking wind and air, sun-
shine and shadow, colour and mist and weaving them into a mighty epic. There
was no place for such work in the contemporary artistic world, yet it was in these
sketches that Dürer, then barely twentyfive years old founded German landscape-
painting.
It is clear that Dürer was born between the desire to obtain his general effect by
means of perspective on one handandcolouron theother. By the endof the fifteenth
century he was striving to master linear perspective and all his pictures of that
period bear the stamp of the attempt. The lines are drawn with a consciousness
of the perspective of vistas and the buildings are drawn with geometrical precision
but the result is a failure. In the Mill and St. John at Nuremberg the relative
distances are not clear, the different objects are placed on the paper side by side
or one behind the other in such a relation that they never form a coherent whole.
There is no focus, no centre from wich the picture radiates, or it is wrongly
4