Herbert E. A. Furst

“ Dürer with finality excludes the faithless from all hope. It is this finality, this absolute faith in the Word, this firm conviction of the finiteness of all things, which characterise the whole of his Art. The spirit which brooks no uncertainty and suffers no metaphor, glues a veritable sword to the lips of the "Son of man."
This finality is the cause of Dürer's isolation. He has no followers in the world of creative Art. Close the doors of Dürer's cathedral and the world rolls on, rolls by unheeding. ”

“ I cannot think of any better way of explaining the effect of Dürer's Art as an illustrator upon his time, than to beg you to imagine the delight a short-sighted man experiences when he is given his first pair of spectacles. Everything remains where it is; he has not lost his sense of orientation, but on a sudden he sees everything more clearly, more defined, more in detail: and where he previously had only recognised vague effects he begins to see their causes. ”

“ We have, at any rate, in Dürer a curious example of an artist referring to Nature in order to discard it; the idealist become realist in order to further his idealism. Most of his pictures contain statements of pictorial facts which are in themselves most true, but taken in conjunction with the whole picture quite untrue. Dürer lacked the courage to trust his sense of sight, his optic organ: beauty with him is a thing which must be thought out, not seen. Dürer had come into direct contact with Italian Art, had felt himself a gentleman in Venice, and only a "parasite" in Nuremberg. ”

“ Let us venture forth then and grope with clumsy fingers amongst the treasures stored; let us be content to pick up a jewel here and there, resting our minds in awe and admiration on its beauty, though we may not readily understand its use and meaning. Foolish men read books and dusty documents, catch a few dull words from the phrasing of long thoughts, and will tell you, these are facts! ”

“ There can be no doubt that Dürer was principally looking towards Italy for approval, as indeed he had little reason to cherish the opinions of the painters in his own country, who were so greatly his inferiors both in mind as in their Art.
Much has been made of the fact that painting was a "free" Art, not a "Guild" in Nuremberg. Now carpentering was also a "free" Art at Nuremberg, and painting was not "free" in Italy, so the glory of freedom is somewhat discounted; but whatever Art was, Dürer, at any rate, was not an artist in Raphael's, Bellini's, or Titian's sense. ”

“ In spite of appearances to the contrary, Dürer was, as I have said, unimaginative. He needed the written word or another's idea as a guide; he never dreamt of an Art that could be beautiful without a "mission"—he never "created." Try to realise for a moment that throughout his work—in accordance with the conception of his age—he mixes purely modern dress with biblical and classical representation, as if our Leightons, Tademas, Poynters, were to introduce crinolines, bustles, or "empire" gowns amongst Venuses and Apollos. ”

“ In judging, not enjoying, a work of art, one should first make sure that one understands the methods of the artist; one should next endeavour to discover his evident purpose or aim, or "motif," and forming one's judgment, ask: Has the artist succeeded in welding aim and result into one organic whole?
Neither the "motif" nor its form are in themselves of value, but the harmony of both—hence we may place Dürer's "Man of Sorrows" by the side of Michelangelo's "Moses," as of equal importance, of equal greatness. This "Man of Sorrows" we must praise as immortal Art, and the reason is evident ”

“ If Dürer were here now I am sure he would lay his hand upon my shoulder, and, his deep true eyes searching mine, his soft and human lips would say:—
You are right, my friend; this is my best, for it is the spirit of my age that spoke in me then.
In front of the Pantheon at Paris is a statue called The Thinker. A seated man, unconscious of his bodily strength, for all his consciousness is in the iron grip of thought. He looks not up, not down—he looks before him ”

“ There is an almost uncanny expression of life in his eyes; dark ages of Byzantine belief and Art spring to the mind, and compel the spectator into an attitude of reverence not wholly due to the merits of the painting.
The comparison with Holbein's work naturally obtrudes itself, when Dürer's portraits are the subject of discussion.
In the Wallace collection is a most delightful little miniature portrait of Holbein, by his own hand. Compare the two heads. What a difference! Holbein the craftsman par excellence; the man to whom drawing came as easily as seeing comes to us. ”

“ If ever a man was a believer irrespective of Church, Creed, or sect—Dürer was he. I confess to a sense of awe in beholding this work, akin to Fra Angelico in its sincerity, akin to Michelangelo in its grandeur, and German wholly in the naturalness of its mystery. With more than photographic sharpness and minuteness of detail does Dürer materialise the vision: God-Father, an aged King—a Charlemagne ”

“ The dead Christ, whose still open lips have not long since uttered "Into Thy hands, O Lord," is being gently laid on the ground, His poor pierced feet rigid, the muscles of His legs stiff as in a cramp. ”

“ There, reader, you have, in my opinion, the greatness of Dürer; he never surpassed it. It is the consciousness of man's impotence; it is the saddest sight mortal eyes can behold—that of a man who has lost faith in himself. ”

“ That Dürer was unimaginative in the higher sense of the word; that he, like the Spirit of the Reformation, sought salvation in the WORD. Throughout Dürer's Art we feel that it was constrained, hampered by his inordinate love of literal truthfulness; not one of his works ever rises even to the level of Raphael's "Madonna della Seggiola." Like German philosophy, his works are so carefully elaborated in detail that the glorious whole is lost in more or less warring details. His Art suffers from insubordination—all facts are co-ordinated. ”

“ Imagination was not Dürer's "forte"; it is therefore with all the greater pleasure that we turn to his portraits.
Portraits are always more satisfactory than subject pictures, a fact which is particularly noticeable to-day. There are scores of painters whose portrait-painting is considerably more impressive than their subject-painting—not because portrait-painting is less difficult, but because it is more difficult to detect the weaknesses of painting in a portrait. ”

“ To understand Dürer you require time; each print of the "Passions," "The Life of Mary," the "Apokalypse," should be read like a page printed in smallest type, with thought and some eye-strain. That of course goes very much against the grain of our own age; we demand large type and short stories.
The study of his work entails considerable self-sacrifice. Your own likes and dislikes you have to suppress, and try to see with eyes that belong to an age long since gone. Do not despise the less self-sacrificing, who refuse the study of old Art ”

“ The analytical juxtaposition of facts was a characteristic of the age. Dürer's Art was a step forward; he—like Raphael, like Titian—dovetailed, where earlier men scarcely joined. Dürer has as yet not the power that even the next generation began to acquire—he never suggests anything; he works everything out, down to the minutest details. ”

“ The green tree is the tree to water; the dead tree—be its black branches and sere leaves never so picturesque—is beyond the need of your attentions.
The Scylla and Charybdis of æsthetic reformers is praise of the old, and poor appraising of the new.
Now the old Italians thought Dürer a most admirable artist, blamed what they called the defects of his Art on the ungainliness of his models, and felt convinced that he might have easily been the first among the Italians had he lived there, instead of the first among the "Flemings." ”

“ One more remark: his contemporaries and critics praised the extraordinary technical skill with which he could draw straight lines without the aid of a ruler, or the astounding legerdemain with which he reproduced every single hair in a curl—the "Paganini" worship which runs through all the ages; which in itself is fruitless; touches the fiddle-strings at best or cerebral cords, not heart-strings. ”

“ There are so many misconceptions about Dürer. He was a deep-thinking man; he was like the churches of the North—narrow, steep, dimly religious within, full of traceries, lacework, gargoyles, and grotesques without.
I have read that it used to be said in Italy: All the cities of Germany were blind, with the exception of Nuremberg, which was one-eyed. True! True also of Dürer and German Art.
In 1526, two years before his death, Dürer presented a panel to his native city, now cut in two, robbed of its Protestant inscription, and hanging in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich. Dürer's last great work! ”

“ The Magdalen holds the right hand of the beloved body, and the stricken mother of Christ is represented in a manner almost worthy of the classic Niobe. Wonderfully expressive, too, are all the hands in this picture. Dürer found never-ending interest in the expressiveness of the hand. But if we were to seek in his colour any beauty other than intensity, we should be disappointed, as we should for the matter of that in any picture painted before the advent of Titian. ”

“ He, too, is a man of knowledge; he does his work faithfully and exceedingly well, but leaves it there. He never moralises, draws no conclusions, infers nothing, states merely facts—and if the truth must be said, is the greater craftsman. ”

“ Hieronymus Holzschuer is another of Dürer's strikingly successful efforts to portray both form and mind, and although the colour of the man's face is of a conventional pink, yet the pale blue background, the white hair, the pink flesh, and the glaring eyes stamp themselves indelibly on the mind of the beholder, much to the detriment of the other picture in the Berlin Gallery, Jacob Muffel. ”

“ All these points have to be realised before one can hope to understand Dürer even faintly. Again, when we examine more closely the apparently quaint and fantastic form his mode of visualising takes, we must make allowances for the habits and customs and costumes of the times—as indeed one has to, in the case of all old masters, and for which reason I humbly submit that the study of old masters properly belongs to the few, not the many. ”

“ When he came to put these materialisations into the form of pictures or prints, the craftsman side, the practical side of his nature, resolved them into scientific problems, with the remarkable result that these visions are hung on purely materialistic facts. From our modern point of view Dürer was decidedly lacking in artistic imagination, which even such men as Goya and Blake, or "si parva licet comparere magnis" John Martin and Gustave Doré, and the delightful Arthur Rackham of our own times possess. ”

“ He himself knew it, and towards the end of this life hated its complexity, caused by the desire to represent in one picture the successive development of the spoken or written word; a desire which even in our days has not completely disappeared.
Dürer therefore appeals to us of to-day more through such conceptions as the wings of the Paumgaertner altar-piece, or the four Temperaments (St. Peter, St. John, St. Mark, and St. Paul) , than through the crowded centre panels of his altar-pieces ”