The works of these men, however, were only the most important and the best of a vast number of woodcuts which, during the first half of the sixteenth century, appeared in Germany during this period of the greatest popularity of the art. Under the personal influence of Dürer, or under the influence of the numerous and widely-spread prints by himself and his associates, many other artists of merit acquired skill in engraving, both on metal and in wood, and employed it upon a great variety of subjects. The devotion of mediæval art wholly to church decoration and to the representation of religious scenes had passed away in all quarters of the world; in Italy the artists had come to treat the subjects of pagan imagination, the beings and scenes of classical mythology; in Germany the people had homelier tasks, and religious art there yielded to the interest which men felt in the incidents and objects of common life; in both countries wealth took the place of religion as the patron of art; and, although art still dealt with the story of the Scriptures and the martyrs, because these filled so important a place in the imagination of the people, still it had become secularized. This change was naturally shown in the arts of engraving more than in painting, because engraving in copper and on wood had a far greater sphere of influence, and came into more intimate relations with the popular life, and because the illustration of books offered a greater variety of subject. In German engraving, from this time, the actual life of the town and the peasantry was represented almost as often as the history of the Saviour and the saints; the village festival, the procession of the wedding-guests, the fêtes of the town, the employments and costumes of the citizens, recur with the same frequency as the passion of the Lord and the Old Testament stories; the joy and sorrow of ordinary life, the objects of ordinary observation and thought, the humorous, the humble, and the satirical, sometimes strangely mingled with ill-understood mythology and badly-caricatured classicism, are the constant theme of the engravers.