Although it is by no means unlikely that Albert Durer might engrave two or three wood-cuts of his own designing, yet, after a careful examination of most of those that bear his mark, I cannot find one which is so decidedly superior to the rest as to induce an opinion of its being engraved by himself; and I cannot for a moment believe that an artist of his great talents, and who painted so many pictures, engraved so many copper-plates, and made so many designs, could find time to engrave even a small part of the many wood-cuts which have been supposed to be executed by him, and which a common wood engraver might execute as well. “If Durer himself had engraved on wood,” says Bartsch in the seventh volume of his Peintre-Graveur, “it is most likely that among the many particular accounts which we have of his different pursuits, and of the various kind of works which he has left, the fact of his having applied himself to wood engraving would certainly have been transmitted in a manner no less explicit; but, far from finding the least trace of it, everything that relates to this subject proves that he had never employed himself in this kind of work. He is always described as a painter, a designer, or an editor of works engraved on wood, but never as a wood engraver.”[V-12] I also further agree with Bartsch, who thinks that the wood-cuts which contain the marks of Lucas Cranach, Hans Burgmair, and others who are known to have been painters of considerable reputation in their day, were not engraved by those artists, but only designed or drawn by them on the block. [Footnote V-12: At the end of the first edition of the cuts illustrative of the Apocalypse, 1498, we find the words: “_Gedrukt durch Albrecht Durer, Maler_,”--Printed by Albert Durer, painter; and the same in Latin in the second edition, printed about 1510. The passion of Christ and the History of the Virgin are respectively said to have been “_effigiata_” and “_per figuras digesta_”--“drawn” and “pictorially represented” by Albert Durer; and the cuts of the Triumphal Car of the Emperor Maximilian are described as being “_erfunden und geordnet_”--“invented and arranged” by him.--Bartsch, Peintre-Graveur, tom. vii. p. 28.]