[Illustration] A week after Corpus Christi day[V-50] Durer left Antwerp for Malines, where the Archduchess Margaret, the aunt of the emperor Charles V, was then residing. He took up his lodgings with Henry de Bles, a painter of considerable reputation, called Civetta by the Italians, from the owl which he painted as a mark in most of his pictures; and the painters and statuaries, as at Antwerp and other places, invited him to an entertainment and treated him with great respect. He waited on the archduchess and showed her his portrait of the emperor, and would have presented it to her, but she would by no means accept of it;--probably because she could not well receive such a gift without making the artist a suitable return, for it appears, from a subsequent passage in Durer’s Journal, that she had no particular objection to receive other works of art when they cost her nothing. [Footnote V-50: Corpus Christi day is a moveable festival, and is celebrated on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday.] In the course of a few days Durer returned to Antwerp, where he shortly afterwards saw Lucas Van Leyden, the celebrated painter and engraver, whose plates at that time were by many considered nearly equal to his own. Durer’s brief notice of his talented contemporary is as follows: “Received an invitation from Master Lucas, who engraves on copper. He is a little man, and a native of Leyden in Holland.” Subsequently he mentions having drawn Lucas’s portrait in crayons; and having exchanged some of his own works to the value of eight florins for a complete set of Lucas’s engravings. Durer in this part of his Journal, after enumerating the portraits he had taken and the exchanges he had made since his return from Malines to Antwerp, thus speaks of the manner in which he was rewarded: “In all my transactions in the Netherlands--for my paintings, drawings, and in disposing of my works--both with high and low I have had the disadvantage. The Lady Margaret, especially, for all that I have given her and done for her, has not made me the least recompense.”