Dürer's paintings have suffered more by the malignity of fortune than any of his other works. Several have disappeared entirely, and several are but wrecks of what they once were. Others are, as he tells us, "ordinary pictures," of which "I will in a year paint a pile which no one would believe it possible for one man to do in the time," and are perhaps more the work of assistants than of the master. Others, again, have since been repainted, more or less disastrously. Yet enough remain to show us that Dürer was not a painter born, in the sense that Titian and Correggio or Rembrandt and Rubens are; nay, not even in the sense that a Jan Van Eyck or a Mantegna is. Mantegna is certainly the painter with whom Dürer has most affinity, and whose method of employing pigment is least removed from his; but Mantegna is a born colourist--a man whose eye for colour is like a musician's ear for melody--while Dürer is at best with difficulty able to avoid glaring discords, and, if we are to judge by the "ordinary pictures," did not avoid them. Again, Mantegna is not so dependent on line as Dürer--nearly the whole of whose surface is produced by hatching with the brush point. These facts may, perhaps, account for the large portion of Dürer's time devoted to engraving. As an engraver he early found a style for himself, which he continued to develop to the end of his life. As a painter he was for ever experimenting, influenced now by Jacopo de' Barbari, again by Bellini and the pictures he saw at Venice, and yet again by those he saw in the Netherlands. As Velasquez, after each of his journeys to Italy, returns to attempt a mythological picture in the grand style, so Dürer turns to painting after his return from Venice or from the Netherlands; and his pictures divide themselves into three groups: those painted after or during his _Wanderjahre_ and before he went to Venice in 1505, those painted there and during the next five years after his return, and those painted in the Netherlands or commenced immediately on his return thence. II The mediums of oil and tempera lend themselves to the production of broad-coloured surfaces that merge imperceptibly into one another. There are men the fundamental unit of whose picture language is a blot or shape; as children or as savages, they would find these most capable of expressing what they saw. There are others for whom the scratch or line is the fundamental unit, for whom every object is most naturally expressed by an outline. There are, of course, men who present us with every possible blend of these two fundamental forms of picture language.