The man who cries out: "Just look how that is done!" "Who could have
believed a single line could have expressed so much?" judges as an
artist, a craftsman. The man who, like Jean Francois Millet, exclaims:
"How fine! How grand! How delicate! How beautiful!" judges as a creator.
He sees that "it is good." An artist--a creator--may possess either or
even both the two former temperaments; but as an artist he must be
governed by the latter two, either singly or combined. Dürer, doubtless,
had a considerable share in all four of these points of view. He
delighted in objects as such, in the new and the strange as new and
strange, in the intricate as intricate, in the powerful as powerful. And
above all in his drawings does he manifest this direct and childish
interest and curiosity. He was also in search of a system, of an
intellectual key or plan of things; and in the many drawings he devoted
to explaining or developing his ideas of proportion, of perspective, of
architecture, he shows this bias strongly. But nearly every drawing by
him, or attributed to him, manifests the third of these temperaments.
The never-ceasing economy and daring of the invention displayed in his
touch, or, as he would have said, "in his hand," is almost as signal as
his perfect assurance and composure. And when one reflects that he was
not, like Rembrandt, an artist who made great or habitual use of the
spaces of shade and light, but that his workmanship is almost entirely
confined to the expressive power of lines, wonder is only increased. Of
the fourth character that creates and estimates value, though in certain
works Dürer rises to supreme heights, though in almost all his important
works he appeases expectation, yet often where he could surely have done
much better he seems to have been content not to exert his rarest
gifts, but rather to play with or parade those that are secondary. Not
only is this so in drawings like the _Dance of Monkeys_ at Basle, done
to content his friend the reformer Felix Frey (see page 168), and in the
borders designed to amuse Maximilian during the hours that custom
ordained he should pretend to give to prayer; but there are drawings
which were not apparently thrown as sops to the idleness of others, but
done to content some half-vacant mood of his own (see Lippmann, 41, 83,
394, 4.20, 333).
In such drawings the economy and daring of the strokes is always
admirable, can only be compared to that in drawings by Rembrandt and
Hokusai; but the occasion is often idle, or treated with a condescension
which well-nigh amounts to indifference. There is no impressiveness of
allure, no intention in the proportions or disposition on the paper such
as Erasmus justly praised in the engravings on copper, probably
recollecting something which Dürer himself had said (see page 186).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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