The man who wrote this was clearly better able to wield the pencil or brush than to pass theological judgment on the questions under discussion. Dürer was already among the most famous men of the day. Led astray by the praise of the Humanists, he, and other similarly privileged minds, easily exceeded the limits of their calling, abetted as they were by the evil tendency to individualism and personal independence prevalent among the best men of the day. On his return to Nuremberg in the autumn of 1521 he lived entirely for his art and remote from all else, clinging to the opinions he had already embraced, or at least suspending his judgment. How greatly the real or imaginary abuses in Catholic practice were capable of exciting him, especially where avarice appeared to play a part, is proved by his indignant inscription in 1523 to an Ostendorfer woodcut, representing the veneration of a picture of our Lady at Ratisbon: “This spectre has risen up against Holy Scripture at Regenspurg ... out of greed of gain”; his wish is that Mary should be rightly venerated “in Christ.” In 1526 he presented his picture of the four Apostles, now the ornament of the Munich Pinacothek, to the Nuremberg bench of magistrates who had just established Protestantism in the city, exhorting them “to accept no human inventions in place of the Word of God, for God will not allow His Word to be either added to or detracted from.” The “warnings,” in the form of texts, afterwards removed, which he placed in the mouths of Peter, John, Paul and Mark in his celebrated picture, also refer to religious seducers and false prophets, more particularly those who seize on the possessions of the poor through avarice and greed. We can hardly do otherwise than apply these texts to the abuses which met with his disapproval, and alleged false teaching of the Catholic Church. It is plain that the Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria understood them in this sense when he ordered their removal. This view is also supported by Dürer’s letter in 1524 to Nicholas Kratzer, in which he says: “We are derided as heretics,” but this must be endured. At a later date Pirkheimer seems to have regarded him as merely “on the way to becoming a Lutheran” (p. 40). It cannot be affirmed with certainty that, when he died suddenly at Nuremberg, on April 6, 1528, he was either entirely convinced of the justice of Luther’s cause or had reverted to Catholicism.[106] At any rate, his art grew up on the soil of the Church.