FROM A DRAWING BY HIMSELF AT THE AGE OF THIRTEEN] Benvenuto Cellini has told us how his father, in like fashion, was eager that he should practise the "accursed art" of music. Durer's father, however, soon gave in and in 1486 apprenticed the boy to Michel Wolgemut. That extraordinarily beautiful, and, for a boy of that age, marvellously executed portrait of himself at the age of thirteen (now at Vienna) must have shown the father something of the power that lay undeveloped in his son. So "it was arranged that I should serve him for three years. During that time God gave me great industry so that I learnt many things; but I had to suffer much at the hands of the other apprentices." * * * * * Painting was already in vogue at Nuremberg in the fourteenth century, but it was never much encouraged. One of the reasons may perhaps have been that there was little opportunity for fresco painting here, as in Italy; for the Gothic style of architecture offers no large surfaces that seem to demand the relief of colour and drawing. Painting was regarded at first merely as an assistant of architecture, glass-blowing and sculpture, for the purposes of decoration and ornament, and painters therefore always continued to be treated as mere artisans of one craft or another. "Here I am a master," writes Durer from Italy, "at home a Parasite." But, however regarded, the art of painting had attained to the dignity of a separate existence when, in the fourteenth century, it was called in to supply the place of sculpture and to furnish altar-pieces and memorial pictures attached to monuments. These latter, "epitaphs," are highly characteristic of northern art, and no better examples of them are to be found than in the great churches of Nuremberg. Many of them, in their original positions, can be seen in the Churches of St. Lorenz and St. Sebald, executed for the great burgher families--Imhoffs, Tuchers, Holzschuhers, etc.--on the death of one of their number. An early example is that of Paul Stromer (1406) in St. Lorenzkirche. The oldest Nuremberg picture is said to be an altarpiece in St. Jakobskirche. A great advance on this awkward work is the celebrated Imhoff'sche Altar-piece in the Lorenzkirche (1418-22). Of the same period, but more full of colour and movement, are the pictures of the Deokarus Altar in the same church, of the Altar of the Sacristy in St. Jakobskirche, and notably of the Tuchersche Altar in the Frauenkirche (1440). The figures in this picture are more severe and also more vigorous than the graceful, soft, full figures of the Imhoff'sche Altar-piece. The names of the painters of these works are unknown. Berthold, who was commissioned by the Council in 1423 to paint the interior of the Rathaus, is the only early painter of note whose name has survived. To him some of the earliest epitaphs are safely to be attributed.