is friend, and
found him, although then very old, still with the pencils in his hand
and painting busily. Great pleasure had Vasari in beholding his works
and in conversing with the master.
It may be affirmed, then, that Titian, having adorned Venice, or
rather all Italy, and other parts of the world, with excellent
paintings, well merits to be loved and respected by artists, and in
many things to be admired and imitated also, as one who has produced,
and is producing, work of infinite merit; nay, such as must endure
while the memory of illustrious men shall remain.
ALBERT DUeRER[3]
[Footnote 3: Copyright, 1894, by Helmar Hess.]
By W. J. HOLLAND, Chancellor of the Western University of Pennsylvania
(1471-1528)
[Illustration: Albert Duerer.]
It has been given to some men to be not only great in the domain of
art by reason of that which they have themselves succeeded in
producing, but by reason of that which they have inspired other men to
produce. They have been not merely artists, but teachers, who by
precept and example have moulded the whole current and drift of
artistic thought in the ages and lands to which they have belonged.
Among these lofty spirits, who live through the centuries not only in
what their hands once fashioned, but still more in what they have
inspired others to do, undoubtedly one of the greatest is Albert
Duerer. Justly reckoned as the representative artist of Germany, he has
the peculiar honor of having raised the craft of the engraver to its
true position, as one of the fine arts. As a painter not unworthy to
be classified with Titian and Raphael, his contemporaries upon Italian
soil, he poured the wealth of his genius into woodcuts and
copperplates, and taught men the practically measureless capacity of
what before his day had been a rudimentary art.
Duerer was born in Nuremberg on May 21, 1471. The family was of
Hungarian origin, though the name is German, and is derived from
Thuerer, meaning a maker of doors. The ancestral calling of the family
probably was that of the carpenter. Albert Duerer, the father of the
great artist, was a goldsmith, and settled about 1460 in Nuremberg,
where he served as an assistant to Hieronymus Holper, a master
goldsmith, whose daughter, Barbara, he married in 1468. He was at the
time forty years of age, and she fifteen. As the result of the union
eighteen children were born into the world, of whom Albrecht was the
second. The
|