Albert Durer Part 22

But some are of another opinion, and discuss how men ought to be made. I will not argue with them about that. I hold Nature for Master in such matters, and the fancy of men for delusion.

And then follows the pa.s.sage quoted by Sir Martin Conway (see p. 289).

It is obvious that, joined with the two preceding sentences, this pa.s.sage can in no way be made to serve the academical pract.i.tioner, as it seems to when taken alone. In the same way, the sentence printed in italics in the above quotation, if isolated, would certainly seem to serve the scientific pract.i.tioners and their slavish realism, though in connection with those that follow this is no longer possible. Durer regards nature as providing raw material for a creation which may not tally exactly with any individual natural object. This was the Greek artists' idea of the serviceableness of nature, as revealed both by their practice and by such traditions as that concerning Zeuxis and his five beautiful models for the figure of Venus. But Durer does not confine the use of his canons even to this aim, but clearly perceived their utility in regard to quite other aims, as is shown by the pa.s.sage beginning, "It is not to be wondered at," &c. (see p. 286), in which the imagination of figures not merely intended to embody beautiful or newly a.s.sorted proportions is clearly considered; and if we review Durer's actual work we shall see how much oftener he created figures for picturesque or dramatic effect than he did to embody beautiful proportions in them, though he evidently also considered the last purpose as of the first importance, as we see when he goes on to say:

Let any one who thinks I alter the human form too much or too little take care to avoid my error and follow nature. There are many different kinds of men in various lands: whoso travels far will find this to be so, and see it before his eyes. We are considering about the most beautiful human figure conceivable, but (only) the Maker of the world knows how that should be. Even if we succeed well we do but approach towards it from afar. For we ourselves have differences of perception, and the vulgar who follow only their own taste usually err. Therefore I do not advise any one to follow me, for I only do what I can, and that is not enough even to satisfy myself.

The extreme complexity of Durer's ideas and their application was a natural result of their having been born of his experience. For excellence is extremely various, and widely scattered through the world.

The simplicity of a true work of art results merely from some excellence having been singled out from all foreign circ.u.mstances, and presented as vividly as it was intensely apprehended. This excellence may be one of proportion or one of many other kinds. Now, a figure conceived by an artist, whether he value it for its choicely a.s.sorted proportions or for picturesque or dramatic effect, may need to be developed before it is serviceable in an elaborate work of art.

Artists who work rapidly, and, whose pictures are dominated by pa.s.sing moods, have always been in the habit of taking great licences with proportion, and, indeed, with all matters of fact. Durer's aim is to endow the artist who elaborates his work slowly with a similar freedom.

This energy and power in rapid work it is the ever-renewed despair of artists to feel themselves losing in the process of elaboration. And one of the reasons for this is that in larger or more elaborate work, the statement, being more ample, is expected to be also more comprehensive and exhaustive; for the time required begets after-thoughts as to the real nature of the object viewed apart from the mood, which is the only excuse for the work; and so some of the artist's attention is drawn away to facts and aspects which it would have been the success of his work to have ignored. Durer's object was to help a man to carry out his essential intention, and that alone, in a carefully elaborated picture; the problems faced were precisely similar to those so successfully coped with in Greek statues. In the first place, he would have pointed out that all sketches will not bear elaboration if their merit depends on extreme licence, for instance. Next, that a man who had a standard of proportion could see wherein the deviations of his sketched figure were essential to the effect he wished it to produce, and wherein they were unessential. Then, if he drew the normal figure large, he would be able to deviate from it in exactly the right places and to the right degree to reproduce the desired effect. But to do this he must also have a general notion of how deviations from a normal proportion could be made consistent throughout all the measurements involved not that he would in every case want to make them consistent. Now, there is a cla.s.s of artists for whom all these suggestions of Durer's must for ever remain useless, for all science of production is impossible for those whose only success lies in improvisation; such improvisations, however dazzling or however delightful they may be, are, nevertheless, the cla.s.s of art-works furthest removed in spirit and in method from Greek statuary. I do not say that they need be inferior; I say that they are opposite in method. And, had circ.u.mstances permitted, or Durer's dowry of great gifts been more complete than it was, and enabled him to become as great a creator of pictures as he is a great draughtsman and portrait-painter, no doubt his pictures would have resembled Greek statues both in their effect and their method, however different they might have been in subject and in range. To talk about "beauty" being sacrificed to "truth," with Prof. Thausing; or the ideal of the North being "strength" in works of art as in life, with Sir Martin Conway;--is to confuse the issue and deceive oneself. To have mistaken the proper end of art, beauty, by thinking it was "truth" or "strength," is to have failed to labour in the right direction; that is all-who-ever may condone the failure.

VI

Again, Sir Martin Conway tells us:

The laws of perspective can be deduced with certainty from mathematical first principles, the canon of proportions' could only be constructed empirically as the result of repeated observations. Nevertheless, once constructed, it can certainly be used as Durer suggested. Its use has practically been superseded by the study of anatomy.

This last phrase shows us in a flash how far the writer when he wrote it was from apprehending Durer's meaning. How could the study of anatomy ever do for an artist what Durer was trying to do? No doubt Sir Martin had Michael Angelo in his mind's eye; and it is true that he studied anatomy, and that his influence has been, on the whole, paramount with artists attempting subjects of this kind ever since. Whether Michael Angelo studied proportion or not, his practice exemplifies Durer's meaning splendidly. No anatomical research could have led him to construct figures nine to twelve, or even fifteen to twenty, heads high--to do which, as his work developed, more and more became his practice, especially in designs and sketches for compositions. To arrive at such proportions he followed his imaginative instinct. He found that these monstrous deviations from the normal (which, of course, in a general sense he recognised, whether he gave any study to rendering it precise or not) produced the effect on his mind that he wished to produce on the minds of others--an effect that was emotional and peculiar to his habitual moods. We know that his const.i.tution gave him the staying-power, while his fiery t.i.tanic spirit gave him the energy, to carry out and perfect his mighty frescoes and statues at the same heat that the creative hour yields other men for the production of a sketch alone. This giant son of Time was able to live for days and weeks together in a state of mind two or three consecutive hours of which exhaust the average master even. Considering the rapidity and intensity of his mental process, it is a miracle that, in so many works and to so great a degree, he respected the too much and too little of human reason, and allowed himself to be governed by what the Greeks called a sense of measure, instead of yielding to his native impetuosity and becoming an a-thousand-fold-greater-Blake; and ill.u.s.trating, to the delight of active and short-winded intelligences, and the stupefaction of slow and dull ones, the futility of eccentricity and the frivolity of pa.s.sion when unseconded by constancy of character and labour. For futile, in the arts, is whatever the sense of beauty must condemn, however well-intentioned; and frivolous is the pa.s.sion that forgets the end it would attain, and becomes merely a private rhapsody, however astonis.h.i.+ng its developments; slowly but surely it will be seen that such fireworks do not vitally concern us. The proportions of many of Michael Angelo's figures are as far removed from any possible normal standard as what Durer calls "this my swiftness," in the abnormally tall and stout figures among the diagrams ill.u.s.trating his book.

And this is where Durer's idea comes nearer to Greek practice. For by letting the striking rather than the subtle govern his departures from the mean, Michael Angelo found himself always bound to go beyond himself; as the palate which once has entertained strong stimulants demands that the dose be continually strengthened. Now this is in entire conformity with the impatience which was perhaps his greatest weakness; just as Durer's too methodical approach is in conformity with that acquiescence in the insufficiency of his conditions which made him in his weak moments swear never again to undertake those better cla.s.ses of work which were less adequately paid, or made him content to display mere manual dexterity rather than do nothing on his days of darkness, suffering and depression: we may add, which made him choose to live at Nuremberg and refuse a better income and more suitable surroundings at Venice.

It is obviously the more hopeful way to create a beautiful figure first and discover a mathematical way of reproducing its most essential proportions afterwards; and no doubt this is what Durer intended should be done; and in consequence he felt a need, and sought to supply it, for mechanical means to simplify, shorten and render more sure that part of the process which must necessarily partake something of the nature of drudgery, if great finish is to be combined with splendid design. The romantic, impulsive _improvisatore_ does not feel this need, considers it bound to defeat its own aim; and, given his own gifts, he is right.

But none the less, there are the Greek statues elaborated with a thoroughness which, if it ever dims or veils the creative intention, does so in a degree so slight as to seem amply compensated by the sense of ease maintained in spite of the innumerable difficulties overcome; there are besides a score or more of Durer's copper engravings with their imperturbable adequacy of minute painstaking, never for a moment sleepy or mechanical or lifeless. The one aim need not excommunicate the other even in the same individual; far less need this be so in different artists, with diverse temperaments, diverse apt.i.tudes.

VII

The application of this idea does not end with the simple proportions of measurement between the limbs and parts of the figure; it is also concerned with what is called the modelling, and the treatment of surfaces such as the draperies, the hair, the fleshy portions and those beneath which the bony structure comes to prominence; in painting it may be applied to the chiaroscuro and colour. Reynolds' remarks on the Venetians in his Eighth Discourse well ill.u.s.trate this fact. He says:

It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed that the ma.s.ses of light in a picture be always of a warm mellow colour, yellow, red, or a yellowish-white; and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept _almost_ entirely out of these ma.s.ses, and be used only to support and set off these warm colours; and, for this purpose, a small _proportion_ of cold colours will be sufficient.

If this conduct be reversed, let the light be cold, and the surrounding colours warm, as we often see in the works of the Roman and Florentine painters; and it will be out of the power of art, even in the hands of Rubens or t.i.tian, to make a picture splendid or harmonious.[86]

Here we see a great colourist attempting to establish a canon for colour. Had he lived at an earlier period, before expression had become generally a subject of criticism, he would have described his discovery in less guarded and elastic language, such as is now applied to scientific laws. And then he might have been as excusably misunderstood as Leonardo and Durer have been; as it is, the misunderstanding dealt out to him is quite without excuse.

Rembrandt, not only exemplifies the impressiveness of great deviations in structural proportions in much the same degree as Michael Angelo, using what the Greeks and Durer would doubtless have considered a dangerous liberty, however much they might have felt bound to admire the results obtained; not only does he do this when, for instance, he represents Jesus now as a giant, now as almost a dwarf, according to the imaginative impression which he chooses to create; but he follows a similar process in his black and white pattern. For among his works there are etchings, which, though often supposed to have been left unfinished, are discerned by those with a sense for beauties of this cla.s.s to be marvellously complete, stimulating, and satisfying, and in the nicest harmony with the other impressions produced by the mental point of view from which the subject is viewed, as also by the main lines and proportions of the composition, and to yield the visual delight most suitable to the occasion. Durer and the Greeks are at one with Michael Angelo and Rembrandt in condemning by their practice all purely mechanical application of ideas or methods to the production of works of creative art, such as is exemplified by artists of more limited aims and powers; by academical pract.i.tioners, by theoretical scientists calling themselves impressionists, luminarists, naturalists, or any other name. For artists whose temperaments are impeded by some unhappy slowness, or difficulty in concentrating themselves, methods of procedure similar to those elaborated by Durer in his books on proportion, properly understood, must be a real aid and benefit; as those who are essentially improvisors may help themselves and supply their deficiencies by methods similar to those which Reynolds describes as practised by Gainsborough.

"He even framed a kind of model of landscapes on his table, composed of broken stones, dried herbs and pieces of broken gla.s.s, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees and water" (Fourteenth Discourse).

This process resembles that of tracing faces or scenes from the life of gnomes in glowing caverns among coals of fire on a winter's eve; it is resorted to in one form or another by all creative artists, but it is peculiarly useful to men like Gainsborough, whose art tends always to become an improvisation, whatever strenuous discipline they may have subjected themselves to in their days of ardent youth.

VIII

Perhaps Durer's actual standards for the normal, his actual methods for creating self-consistent variations from it, are not likely to prove of much use, even when artists shall be sufficiently educated to understand them; nevertheless, the principle which informs them has been latent in the work of all great creators; is marvellously fulfilled indeed, in Greek statuary. The work of Antoine Louis Barye, that great and little-understood master--as far as I am able to judge, the only modern artist who has made science serve him instead of being seduced by her--exemplifies this central idea of Durer's almost as fully as the Greek masterpieces. The future of art appears to me to lie in the hands of those artists who shall be able to grapple with the new means offered them by the advance of science, as he did, and be as little or even less seduced than he was by the foolish idea that art can become science without ceasing to be art, which has handicapped and defeated the efforts of so many industrious and talented men of late years. So truly is this the case that the improvisor appears to many as the only true artist, and his uncontrolled caprices as the farthest reach of human constructive power.

In any case, no artist is unhappy if a docile and hopeful disposition enables him to see in the masterpieces of Greek sculpture the reward of an easy balance of both temperaments and methods, the improvisor's and the elaborator's, under felicitous circ.u.mstances, by men better endowed than himself. And this though never history and archaeology shall be in a position to give him information sufficient to determine that his faith is wholly warranted.

A golden age is a golden dream, that sheds A golden light on waking hours, on toil, On leisure, and on finished works.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 85: "Literary Remains of Albrecht Durer," p. 166.]

[Footnote 86: See also III Discourse where he defends Durer against Bacon.]

CHAPTER II

THE IMPORTANCE OF DOCILITY

I

I now intend to re-arrange what seem the most interesting of the sentences on the theory of art which are found in Durer's MSS. and books on proportion. He did not give them the final form or order which he intended, and it seems to me that to arrange the more important according to the subjects they treat of will be the simplest way of arriving at general conceptions as to their tendency and value. We shall thus bring together repet.i.tions of the same thought and contradictory answers to the same question; and after each series of sentences, I myself shall discuss the points raised, ill.u.s.trating my remarks from modern writers whose opinion in these matters seems to me deserving of most attention. I have heard it said by the late Mr. Arthur Strong that Durer's art is always didactic; and Durer as a writer on art certainly has ever before his mind this one object, to teach others, or, as I should prefer to phrase it, to help others to learn. For he himself is continually confessing that he cannot yet answer his own questions, and it seems to me that the best teacher is always he who most desires to increase his knowledge, not indeed to h.o.a.rd it as some do and make of it a personal possession; intellectual misers, for ever gnas.h.i.+ng their teeth over the reputations or the pretensions of others. No, but one who desires knowledge for its own sake and welcomes it in others with as much satisfaction as he gains it for himself. Docility, i.e., teachableness, let me point out once more, seems to be the necessary midwife of genius, without the aid of which it often labours in vain, or brings forth strange incongruous and misshapen births.

Sad is the condition of a brilliant and fiery spirit shut up in a man's brain without the humble a.s.sistance of this lively, meek and patient virtue! What unrelieved and insupportable throes of agony must be borne by such a spirit, and how often does such labour end in misanthropy or madness! The records of the lives of exceptionally-gifted men tell us only too clearly what pains those are, and how frequently they have been borne. So I fancy I cannot do better than choose out for my first section sentences which praise or advocate the effort to learn, or attempt to enlighten those who make such an effort on the choice of teachers and disciplines.

II

I shall not hesitate to transpose sentences even when they appear in connected pa.s.sages, in order, as I hope, to bring out more clearly their connection. For Durer was not a writer by profession, and his thoughts were often more abundant than he knew how to deal with.

Before starting, however, I must prefix to my quotations some account of the four MS. books in the British Museum from which they are princ.i.p.ally taken. Rough drafts in Pirkheimer's handwriting were found among them, but of Durer's work Sir Martin Conway tells us:

The volumes contain upwards of seven hundred leaves and sc.r.a.ps of paper of various kinds, covered at different dates with more or less elaborate outline drawings, and more or less corrected drafts for works published or planned by Durer. Interspersed among them are geometrical and other sketches.

He was in the habit of correcting and re-copying, again and again, what he had written. Sometimes he would jot down a sentence alongside of matter to which it had no relation. This sentence he would afterwards introduce in its right connection. There are in these volumes no less than four drafts of the beginning of a Dedication to Pirkheimer of the Books of Human Proportions. Two other drafts of this same dedication are among the Dresden MSS. The opening sentences of the Introduction to the same work were likewise, as will be seen, the subject of frequent revision.

These drafts, notes and sketches date from 1508 to 1523. Some collector had had them cut out, gummed together, and bound without the slightest regard to order, or even to the sequence of consecutive pa.s.sages. In January 1890 the volumes were taken to pieces and rearranged by Miss Lina Eckenstein, who had previously made the admirable translations of them for Sir Martin Conway's "Literary Remains of Albrecht Durer," from which my quotations are taken.

The contents of the volumes as rearranged may be roughly described as follows:

Volume 1. Drawings of whole figures and portions of the body, ill.u.s.trating Durer's theories of Proportion. Drawings of a solid octogon. Six coloured drawings of crystals. The description of the Ionic order of architecture. Drawings of columns with measurements. A scale for Human Proportions. A table of contents for a work on Geometry.

Notes on perspective, curves, folds, &c. The different kinds of temple after Vitruvius. Mathematical diagrams, &c.

Volume II. Draft of a dedicatory letter to King Ferdinand (see page 180). Drafts and drawings for "The Art of Fortification." Drawing of a s.h.i.+eld with a rearing horse. Mantles of Netherlandish women and nuns. A Latin inscription for his own portrait. Notes on "Proportion," and on the feast of the Rosenkranz. Scale for Human Proportions. An alphabet.

Draft of a dedication for the books on Proportion. Sketch of a skeleton.

Studies of architecture. Venetian houses and roofs. Sketches of a church, a house, a tower, a drapery, &c.

Volume III. Drafts of a projected work on Painting and on the study of Proportion. Drafts for the dedication, the preface, and for a work on Esthetics. Drawings of a male body, a female body, and a piece of drapery. Notes and drawings for the proportions of heads, hands, feet, outline curves, a child, a woman, &c.

Volume IV. Proportions of a man, a fat woman, the head of the average woman, the young woman, &c. Short Profession of Faith (see page 130).

Scale for Human Proportions, &c. Fragments of the Preface of Essay on Aesthetics, &c. Grimacing and distorted faces. Use of measurements. On the characters of faces, thick, thin, broad, narrow, &c. Sketches of a dragon and of an angel for Maximilian's Triumphal Procession. List of Luther's works (see page 130). Drawings of human bodies proportioned to squares.