FA 4018.2 1874, Jan. 19. Minot Fund. $9.00 Ten of the Illustrations in this volume are reproductions by the Autotype (carbon) process, and are printed in permanent tints by Messrs. Cundall and Fleming, under licence from the Autotype Company, Limited. LONDON R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL. 37 PREFACE. IT appears at first sight somewhat strange that a separate life of the greatest of German artists should never before have been published in England; for the works-at any rate the engraved works —of Albrecht Dürer have for many years been held in high estimation in this country by a certain class of thoughtful students of art and literature. But the rapid development of art education and the growth of true feeling in art which the last few years have witnessed, were both necessary before such a work could, with any chance of success, be addressed to general readers. For Albrecht Dürer is by no means an artist who appeals to all the world. The beauty and holiness of Raphael, the grace of Correggio, the glorious colour of Titian and Rubens-even the power and majesty of Michael Angelo-can be appreciated to some extent by all but the most ignorant or insensible; but the secret of Dürer's strength lies. further from the surface and requires more of intellectual and imaginative effort in its study than that of any of the Italian masters. His work is always transcendently good, but that it is also most beautiful will only be perceived by those whose eyes have been trained to seek out that high and subtle beauty which lies outside the region of the sensuous. But this book does not pretend to deal with the hidden mysteries of Dürer's art. I have not been favoured, as some critics claim to have been, with any especial revelations, and therefore refrain from putting forward any hypotheses of my own on this subject. I cannot even profess to have given a critical history of his works, or to have formed any new catalogue of them for the benefit of connoisseurs, my principal aim having been to tell the story of Dürer's life, using, whenever I could, his own words for that purpose. The translation of the letters, journal, and other papers relating to his personal history, has therefore formed the chief part of my task. These writings of his, which by rare good fortune have been handed down to us, reflect so vividly the simple loving heart with which his genius was associated, that I thought my readers would far rather have them in their crude, rough, and sometimes ungrammatical form, than any smooth biographical structure that I could build up out of them. I have taken the greatest pains to make my translations as faithful as possible, and they have at least this merit, that they are strictly from the original German; but the difficulty of rendering provincial German of the fifteenth century into English of the nineteenth, is so great that I have been obliged in some places to own myself conquered by it. In such places I have given the original words in a foot-note, or in the text, instead of following the example of a French translator of Dürer's letters, who sometimes supplies their places with neat phrases of his own; phrases which Dürer might perhaps or ought to have used, but which assuredly he did not. The arrangement of the parts which I have adopted in this book is somewhat unusual, and needs perhaps a few words of explanation. Part I. is in ordinary chronological order, but Part II., instead of following up the history of the life, is entirely devoted to a con |