Indeed by the time Dürer returned to Venice, he found himself almost as famous there as in Germany, so much were his woodcut books admired (and copied). Modest as always, humble in his insatiable desire to acquire knowledge and skill, he found himself constituting a bridge between northern and southern art, a conduit along which flowed ideas and innovations from Italy to Germany and vice versa. During pauses between his big woodcutting and engraving projects, Dürer drew and painted—in watercolor, tempera, and other color media—a variety of living things: plants, flowers, and above all animals, such as squirrels, foxes, and wolves. The realism with which he depicted fur amazed the Italians. Giovanni Bellini asked to borrow one of the “special brushes” Dürer used for fur. Dürer gave him a brush. “But I’ve got one of these already,” said Giovanni. “Ah!” said Dürer. There had been, since the mid-fifteenth century, a growing market among rich Italian princes and bankers for Netherlandish oil paintings, especially major diptychs and triptychs for high altars for their private chapels—one example being an enormous triptych commissioned by the Florentine banker Tommasi Portinari from Hugo van der Goes, now in the Uffizi. But Dürer was the first German artist whom leading Italian patrons and collectors considered worthy of joining this select company. When he set up a workshop in Venice during his second visit to Italy, it was visited not only by painters and collectors but by the doge Lorenzo Loredan, who offered Dürer 200 florins a year to stay in the city and adorn it. It was in this workshop that Dürer painted, at the request of the German merchants in Venice, his wonderful work The Madonna with the Siskin (1507). There, too, he created his finest and most ambitious painting, The Feast of the Rose Garland(1506). This amazing work, in which the Virgin and Child are enthroned amid a vast collection of saints, monarchs, angels, musicians, and spectators—including Dürer himself—is a summation of all that he had so far learned about art, a tour de force of form and color, simple delight, and exquisite virtuosity. It is also a striking blend of everything Dürer had learned in Italy (especially from Bellini) and the German mystic soulfulness so alien to the Italian vision.15
Much as he had learned, however, Dürer wished to learn more. He traveled by horse to Bologna, where he was hailed as a “second Apelles,” then on to Florence and Rome. He made his own copies of innumerable Italian works of art, including drawings by Leonardo—according to Vasari, done in watercolor on canvas, so they could be seen from both sides. In Italy, too, Dürer began the process of creating his own intellectual encyclopedia of art. He drew a fundamental contrast between German and Italian art knowledge. Germans often knew how to paint because they possessed practical knowledge handed down from one generation to another in the workshop. But the Italians also knew why. They had theory. They had studied the ancients and built on that knowledge—a library of handbooks on perspective and the human body; proportion and anatomy; musculature and facial expressions; the way in which bodies moved, horses functioned; and the physics and chemistry of everyday life.
Hence when Dürer returned from Italy after his second visit in 1507, he began work on a series of treatises on art that were both theoretical and practical, and were the first to be written on the subject in German. His first, four-part treatise, Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion, concerns the proportions and functions of the human body. He preceded the writing by taking a series of measurements of men, women, and children, to discover the dimensions of “typical” and ideal bodies, with interrelationships (of heads, legs, arms, and chest and of each to total height). He used various measurement systems, improving on classical authors such as Vitruvius, insufficiently methodical in his eyes, and on the methods used by Alberti in De Statua (1434). Books 1 and 2 dealt with alternative systems of measurement. Book 3 concentrated on the practical requirements of the working artist, including rule-of-thumb workshop devices and the actual drawing instruments required. Book 4 dealt with the way in which the human body moves. This brilliantly innovative treatise, which exists in a fair copy (Dresden), written in Dürer’s own hand in 1523, has (like his work on paper) a German thoroughness usually lacking in Italian counterparts, and is written throughout in superb German prose. German, thanks partly to Luther, the first prose stylist, was coming to maturity as a language, and Dürer took advantage of its new glories, especially in the conclusion to the third book, which deals with aesthetics and the relationship between man, art, and God. These books supplemented Dürer’s own elaborate drawings of the human body.16
Dürer was always conscious of the needs of the young, eager artist in the workshop, and his manual for the student, the Vuderweysung der Messung, published in 1525, is full of practical instruction on the parabola, the elipse, and the hyperbola; on using conic sections; and on the geometry of three-dimensional bodies, using principles from Plato and Archimedes, but with sensible German updating. He deals with basic architecture, perspective, the principles of the sundial (fixed and moving), and the kind of astronomy useful to the artist. His last book, probably published in 1527, deals with fortification, a topic on which artists needed to be knowledgeable as part of their money-earning trade. Dürer’s work, apart from being the first in German, is a skillful blend of theoretical and practical science, and a great deal more comprehensive than anything produced in Italy at that time.17
By the third decade of the century, Dürer was so well known, through his woodcuts, engravings, and printed work, that he was a European celebrity of the same stature as Erasmus. In 1520–1521 he went on a journey to the Netherlands, traveling in some style and taking along (through the kindness of his heart) his wife Agnes and her maid. The ostensible reason for the trip was to pay his respects to the new emperor, Charles V, who was being crowned in Aachen. Charles’s predecessor, Maximilian, had made Dürer a handsome annuity, and the artist wanted Charles to renew it. He stayed first with the bishop of Bamberg, presenting the bishop with a beautiful Madonna, in return for letters recommending him to the mighty whom he had not yet met. But these letters were scarcely needed. Dürer was received everywhere with acclaim from fellow artists and commissions from the elite. The city of Antwerp, art capital of the Low Countries (which were not yet divided by religious conflict), offered him 500 gold florins a year to work there. Dürer was accompanied by a traveling studio and assistants, and he completed twenty portraits on the trip, as well as over 100 drawings. These are supplemented by his diaries, which give a good account of the coronation and other events he witnessed. Always keen on verisimilitude, he did a portrait of an old man, said to be ninety-three, as a model for St. Jerome. He painted the Danish king, Christian II (this work has been lost), and did a beautiful portrait drawing of Erasmus. He met Patinir, Joos van Cleve, and Lucas van Leyden. In Zeeland he went to see and draw a beached whale, and caught a chill (or malaria) that gave him rheumatism for the rest of his life. He inspected Michelangelo’s Madonna in Brugge (Bruges), and many other masterworks. He returned, dazed, honored, and exhausted, to Nuremberg, where he spent the last seven years of his life as its most famous citizen. (Luther called the town “the eyes and ears of Germany,” with Dürer as its eyes.) Though writing—transmitting his knowledge to future generations—was now his passion, and drawing his delight, he continued to paint for increasingly large sums: he made portraits, altarpieces, and decorations in the city hall. The most comprehensive catalog of his paintings, compiled by Fredja Anzelerosky (1991), lists 189 works, the total including those that are now lost and those destroyed in World War II. His friend Pirckheimer says that Anges was greedy, and that she forced Dürer to work much too hard in order to amass gold. It is true that Dürer left the large sum of 6,874 gold florins, and several unfinished commissions, including a huge altarpiece that he should, perhaps, never have agreed to do. But then Dürer was a lost man without hard work.
He is best remembered not so much as an artistic celebrity but as a simple workman in art, with the tools of his trade in his hand: the sharp knives, gravers, scorpers, tint tools, spit sticks, rollers, and mallet of the w
oodcutter; pots of black and brown ink; chips of wood everywhere; the gravers, gouges, rockers, and roulettes of metal engraving; the needles of the etcher; drypointers and styluses, scrapers and burnishers, and literally hundreds of pens, brushes, charcoal sticks, and graphite pencils from Cumberland plumbago. His workroom had scores of aromatic smells: linseed oil and egg white, walnut essence, sizes and glues, gesso and tempera, hog smells from the brushes, coal and carbon dust, chalk and earths for color mixing, squirrel skins for minute eye brushes, turps and other dryers, lavender oil, waxes and resins, varnish and gypsum, powerful acids for biting into metal, and the reek of fresh canvas rolls and treated wood panels. His hands, to judge from his self-portraits, were big (like the hands of most painters) and worn by the trade, with cuts, calluses, old scars, and acid stains; imperfectly washed; the nails black, or red and raw from carbolic—the hands of a man who worked with them all his painstaking life.
Dürer’s enormous corpus of prints and drawings proved, over the centuries, to be of more use to aspiring artists (and, indeed, to masters) than the work of any other draftsman. They are notable for clarity, precision, extreme accuracy, feeling for texture, superb proportion and design, and—often—great depth of feeling. If Dürer saw something remarkable, he wanted to draw it instantly and preserve it for posterity. Many of his drawings emphasize the structure and solidity of a living object, and his watercolors of towns and buildings convey the various distances from the viewer with extraordinary fidelity of tone. All these drawings teach. In 1515 he got hold of a detailed drawing of an Indian rhinoceros, taken from a creature sent to Lisbon from Goa. The animal was, alas, wrecked and drowned on its way to Genoa, and Dürer never saw it. But from the material he had, he produced a woodcut of astonishing power, presenting the animal as an armored being, and the image has been the archetype of the rhinoceros, all over the world, ever since. Indeed in German schools it was still in use in biology lessons as late as 1939. His images of two hands joined in prayer has likewise achieved world celebrity. There are few areas of representation of the visual world on which Dürer has not left an ineffaceable mark—not surprisingly, since the number of his pages in circulation had reached the tens of millions even before the advent of steam printing.
As early as 1512, when Dürer still had sixteen years to live, Cochlaus’s Cosmographia stated that merchants from all over Europe bought Dürer’s woodcuts and engravings and took them home for native artists to imitate. Toward the end of the sixteenth century there was a phenomenon in German-speaking territory known as the “Dürer revival,” during which his works were reprinted and collectors, led by Emperor Rudolf II in Prague and Emperor Maximilian I in Munich, collected his paintings, prints, books, and drawings. His fame increased in the eighteenth century, and he became an artistic symbol, part of romanticism (especially for Goethe and for artists like Caspar David Friedrich and then, under Bismarck, for German nationalism). On the morning of 6 April 1828, the three-hundredth anniversary of his death, 300 artists gathered at his tomb to pay homage. His life and work were made an object of the full battery of German academic scholarship beginning in the 1780s, earlier than those of any other great artist, and it is likely that more large-scale exhibitions have been held for Dürer than for anyone else. This attention, far from producing satiation, has served to emphasize for successive generations the freshness of his vision and the crispness of his line. No other man has been more creative, in black and white, and it was Erasmus who first noticed—and said so—that it was a crime to try to color Dürer’s prints.
4
Shakespeare: Glimpses of an Unknown Colossus
SHAKESPEARE is the most creative personality in human history. Born in Stratford in April 1564, he became a professional writer toward the end of the 1580s, in his early twenties, so his writing career covers barely a quarter of a century to his death, at age fifty-two, in April 1616. During this time, besides acting often and engaging in speculations and investments both in Stratford and in London, he wrote thirty-nine plays that have survived, and collaborated on a number of others; he also wrote a dozen major poems and hundreds of sonnets.1 During his lifetime his plays were already being performed abroad as well as all over Britain, and even at sea off the coast of west Africa; they have since been translated into every known language and acted all over the world. They have become the basis for over 200 operas by composers great and minor, including Purcell, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, and Britten, and have inspired works by Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and scores of other masters. The 103 songs that dot his plays have been set to music by all the composers of art songs.2 Shakespeare’s works have inspired over 300 movies and thousands of television adaptations, and have provided material or ideas for most professional playwrights from Dryden to Shaw and Stoppard. His poetry is a mainspring of imaginative English literature and a formative influence on its foreign equivalents, especially French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Russian.
Shakespeare’s imaginative and artistic fecundity—and depth—are an apparent demonstration of the unimportance of heredity or genes in creative lives. His father, John, was a provincial glover, who prospered for a time as a small-town worthy, then declined; his mother came from a higher social group, with landed connections, but also provincial. There is no evidence of any kind of previous literary or artistic activity on either side of his family. He was educated at the Stratford grammar school and was (probably) a schoolmaster before forming a connection with a traveling theater company and then coming to London as an actor-playwright (rather like Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby). His undistinguished origins have led some to suppose that the real author of his works was Sir Francis Bacon, the lord chancellor. But this is crude intellectual snobbery—any number of great writers have come from nothing and nowhere. “Baconian theory” rests on cryptograms, chiefly the nonce word “honorificabilitudinitatibus” in Love’s Labours Lost (V. i), which Bacon is supposed to have invented to be rendered in Latin as “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.” But in fact the word was not coined by whoever wrote the play—it is found in an English text as early as 1460. In any case Shakespeare’s life is well documented: there are sixty-six references to him in contemporary documents, which include overwhelming evidence of his connections with theater in general and his plays in particular.3 Many of his contemporaries were fully aware of his greatness, as is attested to by the twenty-four commendatory poems and prefaces written between 1599 and 1640.4 Thanks to the love and devoted work of two of his colleagues, John Hemminges and Henry Cordell—who took a great deal of time and trouble to put together the First Folio, published in 1623—some sixteen of Shakespeare’s plays were saved from oblivion, and the rest, eighteen of which had been published earlier in corrupt quartos, were printed more or less as Shakespeare wrote them. Of the many hundreds of plays written and staged in the years 1580–1620, more than half have disappeared without trace, but we can be reasonably sure we possess Shakespeare’s oeuvre almost in its entirety.5
I do not propose to discuss Shakespeare’s output in detail, merely to examine his creation of two characters, Falstaff and Hamlet, and the plays in which they appear. First, however, it is useful to note Shakespeare’s chief characteristics as a writer, and the way in which they helped his creative process.
We begin with his practicality. He was what Jane Austen was later to call a “sensible man.” He worked empirically, by trial and error, by learning his job and experimenting. He was rational. Always keen to get on, he was never guilty (to use his own words) of “vaunting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other side.” He became a player probably by accident when a visiting company had a vacancy through illness in Stratford, and Shakespeare, already an amateur, filled the gap so well that he was asked to turn professional. He worked for several companies in the 1580s, playing “kingly parts,” and later was Adam in his own As you Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet, as well as appearing in Ben Jonson’s comedies and Jonson
’s tragedy Sejanus. But Shakespeare seems to have grasped, early on, that his gift for writing plays was greater than his skills as an actor could ever be; and he was an established playwright by 1592, when a bad outbreak of plague closed the London theaters for nearly two years. He then (in addition to going to provincial towns) explored the possibility of becoming a nontheatrical man of letters by writing his two great narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
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