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“ D ON’T forget to dot your i’s. Be sure to cross your t’s.” Has your teacher ever said that to you? I always used to have a hard time remembering to dot all the i’s when I wrote compositions at school. But suppose I had gone to school in Germany. There the school children have to be careful about dotting u ’s as well as i ’s! For in Germany there are two kinds of u — a plain u like ours, and a u with two dots on it like this, ü . A u with two dots is sounded something like our u in pure .
I wanted to tell you about the dotted u right at the beginning of this chapter because if I didn’t I know you would ask what the two dots are for when you see them on the name of the German artist Albrecht Dürer. His name, you notice, is not Durer but Dürer. He lived and painted at the same time as Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In fact, he knew some of the great Italian artists personally, for he took a trip to Venice and stayed there for some time. Germany was having a Born Again time as well as Italy and Flanders and later the Netherlands, and Albrecht Dürer was the great artist of the German Renaissance.
Dürer didn’t paint much like the Italians. He painted many kinds of pictures, but his portraits are more famous than his other paintings. And besides paintings, Dürer made engravings. To make an engraving the artist cuts the lines of a picture in wood or copper. Then he puts ink in the lines and presses the wood or copper on a piece of paper. The picture that is printed this way is an engraving.
Dürer made many engravings and he is one painter who is as celebrated for his engravings as for his paintings. Some of his engravings — the one called “Melancholy”, for instance — are as well-known all over the world as his best paintings.
Dürer’s woodcuts also are rightly famous. A woodcut is just the opposite from an engraving. The lines are drawn on the wood and then the wood is cut away from the lines, so that the lines are left raised. Then the raised lines are inked and pressed on the paper.
When Dürer made the trip to Venice that I mentioned,he was welcomed and honored by the Venetians as a famous man. The Venetian artist Bellini, who was then an old man,asked Dürer one day if he would give him one of the special brushes he used to paint the hair in his portraits. Dürer said,“Certainly,” and gave Bellini the brush he was using.
“Why,” said Bellini, “this is just an ordinary brush. Do you really paint those wonderful hairs with a brush like this?”Then Dürer took the brush and with it painted some hairs as only he could paint them.
Dürer admired the works of the Italian painters, but when he returned to Germany he continued to paint in his own way, without trying to make his pictures have an Italian look.
Albrecht Dürer painted several portraits of himself. He was able to do this, of course, by looking in a mirror and painting what he saw in the glass. From these self-portraits we know he was a very handsome man. Several of the other portraits he painted are equally famous. I think you’ll like the one of his father on the opposite page.
NO.18-1 DÜRER’S
Dürer was apt to put a great deal of detail into his pictures. He filled the paintings with all kinds of odds and ends, and every tiny button is painted as carefully as if it were as important as the person’s face. Most of the German artists did this and in most of their pictures so much detail is a drawback. Your eye is drawn from the important things to the unimportant ones. But although Dürer often had just as much detail as other German painters, he was a great enough artist to keep the little things in the picture from becoming too important.
The second great Renaissance artist of Germany also was a portrait painter and a maker of woodcuts. His name was Hans Holbein (Hole’bine) and we have to speak of him as Hans Holbein the Younger because his father was also an artist named Hans Holbein. If Holbein the Younger were alive now he would write his name “Hans Holbein, Jr.”
The Holbeins moved to Switzerland, the country of the Alps, and Hans Holbein the Younger became the friend of a very famous man who lived there — Erasmus. Erasmus was a great thinker and wrote learned books. Holbein painted five portraits of Erasmus. The one most people prefer is the one shown on the opposite page.
It shows a side view of Erasmus. A side view of some one is called a profile. Erasmus sits writing at his desk.There do not seem to be very many details in this portrait,but in another famous portrait by Holbein, called “Portrait of Georg Gisze,” there are about twenty-five articles beside Georg Gisze himself. And yet, like Dürer, Holbein was able to keep them in their place so that after all Georg is the chief thing your eye looks at. Indeed, he left the unimportant details out of the faces of his portraits, putting in only the lines that would tell most.
NO.18-2 ERASMUS
Holbein found his business of painting was not doing so well in Switzerland, so he decided to take a bold step. He would go to England and see what work he could get there.He got a letter of introduction from Erasmus and went. The English liked his work and he painted portraits of most of the important Englishmen of the time including the king,Henry VIII.
The portraits by Hans Holbein are usually liked by boys and girls better than those by any other painter, except perhaps Frans Hals. And that is true for a great many grownups too. So I’m pretty sure you will like them yourself and that you would enjoy a picture book of portraits by this master portrait painter.
But don’t forget Dürer. You’ll like his pictures too.
Albrecht Dürer
Hans Holbein the Younger
I wonder which you are going to like the better.