ATTLE MASTERS EMIL WALDMANN M. KNOEDLER & CO. 14 EAST 57TH STREET NEW YORK 2927. a | ou yu Y BARTHEL BEHAM Madonna at a Window Height 4 ¥%,, width 33% inches THE LITTLE MASTERS BY EMIL WALDMANN M. KNOEDLER & CO. I4 EAST 57TH STREET NEW YORK 1927 The text of this Booklet is translated from CHAPTER iv 0f Diz NÜRNBERGER KLEIN- MEISTER VON EMIL WALDMANN (Meister der Graphik, Band V. Verlag von Kunkhardt & Biermann). It has been printed for presentation only and is not for sale. THE LITTLE MASTERS BY EMIL WALDMANN HE collective name “Little Masters” was coined 2 this small group of artists, because they have usually adopted a very small format in their graphic productions. They all have, it is true, worked along other lines, they have painted panel pictures and ex- ecuted portraits, they have been miniaturists, painted frescoes on walls and made designs for stained glass. Yet their importance, culturally and for the history of art, resides essentially in their graphic accom- plishments, in their small—sometimes, quite minute —engraved prints. These quickly found their way throughout Germany, Italy and France. They were sold at fairs, considered as individual pictures, they were pasted into books and collected by art lovers. These artists, then, were masters in the small for- mat; moreover they were masters of the minute sub- ject, intimate masters. . . . They proceed from Al- brecht Dürer. He had made the graphic arts quite 5 free and had shown by his example what a wealth of subjects for pictorial presentment was still lying quite fallow. He had shown how a thousand differ- ent things might be expressed with the graver and with the woodcutter’s knife, things quite barred from presentment by means of painting. With Diirer these are side-issues, these little tales told, these things put down as they were seen, side- issues from his large cycles and from work under- taken for the emperor. The Little Masters have grasped the themes here touched upon, they have elaborated them and made them fruitful. They have borne these new topics unto the people, and because they have conceived and treated these subjects in popular vein, they have made them popular. We can hardly conceive, today, what was the effect of these activities, since every subject is familiar to us in art. But how astonished must the burghers of all classes have been, in Nuremberg, when all of a sudden the most commonplace and natural things assumed pic- torial importance. The most insignificant matters, things to which hardly anybody had hitherto given 6 ; HEINRICH ALDEGREVER f the Shepherds Adoration o ight 4 He width 25% inches 346, HEINRICH ALDEGREVER Susannah at the Bath Height 434, width 3% inches a thought, were now pictured again and again. Be- fore that time these things had appeared in Nether- landish calendars, as marginal designs, as explana- tions of constellations of the various months. There one could see the countryman’s life during the changing seasons, tilling the soil, and the toilsome existence of the peasants, those despised children of Saturn, doomed to misfortune, was pictured at length, in all its particulars. But such pictures were scarce luxuries, intended for the few great and wealthy on earth. Even the better bred among the people had had no share in them. Now, however, these pictures of life had become accessible to every- body, and this in a form of their own, as an end. The fourth estate, which was here depicted, could buy these little prints for a few pennies and behold themselves as in a mirror. This was bound to give, at one stroke, an undreamt-of popularity to the lin- ear art, the more so, since the naturalism in the con- ception did not content itself with these topics from daily life, but also sought to pervade all the other spheres. Not only is a peasant woman pictured faith- 9 fully here, as she is hurrying to market with her basket, not only are a few leaders of mercenaries portrayed, as one has frequently beheld them ın ac- tual life—no, every other subject likewise, Biblical stories and the Gospels are embroidered with genre- like features. Lot, the brother of Abraham, sits with his daughters as a spendthrift sits at wine with loose women, and in the Marriage at Cana, where a St. Martin’s goose graces the feast, a parrot looks down from his perch. The holy Apostles have become poor, wandering folk, and in the story of the Prodigal Son, one has no longer the feeling of something very sad and calamitous, indeed everywhere there is a sense of the comfortable and homelike. That degraded man, standing there among his pigs, desirous, so the inscription states, of feeding on husks, really looks like a peaceable herdsman at eventide, and in the picture of the reconciliation, the plowing peasant and the man slaughtering the calf always again draw one’s attention. This particular way of look- ing upon the Holy Writ, so entirely from the view- point of a simple human being, and for the benefit IO Zurae1dus [eurdLIE JY} se IZIS Jwes DY] JO ELIEWES Jo uewoM 94} pur Isııyy WVHA4 ATVIAS SNVH HANS SEBALD BEHAM Young Woman and a Jester (Etching) Of the same size as the original etching Zuge ER APIS SIREN, of grown-up children fond of seeing things, could not but find quick appreciation at a time which moved in rationalistic cycles of thought, and with people in large cities, who took much pleasure in the external appearance of things. Add to this that the pictures of daily life and of the street were quite up-to-date then. Was it not the first time that the peasants, those “felt-hats,”” those ‘‘flails,’* were playing a political röle, and were being watched with curiosity, when, straight from the concerns of war, they came to market, their hayforks on their shoulder. Wide circles were, indeed, in sympathy with their endeavors, and may have taken no less interest in them, as pictured, than in the fantastically togged- up mercenaries with their martial appearance, who were again loudly disporting themselves in the city. Here were fascinating contrasts, these “fine” sol- diers, and the wretched, but for that reason no less dangerous, peasant-warriors, who were forbidden to wear the garb of the lansquenet. At times the artists * Equivalents of: ‘‘Hayseed’’ and ‘‘Rube.”’ 13 have sought to enhance the timeliness of their prints still further by means of explanatory or “speaking” inscriptions: “Der Krieg ist aus—Wo nun himans.” (War is over—Now what next.) is found upon the picture of the suddenly jobless lansquenets, and Se- bald Beham has added to his figures of the drum- mer Acker Concz and the color bearer Klos Wuczer, two decades later, the explanatory remark “Im Bauern Krieg 1525” (In the Peasant War 1525). The ancient tales with their quiet, comfortable tone, offered a good opportunity for chatty story- telling. The fairy-tale nature of many imaginings, and the broadly elaborating treatment gave an in- centive to imaginative recreation. Judith, for instance, was Hecuba to the people, and could be unrestrictedly dressed up as a lady of fashion; garbed in the costliest gowns, fur-trimmed, hung with the heaviest of golden beads, in order to satisfy the craving for luxury, perhaps even for pro- hibited luxury. Certain themes, also were presented in a new light. Pencz has engraved a series of hero- ines of the Old Testament, and has illustrated by 14 rss apa UFER SE eee aie KLOS WVCZER.. | CONCZ. ACKER. SS Ss 2 5 < m >» tm m Er } HANS SEBALD BEHAM Standard Bearer and Drummer “In the Peasant War. 1525.”’ Of the same size as the original engraving GEORG PENCZ Death of Virginia Height 4%, width 2156 inches many instances, how woman is the doom of man, how woman’s guile and falseness has depraved the noblest among men. Undoubtedly this was most in- teresting at a time when much discussion was going on about woman’s röle, and when many of them were competing with men and had a share in politi- cal and social life. Yet these stories from the Old Testament did not form the most important theme about which the Little Masters could inform the people. This was more or less familiar ground to them, and what they most craved was novelty. Those who could not read were hungry for intellectual food, that food of which they had heard so much talk: the fairy-tale of an- tiquity. And so the engravings of the Little Masters became an educational agency in the broadest sense; the figures of antiquity arose to new life. The Rape of Helen, the wars of Greeks and Trojans, were related upon friezes as long as a finger, and Queen Dido stabbed herself, while on one side — with learned statements of sources of information — the event was briefly related. Here one heard about the +7 twelve deeds of Hercules, one saw Nessus, as a Satyr (!), decoy the beautiful woman-nymph Dejanira. Fabulous figures are playing the lyre, hidden in the reeds, and a female Satyr answers on the bagpipe, and Tritons, astride of Dolphins, battle with one an- other, The Judgment of Paris is presented, now he- roically in calm nudity, and again somewhat trivi- ally, part-dressed and chatty. The gods of Olympus appear as planetary figures, some favored few of them, such as Venus, accompanied by the blind- folded Cupid, appear by themselves. In one instance she makes an eloquent inviting gesture with her hand, whose significance is explained, on a tablet, by the words: “‘Audaces Venus Jbsa Juvat.” The Tri- umph of Bacchus resembles the Triumph of a Ro- man General, men and women, bearing trophies, precede him, while excited satyrs form the cortege. Besides mythology, history engages the minds, notably—as is natural with the status of tradition then obtaining—first and foremost Roman history. Marcus Curtius, Mucius Scevola, Virginius and Porsenna are the heroes, the Horatii and Curatii ac- 18 BETEN 7 ALBRECHT ALTDORFER Horatius Cocles leaping into the Tiber Of the same size as the original engraving HANS SEBALD BEHAM Cimon and his Daughter Of the same size as the original engraving complish their deeds, one hears about Cimon and Pero and about Lucretia stabbing herself. For the murdress Judith, in the Old Testament, an inter- esting parallel is found in Queen Tomiris of the Scythians. Allegories are also tried, presentments in the sense of the humanists. The Christian and antique virtues appear as female figures with their attributes, the liberal arts likewise, and also the vices are shown allegorically. In mythology Nessus was a centaur. Hans Sebald Beham knew that, for in the series of the Deeds of Hercules he has pictured him as such. In another print, however (P. 110), he renders him not as a man with the body of a horse, but as a Satyr with cloven feet and cow horns. The artist was not main- ly concerned with the diffusion of exact knowledge, his main endeavor may well have been a present- ment of the antique realm of fables, a charming lit- tle genre picture, an amorous couple doing just about what the “Peasant and his sweetheart” also do close by the fence. He may have added the mythological 21 names merely to secure more interest for the print, since whoever may have had no interest in loving couples had some in mythology, and vice-versa. The artist was not so very keen to have everything accu- rate; what interested him mainly was an artistic theme: the nude human body. And this is, most likely, one of the main reasons why the Little Mas- ters turned, in steadily increasing measure, to an- tique subjects. Here they could make use of the nude. That was surely something quite novel, then, something quite important. The generation preced- ing Dürer hardly knew the nude, or knew it only in a wholly different sense. St. Sebastian and St. Jerome were almost the only themes, aside from the Cruci- fied Christ, in which nude bodies were to be seen. Hence antiquity, with its throng of gods and demi- gods was also quite a new world, from a formally artistic standpoint. The force which Dürer had brought with him from Italy, the Renaissance, the new grand style of presentment, strove with might and main toward the light and was the actually modern. Let Tom, Dick and Harry delight in their 22 ne HANS SEBALD BEHAM Death and a Nude Woman Of the same size as the original engraving HANS SEBALD BEHAM Leda and the Swan Of the same size as the original engraving familiarity with the family relations of the gods, in their knowledge that Daphne had been turned into a laurel tree, and that Nessus was not a satyr but a centaur—the artists wanted to know how a human body is built up, how the masses are correlated to one another, how one achieves motion and what are the facts about balance and counterpoise. Once they had learned this and had mastered the nude body, once they had grasped the essential points of propor- tion, the secret of which was possessed in Italy, they wanted to show this nude body, and show it again and again, because, forsooth, it was beautiful. Beau- tiful in a way quite undreamt of before: in its unfet- tered, wholesome, healthy humanness. Often the hu- man body became, for the artist, the main theme of the picture. A nude was scantily qualified by some accessories for a Flora or a Cleopatra. And the many fascinating figures of children, which we meet with in the prints by the Little Masters, owe their exist- ence not only to a newly awakened sense of the ways of the child and its quaint humor; they are likewise important as nude subjects. Before Barthel Beham => turned to humanistic subjects, before he created those magnificent friezes of Gladiators, with their parade of nudes in the guise of fighting men, he had made the nude child-body the subject of his studies. In the children’s Bacchanalia with the Vat, by Master I. B., we find Italian bambini of almost grown-up forms and with virile gestures. The attitude in which the Little Masters have ap- proached all their fields of subjects, was, as we have seen, almost always purely genre-like. This manner has been elaborated by them and may be considered as being quite essentially their domain. This is the point, also, in which they have gone beyond their great teacher Durer. They are the first masters of genre in German history of art. But aside from this, there is another field which they have cultivated and handled originally, namely ornament. Their actual importance for the culture of their time is almost as great here as in that other sphere, which has just been considered. If in their little pictures of daily life, in their feeling manner of relating the stories of the Holy Writ and of spreading afar the tales of 26 ALBRECHT ALTDORFER The Virgin in a Landscape Height 67As, width 45% inches LUDWIG KRUG St. John on the Island of Patmos Height 57, width 37% inches antiquity, they exercised a direct influence on the mental life of their contemporaries, in ornamental prints they found a means to collaborate in the ex- ternal culture of their period, in imparting a certain shape, or at least a certain manner of decoration, to the implements of daily life. The ornamental prints which issued from their hands served as direct mod- els for the craftsmen, as had the ornamental prints of the XVth century before them, the productions of Schongauer and of Israhel van Meckenem; and they must have been used in large numbers, more espe- cially by the goldsmiths, i.e., by the most distin- guished craft, which brought forth so rich a harvest in that very Nuremberg. It is not surprising that the major portion of the early, of the Gothic, ornamen- tal prints presents patterns for gold and silver ware. Was not the technique of engraving closely linked, originally, with the handicraft of tooling and grav- ing metals, and it is to this fact that the ornamental engravings of the XVIth century owe, not in least measure, the sureness and adequacy of their essen- tial style. Only one striking feature remains, namely 29 that these artists have given so little thought to the invention of new forms and objects, but have main- ly concerned themselves with the elaboration of or- nament only. The great popularity of this form may perhaps be explained by its being so neutral. Once the Renaissance proportions were accepted as a prin- ciple of general structure in applied art as a whole, the panel could be used almost anywhere. On gob- lets with an articulation of lateral bands (as yet for- eign to the Gothic taste) just as well as on furniture treated architecturally, on mantels, chests and cab- inets; on keys and drinking cups just as well as on arms and on the embossed borders of Rhenish stone- ware. The interior decorators could make ceiling friezes with them just as readily as the stonecutters could use them for panels on cornices, doorways and windows. Oftentimes the artist has contrived his or- namental design for alternations thus providing for variations without end. Much more rarely do we find ornament, as destined to some specific kind of use; in fact this is practically found only in the orna- ments for dagger sheaths, since here, owing to the 30 say>ut 974,8 mpım “Ver IYSIOHY TUI) OM] ya JUISWEUIO WVHNYJ4 ATVIdYS SNVH ALBRECHT ALTDORFER Mucius Scevola Of the same size as the original engraving asymmetric shape of these objects a symmetrical use and halving could not be contrived. If one considers how close the Little Masters stand to actual life, in all their achievements, how they produce with an eye to sales, how they figure on re- turns, how they allow themselves to be guided by public taste in the choice of their subjects, one would think that they would also have devoted a brisk ac- tivity to portraiture. Here, surely, was quite a new source of income. As a matter of fact, there are not very many portraits by the hands of these artists. Barthel Beham, who was in Bavarian employ as a portraitist in the thirties of the XVIth century, has engraved a half-dozen portraits, some of them repro- ductions of his paintings. By the hand of Pencz, who has likewise painted many likenesses, we know a double portrait of a couple—probably the portraits of the artist and of his wife—as well as a portrait of a prince. Master I. B. has published the rather medi- ocre portraits of Luther and of Melanchthon. That is all. Hans Sebald Beham, the most business-like of them, has never ventured in that field. The rea- 33 son for this lies, perhaps, in the insight of these art- ists, that they lacked the abilities requisite for a burgher portrait. Dürer had shown, in his Melanch- thon and in his Pirkheimer, how such problems should be solved. He has shown it in a masterly and sovereign manner. Possibly the burghers of Nurem- berg knew their Melanchthon, such as we see him in the small engraving by Master I. B., better from a glimpse of him in the street, than the man with the profound eyes under mighty brows as pictured by Dürer. Yet a shy instinct may have told these artists themselves which was the more important. Psychol- ogy was not their forte anyway; they had had as few dealings as possible with the human soul. Only one further word, in this place, as to their technique. It goes without saying that herein Diirer was again the main prototype. None before him had handled the graver as he did, with such a supple freedom, and at the same time with such patient truth and great severity. If we compare him, in this particular, with the Italians of his time, with Mar- cantonio, Agostino Veneziano and Marco Dente da >4 BARTHEL BEHAM Charles V. Emperor Height 83As, width 5°%6 inches DIRICK VELLERT Christ and the Woman of Samaria Height 434, width 3Vis inches Ravenna, it becomes clear at once, what there is ın this technical superiority of German engraving. The Little Masters, with all their affinity—otherwise— for Southern ways, have taken good care not to bar- ter what they had learned from Dürer for the line engraving of the Italians. Their great art in the ob- servation of detail, their far-reaching realism in the rendering of all substances, their wealth in the gra- dation of media has usually held its own victorious- ly against the ideal abstractions of the Italians. The mirroring gleam of the metal in the Arms by Durer, the greatest possible illusory effect of grass and flow- ers, of the wooden panelling of a room, of hair and fur—all this ever was the ideal of the Little Masters in this heyday. They have kept to that, indeed they have sometimes even tried to excel it. The natural- ism of conception in all subjective matters called for a far-reaching naturalism in the characterization of visible texture. The public for whom they worked were hardly content with suggestions, they de- manded robust certainty and unquestioned clear- ness regarding all that was laid before their eyes. 37 Whether a dress was made of velvet or of satin in- terested them very much, and to those who found pleasure in minute execution, such a print as Barthel Beham’s Madonna with the Parrot must have meant an actual delight. Given such a sentiment, these art- ists have acquired a tremendously solid, highly ex- act, manual skill. The one least clever among them is Georg Pencz, who most nearly approximates the manner of engraving of the Italians. Hans Sebald Beham, on the other hand, is the first and certainly one of the greatest virtuosi of engraving. As with Dürer, so with him, the language of pure, supple, swelling and tapering line is very expressive. He superposes three, four layers of lines one upon the other for the purpose of plastic modelling, and even though in many cases the variations in states of his plates are due not to artistic but to commercial rea- sons (his endeavor to keep the plates fit for print- ing as long as possible, hence the reworkings, by his own hands, when wear became apparent) it can- not be denied that he made use of these means in a masterly way. A very considerable mastery of the 38 HANS SEBALD BEHAM Madonna with the Parrot Of the same size as the original engraving Ss TIER ALBRECHT ALTDORFER St. Jerome in a Grotto (Woodcut Height 65%, width 434 inches medium is requisite in so reworking plates of that nature, that they will yield any good impressions at all. His modelling of figures, especially of nudes, de- serves, indeed, our greatest admiration. There are not many engravers who can vie with him in that evenness of graphic effect and black-and-white tonal- ity. With most artists who go to such levels of plas- tic rendering, we miss the equipoise in the balance of the pictorial expanse. Even where Hans Sebald Beham engraves ever so delicately and minutely, using abundant stippling in his modelling, he still almost invariably controls the general effect. Even in the last decade of his activity, despite the slacken- ing of his artistic powers and of his earnestness, this selfacquired faculty never fails him. As regards technique Hans Sebald Beham was the leader of the group. At first Barthel proceeds for a brief space together with his brother, but he soon turns to a more coloristic, to a warmer manner of engraving. That depth of modelling, and that high- est plastic form, with bright light, in which Sebald succeeds later on, Barthel has never attempted; he 41 IL 17 WGA \\ WAONY WED NUR YY) Gigs. Be STR GEN SVN Wf AM pi lG Fs a Ss BEET ZZ Voted ati KE: Lim SEAT > HANS BROSAMER Christ on the Cross between Martin Luther and Frederick the Wise (Woodcut) Height 454, width 6 inches “a a WE Steer DOMINNS. “CONVERTERE AD ME. HANS BROSAMER Christ on the Cross Height 103%, width 634 inches generally prefers an effect of clair-obscure and really never quite abandons the deep black of the back- ground. Indeed with increasing maturity, when he turns more and more to subjects of humanistic cul- ture, the light on dark even predominates with him. The friezes of the Battles of Men appear more Ital- ian in this external particular, than the works of Se- bald, with whom the Rape of Helen surely would exhibit quite another aspect, had he conceived it himself and not copied it after Barthel Beham. The works by the Master I. B., finally, are quite close, in character, to those by Barthel Beham, as re- gards technique. For a time he has then adopted a very dashing, not very vigorous stroke, a flowing, playful manner, used occasionally by Sebald Beham. Of all the group, Sebald Beham alone has made etchings, but he has not, for all that, found an actual etching style. The true medium of expression of the Little Masters was, and remains, the graver. 44 = x ae 1 ee