Darer Sentence Examples

Albrecht Darer the elder was a goldsmith by trade, and settled soon after the middle of the 15th century in Nuremberg.

The elder Darer was an esteemed craftsman and pious citizen, sometimes, as was natural, straitened in means by the pressure of his numerous progeny.

We cannot with certainty identify any of these as being by the 'prentice hand of the young Darer.

But after travelling two years in various parts of Germany, where we are unable to follow him, the young Darer arrived at Colmar in 1492, only to find that Schongauer had died the previous year.

But the prevailing opinion is against this conjecture, and sees in these designs the work not of a strenuous student and searcher such as Darer was, but of a riper and more facile hand working in a spirit of settled routine.

Whether the young Darer's stay at Basel was long or short, or whether, as has been supposed, he travelled from there into the Low Countries, it is certain that in the early part of 1494 he was working at Strassburg, and returned to his home at Nuremberg immediately after Whitsuntide in that year.

The Venetian painter etcher, Jacopo de Barbari, whom Darer had already, it would seem, met in Venice in 1494-1495, and by the example of whose engravings he had already been much influenced, came to settle for a while in Nuremberg in 1500.

Chronological and other proofs show that if such a suit was fought at all, it must have been in connexion with another set of Darer's woodcuts, the first seventeen of the Life of the Virgin.

Darer himself, a number of whose familiar letters written from Venice to his friend Pirkheimer at Nuremberg are preserved, makes no mention of anything of the kind.

Other causes, of which we have explicit record, were an outbreak of sickness at Nuremberg; Darer's desire, which in fact was realized, of finding a good market for the proceeds of his art; and the prospect, also realized, of a commission for an important picture from the German community settled at Venice, who had lately caused an exchange and warehouse - the Fondaco de' Tedeschi - to be built on the Grand Canal, and who were now desirous to dedicate a picture in the church of St Bartholomew.

The picture painted by Darer on this commission was the "Adoration of the Virgin," better known as the "Feast of Rose Garlands"; it was subsequently acquired by the emperor Rudolf II., and carried as a thing beyond price upon men's shoulders to Vienna; it now exists in a greatly injured state in the monastery of Strahow at Prague.

Of all Darer's works, it is the one in which he most deliberately rivalled the combined splendour and playfulness of certain phases of Italian art.

Even in its present ruined state, it is apparent that in spite of the masterly treatment of particular passages, such as the robe of the pope, Darer still lacked a true sense of harmony and tone-relations, and that the effect of his work must have been restless and garish beside that of a master like the aged Bellini.

A similar festal intention in design and colouring, with similar mastery in passages and even less sense of harmonious relations in the whole, is apparent in a second important picture painted by Darer at Venice, "The Virgin and Child with the Goldfinch," formerly in the collection of Lord Lothian and now at Berlin.

The most satisfying of Darer's paintings done in Venice are the admirable portrait of a young man at Hampton Court (the same sitter reappears in the "Feast of Rose Garlands"), and two small pieces, one the head of a brown Italian girl modelled and painted with real breadth and simplicity, formerly in the collection of Mr Reginald Cholmondeley and now at Berlin, and the small and very striking little "Christ Crucified" with the figure relieved against the night sky, which is preserved in the Dresden Gallery and has served as model and inspiration to numberless later treatments of the theme.

From Venice Darer kept up a continuous correspondence, which has been published, with his bosom friend Pirkheimer at Nuremberg.

From the spring of 1507 until the summer of 1520, Darer was again a settled resident in his native town.

He was on terms of friendship or friendly communication with all the first masters of the age, and Raphael held himself honoured in exchanging drawings with Darer.

But among its native surroundings the career of Darer stands out with an aspect of ideal elevation and decorum which is its own.

The name of Agnes Darer was for centuries used to point a moral, and among the unworthy wives of great men the wife of Darer became almost as notorious as the wife of Socrates.

The source of the traditions to her discredit is to be found in a letter written a few years after Darer's death by his life-long intimate, Willibald Pirkheimer, who accuses her of having plagued her husband to death by her meanness, made him overwork himself for money's sake, and given his latter days no peace.

No doubt there must have been some kind of foundation for Pirkheimer's charges; and it is to be noted that neither in Darer's early correspondence with this intimate friend, nor anywhere in his journals, does he use any expressions of tenderness or affection for his wife, only speaking of her as his housemate and of her helping in the sale of his prints,&c. That he took her with him on his journey to the Netherlands shows at any rate that there can have been no acute estrangement.

And it is fair to remember in her defence that Pirkheimer when he denounced her was old, gouty and peevish, and that the immediate occasion of his outbreak against his friend's widow was a fit of anger because she had not let him have a pair of antlers - a household ornament much prized in those days - to which he fancied himself entitled out of the property left by Darer.

We have evidence that after her husband's death Agnes Darer behaved with generosity to his brothers.

The picture, painted for the elector Frederick of Saxony, is now in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna; the overcrowded canvas (into which Darer has again introduced his own portrait as a spectator alongside of the elector) is full of striking and animated detail, but fails to make any great impression on the whole, and does not do justice to the improved sense of breadth and balance in design, of clearness and dignity in composition, which the master had undoubtedly brought back with him from his second visit to Italy.

In the meantime Darer had added a few to the number of his line-engravings and had completed the two woodcut series of the Great Passion, begun about 1498-1499, and the Life of the Virgin.

Besides such fine single woodcuts as the "Mass of St Gregory," the "St Christopher," the "St Jerome," and two Holy Families of 1511, Darer published in the same year the most numerous and popularly conceived of all his woodcut series, that known from the dimensions of its thirty-seven subjects as the "Little Passion" on wood; and in the next year, 1512, a set of fifteen small copper-engravings on the same theme, the "Little Passion" on copper.

In thus repeating over and over on wood and copper nearly the same incidents of the Passion, or again in rehandling them in yet another medium, as in the highly finished series of drawings known as the "Green Passion" in the Albertina at Vienna, Darer shows an inexhaustible variety of dramatic and graphic invention, and is never betrayed into repeating an identical action or motive.

In 1513 and 1514 appeared the three most famous of Darer's works in copper-engraving, "The Knight and Death" (or simply "The Knight," as he himself calls it, 1513), the "Melancolia" and the "St Jerome in his Study" (both 1514).

The face of the rider seems to recall that of the statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni at Venice; for the armour Darer had recourse to an old drawing of his own, signed and dated in 1498.

Darer (London, 1889) contains extensive transcripts from the MSS.

The cities of Strassburg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Basel, became centres of learned coteries, which gathered round scholars like Wimpheling, Brant, Peutinger, Schedel, and Pirckheimer, artists like Darer and Holbein, printers of the eminence of Froben.

The note of Renaissance work in Germany was still Gothic. This we feel in the penetrative earnestness of Darer, in the homeliness of Hans Sachs, in the grotesque humour of Eulenspiegel and the Narrenschiff, the sombre pregnancy of the Faust legend, the almost stolid mastery of Holbein.

One of these was a cartoon or monochrome painting of Adam and Eve in tempera, and in this, besides the beauty of the figures, the infinite truth and elaboration of the foliage and animals in the background are celebrated in terms which bring to mind the treatment of the subject by Albrecht Darer in his famous engraving done thirty years later.

According to Vasari, Marcantonio, in copying Diirer's series of the Little Passion on wood, had imitated the original monogram, and Darer, indignant at this fraud, set out for Italy in order to protect his rights, and having lodged a complaint against Marcantonio before the signory of Venice, carried his point so far that Marcantonio was forbidden in future to add the monogram of Darer to copies taken after his works.

That veteran showed the German visitor the most generous courtesy, and Darer still speaks of him as the best in painting ("der pest im gemell") in spite of his advanced years.