lready attained
great and peculiar excellence, but in these, as might be expected from
the subject, the fantastic element forms the groundwork of the whole.
These mystical subjects are conceived in a singularly poetical spirit;
the wonderful and monstrous meet us in living bodily forms. Some of them
exhibit a power of representation to the eye, and a grandeur of
conception the more surprising, since the shapeless exuberance of the
scriptural visions might easily have led the artist astray, as has
indeed frequently happened in the case of others who have attempted
these subjects." In artistic effects these cuts are inferior to his
latter works, and the drawing is sometimes more defective; but in
inventive power they are master-pieces, and no artist before or since
has so successfully treated these mysteries. The reputation of Duerer was
well-established by these cuts, and gave him a good position in his
native town, which he never left afterwards, except for a journey to
Venice in 1506, and to the Netherlands in 1520.

All Duerer's tastes were essentially national, if indeed they may not be
said to be narrowed within the circle of the town of Nuernberg and its
neighbourhood. He married soon after his return; and living entirely at
home, prosecuted his art with unwearied assiduity, the avarice of his
wife urging still further his constant labours. His studies seem to have
been made from the people around him, or from the scenes which
constantly met his eye. Thus, in his scripture prints, the people of
Nuernberg and the peasants of the neighbourhood, figure as
representatives of the ancient Jews. St. Joseph is a Nuernberg carpenter,
and the Virgin herself seems to have been modelled from some fair maiden
of the city. The stout burghers, who witness the happy meeting of St.
Joachim and Anne at the golden gate of the temple, in his series of
prints illustrative of the Life of the Virgin, are such as Duerer might
have seen daily loitering by the tower gate opposite his own windows;
and the modest-looking maiden with the extravagantly fashionable
head-dress, whom he has introduced in his "Marriage of the Virgin," has
been absolutely copied from nature; the original sketch, made by his own
hand from a Nuernberg damsel, is preserved with many similar studies by
him in the British Museum. He was untiring in his converse with nature
as he saw it around him; and the minutely careful sketches which now
enrich our national collection