transcending the worst Italian Judas) they seem to feel any repugnance.
They have also a beastly love of horrors; their decollations and
flagellations are quite sickening in detail, as distinguished from the
tidy, decorous executions of the early Italians; and one feels that they
do enjoy seeing, as in one of their prints, the bowels of St. Erasmus
being taken out with a windlass, or Jael, as Altdorfer has shown her
in his romantic print, neatly hammering the nail into the head of the
sprawling, snoring Sisera. There is a good deal of grossness, too (of
which, among the Italians, even Robetta and similar, there is so little),
in the details of village fairs and adventures of wenches with their
Schatz; and a strange permeating nightmare, gruesomeness of lewd, warty
devils, made up of snouts, hoofs, bills, claws, and incoherent parts
of incoherent creatures; of perpetual skeletons climbing in trees, or
appearing behind flower-beds. But there is also--and Holbein's Dance of
Death, terrible, jocular, tender, vulgar and poetic, contains it all, this
German world--a great tenderness. Tenderness not merely in the heads of
women and children, in the fervent embrace of husband and wife and mother
and daughter; but in the feeling for dumb creatures and inanimate things,
the gentle dogs of St. Hubert, the deer that crouch among the rocks with
Genevieve, the very tangled grasses and larches and gentians that hang
to the crags, drawn as no Italian ever drew them; the quiet, sentimental
little landscapes of castles on fir-clad hills, of manor-houses, gabled
and chimneyed, among the reeds and willows of shallow ponds. These
feelings, Teutonic doubtless, but less mediaeval than we might think, for
the Middle Ages of the Minnesingers were terribly conventional, seem to
well up at the voice of Luther; and it is this which make the German
engravers, men not always of the highest talents, invent new and beautiful
Gospel pictures. Of these I would take two as typical--typical of
individual fancy most strangely contrasting with the conventionalism of
the Italians. Let the reader think of any of the scores of Flights into
Egypt, and of Resurrections by fifteenth-century Italians, or even
Giottesques; and then turn to two prints, one of each of these subjects
respectively, by Martin Schongauer and Altdorfer. Schongauer gives a
delightful oasis: palms and prickly pears, the latter conceived as
growing at the top of a tree; below, lizards at play a