lower nature won;
in 1504 there is but a potential coarseness in the strong face; in 1522
the swine had conquered and but the wreck of the scholar is visible.

As an engineer and as a student of aesthetics Duerer was also the northern
Leonardo. His theory of art reveals the secret of his genius: "What
beauty is, I know not; but for myself I take that which at all times has
been considered beautiful by the greater number." This is making art
democratic, bringing it down from the small coterie of palace and mansion
to the home of the people at large. Duerer and his compeers were enabled
to do this by exploiting the new German arts of etching and
wood-engraving. Pictures were multiplied by hundreds and thousands and
sold, not to one patron but to the many. Characteristically they
reflected the life and thoughts of the common people in every homely
phase. Pious subjects were numerous, because religion bulked large in
the common thought, {684} but it was the religion of the popular
preacher, translating the life of Christ into contemporary German life,
wholesome and a little vulgar. The people love marvels and they are very
literal; what could be more marvellous and more literal than Duerer's
illustrations of the Apocalypse in which the Dragon with ten horns and
seven heads, and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes are represented
exactly as they are described? Duerer neither strove for nor attained
anything but realism. "I think," he wrote, "the more exact and like a
man a picture is, the better the work. . . . Others are of another
opinion and speak of how a man should be . . . but in such things I
consider nature the master and human imaginations errors." It was life
he copied, the life he saw around him at Nuremberg.

But Duerer, to use his own famous criterion of portraiture, [Sidenote:
1513-14] painted not only the features of Germany, but her soul. Three
of his woodcuts depict German aspirations so fully that they are the best
explanation of the Reformation, which they prophesy. The first of these,
The Knight, Death and the Devil, shows the Christian soldier riding
through a valley of supernatural terrors. "So ist des Menchen Leben
nichts anderes dann eine Ritterschaft auf Erden," is the old German
translation of Job vii, 1, following the Vulgate. Erasmus in his
_Handbook of the Christian Knight_ had imagined just such a scene, and so
deeply had the idea of the soldier of Christ sunk into the people