e birds could fly out of the picture, the stems of
his plants seem to curve and bend towards us, and we look deep into
the flower they hold out.[3]

In the German Renaissance too, the great masters limited themselves
to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their Madonnas and
Holy Families. But, as Luebke says,[4] one soon sees that Duerer
depended on architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than
Holbein; he preferred landscape.

'The charm of this background is so great, the inwardness of German
feeling for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a special
value of its own, and the master through it has become the father of
landscape painting.'[5]

This must be taken with a grain of salt; but, at all events, it is
true that Duerer combined 'keen and devoted study of Nature (in the
widest sense of the word) with a penetration which aimed at tracing
her facts up to their source.'[6] It is interesting to see how these
qualities overcame his theoretical views on Nature and art.[7]
Duerer's deep respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era.
Melanchthon relates that he often regretted that he had been too much
attracted in his younger days by variety and the fantastic, and had
only understood Nature's simple truth and beauty later in life.

His riper judgment preferred her to all other models. Nature, in his
remarks on the theory of art, includes the animate and the inanimate,
living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting to observe
that his admiration of her as a divine thing was due to deep
religious feeling. In his work on Proportion[8] he says:

'Certainly art is hidden in Nature, and he who is able to separate it
by force from Nature, he possesses it. Never imagine that you can or
will surpass Nature's achievements; human effort cannot compare with
the ability which her Creator has given her. Therefore no man can
ever make a picture which excels Nature's; and when, through much
copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work,
it is rather something received and learnt, whose seeds grow and bear
fruit of their own kind. Thereby the gathered treasure of the heart,
and the new creature which takes shape and form there, comes to light
in the artist's work.'

Elsewhere Duerer says 'a good painter's mind is full of figures,' and
he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all living
things which human intelligence rarely succeeds in reprodu