h, and skill.

When Flemings began to make tours in Italy and saw the pictures of
Raphael, in whom grace was native, they fell in love with his work
and returned to Flanders to try and paint as he did. But to them grace
was not God-given, and in their attempt to achieve it, their pictures
became sentimental and postured, and the naive simplicity and everyday
truth, so attractive in the works of the earlier school, perished.
The influence of the Van Eycks had not been confined to Flanders.
Artists in Germany had been profoundly affected. They learnt the new
technique of painting from the pupils of the Van Eycks in the fifteenth
century. Like them, too, they discarded gold backgrounds and tried
to paint men and women as they really looked, instead of in the old
conventional fashion of the Middle Ages. Schools of painting grew up
in several of the more important German towns, till towards the end
of the fifteenth century two German artists were born, Albert Durer
at Nuremberg in 1471, and Hans Holbein the younger at Augsburg in 1497,
who deserve to rank with the greatest painters of the time in any
country.

Durer is commonly regarded as the most typically German of artists,
though his father was Hungarian, and as a matter of fact he stands
very much alone. His pictures and engravings are 'long, long thoughts.'
Every inch of the surface is weighted with meaning. His cast of mind,
indeed, was more that of a philosopher than that of an artist. In a
drawing which Durer made of himself in the looking-glass at the age
of thirteen, we see a thoughtful little face gazing out upon the world
with questioning eyes. Already the delicacy of the lines is striking,
and the hair so beautifully finished that we can anticipate the later
artist whose pictures are remarkable for so surprising a wealth of
detail. The characteristics of the Flemish School, carefulness of
workmanship and indifference to the physical beauty of the model, to
which the Italians were so sensitive, continued in his work. For
thoroughness his portraits can be compared with those of John van Eyck.
In the National Gallery his father lives again for us in a picture
of wonderful power and insight.

Durer was akin to Leonardo in the desire for more and yet more knowledge.
Like him he wrote treatises on fortifications, human proportions,
geometry, and perspective, and filled his sketchbooks with studies
of plants, animals, and natural scenery. His eager mind employed it