o the National Gallery by George
Salting.

In other parts of Germany, particularly in Nuremberg, Ulm, Augsburg, and
Basle, various names of painters of the latter half of the fourteenth
century have survived, but their works are of little interest except to
the connoisseur as showing the influence under which the two great
artists of the sixteenth century, Albert Duerer and Hans Holbein, and one
or two lesser lights like Lucas Cranach, Albert Altdorfer, and Adam
Elsheimer, were formed.

In Germany the taste for the fantastic in art peculiar to the Middle
Ages, though it engendered clever and spirited works such as those of
Quentin Massys and Lucas van Leyden, was still unfavourable to the
cultivation of pure beauty, scenes from the Apocalypse, Dances of Death,
etc., being among the favourite subjects for art. On the other hand, the
pictorial treatment of antique literature, a world so suggestive of
beautiful forms, was so little comprehended by the German mind that they
only sought to express it through the medium of those fantastic ideas
with very childish and even tasteless results. We must also remember
that that average education of the various classes of society which the
fine arts require for their protection stood on a very low footing in
Germany. In Italy the favour with which works of art was regarded was
far more widely extended. This again gave rise to a more elevated
personal position on the part of the artist, which in Italy was not only
one of more consideration, but of incomparably greater independence. In
this latter respect Germany was so

[Illustration: PLATE XXXII.

"THE MASTER OF ST BARTHOLOMEW"

TWO SAINTS

_National Gallery, London_]

deficient that the genius of Albert Duerer and Holbein was miserably
cramped and hindered in development by the poverty and littleness of
surrounding circumstances. It is known that of all the German princes no
one but the Elector Frederick the Wise ever gave Albert Duerer a
commission for pictures, while a writing addressed by the great painter
to the magistracy of Nuremberg tells us that his native city never gave
him employment even to the value of 500 florins. At the same time his
pictures were so meanly paid, that for the means of subsistence, as he
says himself, he was compelled to devote himself to engraving. How far
more such a man as Duerer would have been appreciated in Italy or in the
Netherlands is further evidenced in the above-mentioned writing,