Dürer strove strenuously in both these directions. He unquestionably added immensely to the knowledge of actual form and to the power of representation, but his eagerness led him to regard quantity of form rather than its quality. With him drawing became a means of making manifest the greatest possible amount of form, the utmost roundness of relief, and his studies in pure design failed to keep pace with this. In the end he could not use to significant purpose the increased material at his disposal, and from the point of view of pure design his work actually falls short of that of his predecessor, Martin Schongauer, who indeed was benefited by lacking Dürer’s power of representation.
From this point of view it may be worth while to examine in some detail Dürer’s relations to Italian art. The earliest definite example of his study of Italian art is in 1494, when he was probably in Venice for the first time. It is a copy in pen and ink of an engraving of the “Death of Orpheus” by some follower of Mantegna. The engraving is not the work of a great artist, and Dürer’s copy shows his superior skill in the rendering of form; but even here he has failed to realise the beauty of spatial arrangement in the original, and his desire to enrich the design with many skilfully drawn and convincing details results in a distinct weakening of the dramatic effect. Again, in the same year we have two drawings from engravings, this time by Mantegna himself. It is easy to understand that of all Italians, Mantegna should have been the most sympathetic to Dürer, and that he should have regretted more than any other ill-fortune of his life,--more even than the similar fate that prevented his meeting Schongauer,--Mantegna’s death just when he was setting out to Mantua to learn from the great master. What Dürer saw in Mantegna was his clear decision of line and his richly patterned effect. In his pen-and-ink copies he tries to surpass the original in both these ways, and indeed the effect is of greater complexity, with more fullness and roundness of form. Where Mantegna is content with a firm statement of the generalised contour of a limb, Dürer will give a curve for each muscle. There is in Dürer’s copies a mass of brilliant detail; each part is in a sense more convincingly real; but in doing this something of the unity of rhythm and the easy relations of planes has been lost, and on the whole the balance is against the copyist. It is curious that when in time Rembrandt came to copy Mantegna he took the other way, and actually heightened the dramatic effect by minute readjustments of planning, and by a wilful simplification of the line.[40]