In Germany, as in Italy, men speedily awoke to the new life, but the awakening took a different form.  We find a different quality in the art of the north.  Italian spontaneity and child-like joy is absent; so, too, the sense of physical beauty, universal in Italy.  You remember how the successors of the Van Eycks in Flanders painted excellent portraits and small carefully studied pictures of scriptural events in wonderful detail.  They were a strictly practical people whose painting of stuffs, furs, jewellery, and architecture was marvellously minute and veracious.  But they were not a handsome race, and their models for saints and virgins seem to have been the people that came handiest and by no means the best looking.  Thus the figures in their pictures lack personal charm, though the painting is usually full of vigour, truth, 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.