Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some light tanning due to age. Plates bright and vivid. Year 1947. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The art of the Germanic countries during the period of the Reformation was the most brutal and lustful which the world has ever seen. In 1933 I happened to be engaged in the classification of sixteenth-century German woodcuts and although usually suspicious of that too convenient abstraction the national characteristic I could not but be struck by the similarity of the world they revealed to that which was taking shape in Germany under the influence of the Nazis. Here in the cuts and drawings of Hans Sebald Beham Barthel Beham Cranach Nicholas Manuel and above all Urs Graf was all the cruelty the swagger the smut the self-pity and the hysteri- cal virility which the political genius of Hitler and his associates had found lying dormant in a defeated people waiting to be fanned into a final conflagration. I must apologise to my Swiss friends for classing Urs Graf as a German but the facts of history do not always respect subsequent national sympathies. The Swiss were not always the amiable peaceful people which they have become and the way in which the respectable merchants of Basle have survived her brutal mercenaries is a rare instance of biology and morality in combination. Urs Graf may certainly be quoted in refutation of a narrowly moralistic theory of art. He was a cutthroat a swindler a bully and a lecher. He beat his wife and amused himself by abominable practical jokes. Such defects must prevent a man from being a great artist in the sense that Dante and Michelangelo are great but they do not prevent him from being a very good and ef- fective one. (MP)