Dürer evidently felt a profound reverence for Mantegna’s designs, for he has altered them but little, and one might well imagine that even Dürer could scarcely improve upon such originals. But it is even more instructive to study his work upon the so-called Tarocchi engravings. Here the originals were not executed by an artist of first-rate ability, though the designs have much of Cossa’s splendid style. Dürer seems, therefore, to have felt no particular constraint about altering them. His alterations (see Plate) show us clearly what it was that he saw in the originals and what he missed. In all these figures Dürer gives increased verisimilitude: his feet are like actual feet, not the schematic abstract of a foot that contents the Italian engraver; his poses are more casual, less formal and symmetrical; and his draperies are more ingeniously disposed; but none the less, from the point of view of the expression of imaginative truth, there is not one of Dürer’s figures which equals the original, not one in which some essential part of the idea is not missed or at least less clearly stated. In general the continuity of the contour is lost sight of and the rhythm frittered away. In the Pope, for instance, Dürer loses all the grave sedateness of the original by breaking the symmetry of the pose, its
squareness and immovable aplomb. And with this goes, in spite of the increased verisimilitude, the sense of reality. In the “Knight and Page” not only is the movement of the knight missed by correcting a distortion in the original, but the balance of the composition is lost by displacing the page. In the “Primum Mobile” (see Plate) the ecstatic rush of the figure is lost by slight corrections of the pose and by giving to the floating drapery too complicated a design. It would be tedious to go through these copies in detail, but enough has been said to show how hard it was for Dürer, absorbed by his new curiosity in representation, to grasp those primary and elemental principles of design which were inherent in the Italian tradition.
About the same time we find Dürer studying both Pollajuolo and Lorenzo di Credi. The copy of Pollajuolo is not a good example of Dürer’s art; it certainly misses the tension and inner life of Pollajuolo’s nudes. The Lorenzo di Credi, as might be expected, is in many ways more than adequate to the original, though as compared even with Credi, Dürer has not a clear sense of the correlation of linear elements in the design.