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ALBERT DITHER'S PASSION PRINTS..
The claim which the title asserts for these prints, as "representing the original wood-blocks of Albert Durer," is not merely a catching cir- cumlocution for saying that they are imitated from the originals, but is literally correct ; casts having been taken from the blocks, now in the British Museum, and type-metal copies from the casts. Allowance is to be made, however, as the editor explains, "for the dressing necessary on account of the worm-holes" ; and indeed the worn and patchy aspect of the prints will offer little attraction to those who care more for fair outside than for sound inside. The editor has judged it better, "for general circulation," to omit four of the original prints. The series, which is sufficiently familiar, commences with the Annunciation and the Nativity. All the events of the life of Christ are then passed over until the tri- umphal entry into Jerusalem ; which is succeeded by four designs lead- ing up to the Betrayal. Between this subject and the Entombment, the events of the Passion occupy sixteen designs ; and five are given to the period from the Resurrection to the Ascension. The Day of Pentecost, the Last Judgment, and Jesus parting with his Mother before the Passion, and appearing to her after the Resurrection, terminate the series.
There is something startling and disturbing in the first impression produced by most of the religious subjects of Albert Durer ; though ex- ceptional cases occur, as the Agony in the Garden of the present series. The master, like other German and Flemish artists, seems not to have contemplated the necessity of greater mental elevation in these subjects than in those of common life, nor to have shrunk from rendering with all literalness whatever may be painful in them ; to have aimed, in short, rather at embodying a plain fact than at expressing his own feeling about the fact by an emotional or pathetic rendering. As one grows more familiar with the works, one is more disposed to allow for this principle, and to reverence the genuineness of soul with which Darer approaches equally the history of redemption or a group of feudal troopers, determined to give the plain truth as be can conceive it to have looked to a bystander. The series before us is eminently marked with these characteristics, and must be studied and dwelt on before it is ap- preciated. This is the more necessary to be noted, as the price at which it is published (one shilling) may bring it into the hands of many who have not yet become familiarized with the designs themselves, or with the principle and method embodied in them.
The letterpress consists simply of texts of Scripture ; each print, with a few exceptions, being illustrated by texts, of three classes—first, pro- phetic of the event; second, narrating the event; and third, of general application in connexion with it, The edition, with all its cheapness, is elegant as well as handy.
The Humiliation and Exaltation of our Redeemer: in thirty-two Prints, re- presenting the original Wood-blocks of Albert Darer. Edited by John Allen, M.A., Archdeacon of Salop, 4-c. Published by Routledge.
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