master's brothers Dürer studied and helped to support himself by his art
at Colmar and at Bâsle. Various wood-blocks executed by him at the
latter place are preserved there. Whether he also visited Venice now or
not is a moot point. Here or elsewhere, at any rate, he came under the
influence of the Bellini, of Mantegna, and more particularly of Jacopo
dei Barbari--the painter and engraver to whom he owed the incentive to
study the proportions of the human body--a study which henceforth became
the most absorbing interest of his life.

"I was four years absent from Nuremberg," he records, "and then my
father recalled me. After my return Hans Frey came to an understanding
with my father. He gave me his daughter Agnes and with her 200 florins,
and we were married." Dürer, who writes so lovingly of his parents,
never mentions his wife with any affection; a fact which to some extent
confirms her reputation as a Xantippe. She, too, in her way, it is
suggested, practised the art of cross-hatching. Pirkheimer, writing
after the artist's death, says that by her avariciousness and quarreling
nature she brought him to the grave before his day. She was probably a
woman of a practical and prosaic turn, to whom the dreamy, poetic,
imaginative nature of the artist-student, her husband, was intolerably
irritating. Yet as we look at his portraits of himself--and no man
except Rembrandt has painted himself so often--it is difficult to
understand how any one could have been angry with Albert Dürer. Never
did the face of man bear a more sweet, benign, and trustful expression.
In those portraits we see something of the beauty, of the strength, of
the weakness of the man so beloved in his generation. His fondness for
fine clothes and his legitimate pride in his personal beauty reveal
themselves in the rich vestments he wears and the wealth of silken
curls, so carefully waved, so wondrously painted, falling proudly over
his free neck.