Dürer was certainly more familiar with death and suffering than we are.
Unless the grey lady and the dark angel visit our own homes, most of us—of my readers, at any rate—have to seek deliberately the faces of sorrow in the slums and the grimaces of death in the Coroner's Court. But in Dürer's days death lurked beyond the city walls; the sight of the slain or swinging victims of knightly valour, and peasant's revenge, blanched the cheeks of many maidens, and queer plagues and pestilences mowed the most upright to the ground. The Dance of Death was a favourite subject with the old painters, not because their disposition was morbid, but because the times were more out of joint than they are now.
All these points have to be realised before one can hope to understand Dürer even faintly. Again, when we examine more closely the apparently quaint and fantastic
