form his mode of visualising takes, we must make allowances for the habits and customs and costumes of the times—as indeed one has to, in the case of all old masters, and for which reason I humbly submit that the study of old masters properly belongs to the few, not the many. A great deal of erroneous opinions are held simply because it is difficult to disentangle the individual from the typical
Dürer whose wanderjahre had taken him to Strasburg and Bâle and Venice, returned home again apparently uninfluenced.
Critics from Raphael's age down to the last few years have lamented this fact; have thought that "knowledge of classic antiquity" might have made a better artist of him.
Now, Dürer was not an artist in its wider sense; he was a craftsman certainly, but above all a thinker. Dürer uses his eyes
