Four Books on Human Proportion

...knowledge which one might have believed he had found by chance. But for Albrecht, everything was prepared, certain, and ready at hand, because he had led painting onto the path of instruction and recalled it to the reason of doctrine. Without this, as Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator, who argued that art requires both natural talent and systematic study wrote, even if something is done well with the help of nature, nevertheless, because it happens by chance, it cannot always be ready. He first worked these things out for himself. Soon, being most generous and sincere, he set out to explain them in written books for the illustrious and most learned man Willibald Pirckheimer Pirckheimer A prominent Nuremberg lawyer, humanist, and Dürer’s closest friend, to whom he also dedicated them with a most elegant letter. Since we felt that rendering that letter into Latin while preserving its untouched, native character was beyond our powers, we have left it intact Camerarius chose not to translate Dürer’s original German dedication to Pirckheimer to avoid losing its specific personal tone. But before he could finish everything and publish them in a corrected form as he had desired, he was snatched away by death—a death that was peaceful and even desirable, but certainly, in our judgment, premature.

If there was anything in that man that seemed like a flaw, it was his unique and infinite diligence, and a self-scrutiny that was often hardly fair to himself. Thus, death took him away from the publication of the work he had begun, which his friends nevertheless completed from his own writings. About this work, and about our version of it, we shall now say a few words.

The work itself, begun by him to be elaborated in a certain geometric manner geometirco modo, seems a little unpolished and lacking the "stain" of literature meaning it lacked the flowery style of a trained scholar, being somewhat rough; but this is easily compensated for by the goodness of the subject itself. A few days before he met his fate, he had asked me to make it Latin even as he was refining it, and I did not begrudge him my labor and study. But death stole from him this care and the opportunity to polish the work—as it steals almost everything. Afterward, his friends obtained my consent—not only through prayers but by their own authority—to undertake the translation into the Latin language, so that this task, accepted while Dürer was alive, might be performed for him now that he is dead.

Indeed, I was not unaware of how great a burden I was taking up in handling a subject that was not entirely clear to me, nor one in which I had anything in the Latin language to set down as an example to imitate.

How much more difficult?

it was for [the author]?

from the author's [notes]?

to the people of Nuremberg?

which [was] most [important]?

[...] for Nuremberg?

It also did not escape me how much more difficult it would be, occupied as I am with other ordinary business; I saw that I could not devote as much diligence and persistence to this translation as I desired and as the work itself deserved. But what was I to do? Out of respect for a man who was my dearest friend, and by the will of his surviving friends—who have a certain right to command me—I was swept along against all difficulties to enter upon a path that was neither level nor easy for me.

Therefore, I have devoted as much leisure as I could steal from my necessary occupations to two books of the entire volume, and I have attempted to teach in Latin, however I could, those things which he had taught so excellently in the German language teutonica lingua original: "teutonica lingua". I trust I shall easily find pardon among you, the good students of the arts, for this deed, as I neither wish nor am able to defend myself from appearing bold. Indeed, I believe that such boldness should not only be forgiven in places, but even supported. If I learn that my industry and study in this part have been pleasing to you, I shall be encouraged to translate the remainder of Albrecht’s instructions on painting de pictura præceptionum into Latin, a task that will be as much more refined as it is more laborious.

However, you should not only expect his writings on this subject, but also his works on geometry as well as fortification tichismatica from the Greek "teichos" (wall); Dürer wrote a famous treatise on defending towns and castles, in which he described the defenses of cities as the conditions of these times require. These are generally the things about which he composed books. For I hear that some people are promising the public, either in their writings or conversations, a little book by Albrecht on the symmetry of the parts in the bodies of horses; I truly wonder where they will produce it from after his death, since he never finished it while alive. Although it is no secret to me that Albrecht began to seek the truth of proportions in this genre as well, the labor of the author will be no less now that he is dead than it would have been while he was living.