Albrecht Dürer's legacy
Hmm... hello, again! This has got to be the first story in a while that doesn't have/allude to Aziraphale or Crowley. Wait, no, come back!
Title: The Lost Yet Accurate Prophecy of Bertran Dürer, Farmhand
Rating: PG/G
Word Count: 2,584
Disclaimer: Albrecht Dürer belongs to history, War, Famine, and Death belong to Revelations, Pollution and the way in which the Apocalypse is portrayed belong to Terry & Neil, and Bertran, Sibylle, and Albrecht's mother are entirely fictional, made by me. You can have them, I guess.
Summary: The brother to famous artist Albrecht Dürer, Bertran Dürer, has a vision of the Apocalypse. However, it turns out to be more trouble than he'd bargained for.
It is said that genius often goes unnoticed. This statement is twice as true in the world of art.
This is so often the case because art, unlike truth, is completely subjective. A piece of art that may be wholly unrecognized by one culture may be embraced as genius in another, appreciated in a way that would have provided for the prosperous life the artist might have imagined for himself after choosing his career, instead of the joyless and damp existence that is afforded by obscurity. Truly, the world of art is such a shifting and fickle thing that it's almost impossible to tell which artists will be celebrated throughout their lives, which will become legends posthumously, and which would be forced to live a life of poverty-their ill fortune not allowing them even the scantest sliver of history to call their hay-day before time's gaping maw swallows them back up into anonymity. And their only solace is the loneliness of their ingenuity-that stark, gleaming EUREKA! that no one heard them shout. And maybe, for the really unlucky ones, the inevitable release of death.
But it wouldn't really be fair to use this latter description to describe Bertran Dürer, farmhand, briefly-a-wood-carver, and brother-to-a-master-artist. First of all, he wasn't really a genius. At least, the way in which he was a genius was completely ill-suited to the trade of wood-carving. Or any kind of art, for that matter. His genius was of the heavenly sort-that rare and random type bestowed upon the completely unsuspecting and only bestowed for long enough to leave the bestowee alarmed and often confused. His brother Albrecht had the other kind of gift-that is to say, the kind that allowed him the proper skills to articulate his visions artistically and the kind that had the courtesy to linger about until he was able to get a good grasp on it.
Currently, his elder brother Albrecht was visiting with Bertran and his family in their small home in Nuremburg. This always annoyed Bertran because when this happened their mother would always look at him pointedly and say things like "Withe tenne and eight childerenne, the odds would be graite that moore than wonn of myne offspryng would possess the skilles ov the oyl painte, OR the charcohl penne, OR the cutting ov wood," or "Oh, but iffe the fruite ov myne wombe were alle as ripe withe the seeds ov the Lorde's ownne talente." It was all very tiresome. Working on the farm was a very honest way of life and he had no desire to be an artist like his brother.
“So, Albrecht, are ewe stille working uponne yore oyl painte portraites?” asked Bertran’s mother as the family sat down to dinner.
“No, mother. I amme now working uponne a newe series.”
“Wot is it about?” Bertran asked.
“Oh, The Apocalypse,” Albrecht responded nonchalantly, pushing some of his cabbage aside on his plate with his fork. “Ewe know how it is. I’ve benne doing a lotte of wood-cutting as of late.”
“How wunderfulle! Ewe know, yore ownne brother Bertran has benne cutting wood as of late.”
“Really?” asked Albrecht, seeming genuinely interested.
“Yes. To burne it inne the fyre of the hearth!” his mother crowed, cackling. Bertran scowled.
“I amme going to cleane outte the chicken coope,” he announced shortly, standing up from the table.
“Brother, do notte becomme up-sette,” Albrecht called after him.
“I’m notte up-sette. The chicken coope needs cleaning, that’s alle.”
But it really didn’t.
That night, Bertran couldn’t sleep very well. Granted, his bed was really no more than an itchy sack stuffed uncomfortably full of hay, and it was stiflingly hot that night, and his room smelt of the end result of a chicken’s lunch, but he was rather used to all this. What was keeping him from sleep was the thought of wood-cutting, and his brother visiting from Italy, and the bloody Apocalypse. Albrecht had shown him one of his carvings that he was working on as a part of his new series, and Bertran couldn’t help but admire it, even though it was unfinished. It featured the Four Horsemen, and Hades, and heavenly light, and people being trampled beneath the Horesemens’ horses’ hooves. Who were the Four Horsemen anyway? Albrecht had explained it, but Bertran didn’t seem to remember very clearly… There was Death, right in front, that’s the obvious one… then Famine, with his scales… and War. And the last one… what was his name… Oh, yes. Pollution.
Bertran blinked. Pollution? That clearly wasn’t it. What had made him think of that?
He frowned. Slowly, a vision filled his head. A very strange one, at that. As bits and pieces flooded in, he became more and more excited.
“Ohhh…. OH! OH!” he shouted, flinging his scratchy, roughly hewn blanket to the floor and jumping up. He ran, barefoot, through the house until he had gathered his wits enough to pound loudly on his sister’s door.
“Sibylle! SIBYLLE! Get thee uppe!”
“Byye our Lorde and Saviour! Wot do ewe want from me this late inne the nighte? The moon’s full risen inne the skye!” she screeched at him from behind the door.
“Where does our brother Albrecht keepe his wood cutting tooles?”
“Where does he allways keepe theme, ewe brainless, featherless goose?” Sibylle squawked in annoyance. “On the floore beside the hearth.”
“Thank ewe, deare sister,” Bertran said quickly, running off.
“Albrecht wille be very crosse withe ewe if ewe use his tooles, Bertran!” Sibylle called after him, but her warning fell upon deaf ears. Bertran was halfway across the house by the time she finished her sentence.
Bertran paused as he looked at all the tools that lay before him. He hadn’t the faintest idea as to which ones he needed, or if he needed all of them, or if some of them even belonged to Albrecht. He had the vague idea that he was picking up an iron poker for the fire as he scooped up all of the metal tools on the ground, along with a small wooden slab. With all the proper tools in tow, he scurried into his room, praying that his precious vision wasn’t just a bad after-effect of the cabbage, or the smell of chicken mixed with the heat rattling his brain.
After he returned to his room with his brother’s tools and his head bursting with strange and magical images, he did not emerge for several days.
“Bertran? I have a cuppe of water for ewe,” his brother Albrecht would say to him in a concerned voice, knocking on his door. “Come outte and have a sup.”
“I can notte stop, brother,” Bertran replied foggily. “Got a visionne.”
“Bertran, you’re moore useless than a lame horse on a summer’s day,” his mother would say, rapping sharply at his door. “Gette thee outte here right this moment and cleanne outte the horse’s stalles.”
“Gotte a visionne, mother. Can notte moore stop than I could plucke outte myne ownne eye.”
And so it went for the next five days. Bertran cut his hand four times and almost severed his index finger twice, but he finally finished his masterpiece.
“Brother Albrecht! Sisters, brothers, mother!” cried Bertran, flinging open the door of his room in what he secretly hoped would be a dramatic and impressive manner. However, he only managed to almost hit one of his younger sisters in the head in what might have been a fatal blow. “I’ve done it!”
“Did wot? Did ewe see? Sibylle, wot did he do?” asked Bertran’s mother irritably.
“He did allmoste hit yore youngest daughter inne the heade. Maybee that is wot he is talking about.”
“No!” Bertran cried in frustration. “That is notte it! Come and see! I have had a visionne of the Apocalypse! Come and looke!”
He displayed his wood carving proudly to his mother, Albrecht, and some of his younger sisters. They stared at it.
“Ewe juste coppied Brother Albrecht’s carving,” one of his younger sisters complained loudly. “Only worse.”
“It’s the Apocalypse,” Bertran told her. “It is bounde to be symilar.”
Someone grabbed the masterpiece out of his hand.
“Wot’s that?”
“Is that a horse?”
“No,” Bertran said proudly. “It is an ironne wagonne. Withe but two wheeles.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Blasphemie, Bertran, if I evere did see it!” cried his mother in a very distressful tone of voice. She squinted and put the carving up to her nose to better see-then with a yelp flung it out at arm’s length as if the sins portrayed in it could somehow crawl up her skin and infect her. “Is that a womanne?”
“Umme… yes,” Bertran responded, sounding unsure. “It is War.” He was slowly beginning to realize that nothing he had drawn really made much sense. He hadn’t really thought much concerning the content of his vision in his frenzy to translate it onto the wood. But now he was beginning to wonder if he had committed some awful crime against his Lord. By all accounts, his brother’s version of things seemed much more… well… traditional.
“Heresy!” his mother screamed, throwing the carving onto the ground. “Bertran, wot have ewe done?”
“I have done nothing! I saw a visionne! I sweare it!” Bertran said defensively, scooping up his precious carving from the floor.
“Ewe have seen a visionne from the Devile!” his mother gasped. “O, Lorde, save myne sonne from The Adversarry! O, myne wickede, foolish boy!”
Bertran considered this. He wasn’t entirely sure that his mother’s allegations weren’t true. But he didn’t feel like the Devil was working through him. He had the sneaking suspicion that if the Devil was using him as a vessel for his unholy works, he’d be able to tell-at least a little bit. Then again, the Devil had ever worked through him before-at least, he didn’t think so-and it would be untrue to say that he knew for certain what it would be like.
“Mother, please calme yoreself,” Albrecht told his mother, coming forward to look at the carving for himself. He looked at the cut wood for a very long time-trying nobly to find something positive to say to his younger brother.
“Well, yore shading is quite… That is to saye…” he attempted. Then he looked up at Bertran brightly. “Welle, ewe saye that this is yore first attempte at carving?”
“No,” Bertran replied bluntly.
“Oh,” Albrecht replied in a low voice. Then, “Wot did ewe saye the Horsemen were ryding?”
“Ironne wagonnes,” said Bertran miserably. He began to feel a hint of shame slowly creeping through him as he looked down upon his masterpiece. He realized now that he clearly had no talent with the wood cutting tools, and whatever magic his art had held despite his less-than-stellar mechanical skills was swiftly dissipating.
“Are those fish?” Sibylle scoffed.
“Yes.”
“Who is that in the crownne?” one of Bertran’s younger sister’s asked loudly.
“Pollution. He tooke the place of Pestilence.”
“Wot is this graite formeless blobbe?” Albrecht asked politely, pointing to the lower left hand corner of the block.
“A demonne from Hell.”
Albrecht blinked. “Ohhh,” he said in that way that was suggestive of a mother assuring her child that its formless scratch of a drawing clearly looks like two skeletons in hats having tea, how silly of me to ask, darling. “Of course.”
The silence that followed was tangible. Bertran felt downright awful. He was so certain that he, Bertran Dürer, had seen the Apocalypse as it was happening. He should have known that he, Bertran Dürer, was only the farmhand and that his brother, Albrecht, was the ingénue and the artist. Compared to his brother’s art, the slab of wood he held in his hand looked positively primitive.
Albrecht cleared his throat. “Perhaps, brother, the worke of an artisanne is notte meante for ewe,” he said in the kindest possible way.
Bertran sighed, wiping off his grubby hands on his equally grubby tunic. “I suppose ewe are righte.”
“Of course Albrecht is righte, ewe braneless, lice-riddene donkey,” their mother told Bertran sharply. “Now starte earning yore keepe and give the she-goate a nife milking before we sup upon dinner.”
“Yes, mother,” Bertran mumbled in disappointment as he slowly shuffled off towards the goat pens.
“Bertran?” Albrecht called after his brother. Bertran turned around, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“Yes?”
There was a pause.
“…Are ewe donne withe my tooles?”
Bertran’s face fell. “Yes, brother. They are inne my room.”
“Thanke ewe.”
And so Bertran went to milk the goats and collect the eggs from the hens and tend to the cows and horse, and Albrecht went to work on his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse carving with his tools, and Bertran’s mother took Bertran’s heretical and ill-shaded wood carving and used it to warm up the house a bit, and everything in the Dürer household went back to exactly the state it had been in before Bertran’s strange vision of the Apocalypse and iron wagons and fish.
And when Albrecht completed his carving, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (which was conspicuously devoid of any fish and in which the four riders rode on horses, thank you very much), it was greeted with great success and admiration-celebrated for Albrecht’s great skill and beautiful imagery. Indeed, in later years, this work and his other works that followed in his series about the Apocalypse were often considered among those that most famously defined him as an artist. Albrecht never considered it his greatest work, but as is common in the world of art, one’s most popular piece is rarely one’s personal favorite. Just ask Nirvana.
The name of Bertran Dürer never became known to more than a handful of people during the course of history, and it certainly was not due to his skills as an artist. After that fateful night, he was never again granted so much as a vision about whether or not it would rain the next day, and he never picked up another wood carving tool in his life. Sometimes he would remember that night and wonder vaguely as to whether he had been blessed with some psychic vision of the future or if some spiteful demon had crawled into his head and played a cruel joke on his mind. But then he would realize there was some menial chore he had yet to do, such as clean out the chicken coop, or water the horses, and he wouldn’t give it another thought.
It is clear to see that when Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is placed side to side with the much lesser known Bertran Dürer’s Three Iron Wagon Riding Men and One Iron Wagon Riding Woman of the Apocalypse, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the superior work of art. Albrecht’s use of positive and negative space, his shading, anatomy, and linework are all superb and clearly the work of a seasoned and skilled professional. On the other hand, Bertran Dürer’s work is sloppy, ill-conceived, and at most times makes poor use of perspective. Mechanically speaking, Albrecht was clearly the better artist.
It was very ironic that the lesser skilled and lesser appreciated artist was the one who got the whole thing right-making Bertran Dürer one of only two people in the entirety of history to ever accurately predict the events of the Apocalypse (the other, of course, being Agnes Nutter, witch).
But Bertran was a very good farmhand.
"Three Ironne Wagonne Riding Men and One Ironne Wagonne Riding Woman,"
Bertran Dürer, 1498
Title: The Lost Yet Accurate Prophecy of Bertran Dürer, Farmhand
Rating: PG/G
Word Count: 2,584
Disclaimer: Albrecht Dürer belongs to history, War, Famine, and Death belong to Revelations, Pollution and the way in which the Apocalypse is portrayed belong to Terry & Neil, and Bertran, Sibylle, and Albrecht's mother are entirely fictional, made by me. You can have them, I guess.
Summary: The brother to famous artist Albrecht Dürer, Bertran Dürer, has a vision of the Apocalypse. However, it turns out to be more trouble than he'd bargained for.
It is said that genius often goes unnoticed. This statement is twice as true in the world of art.
This is so often the case because art, unlike truth, is completely subjective. A piece of art that may be wholly unrecognized by one culture may be embraced as genius in another, appreciated in a way that would have provided for the prosperous life the artist might have imagined for himself after choosing his career, instead of the joyless and damp existence that is afforded by obscurity. Truly, the world of art is such a shifting and fickle thing that it's almost impossible to tell which artists will be celebrated throughout their lives, which will become legends posthumously, and which would be forced to live a life of poverty-their ill fortune not allowing them even the scantest sliver of history to call their hay-day before time's gaping maw swallows them back up into anonymity. And their only solace is the loneliness of their ingenuity-that stark, gleaming EUREKA! that no one heard them shout. And maybe, for the really unlucky ones, the inevitable release of death.
But it wouldn't really be fair to use this latter description to describe Bertran Dürer, farmhand, briefly-a-wood-carver, and brother-to-a-master-artist. First of all, he wasn't really a genius. At least, the way in which he was a genius was completely ill-suited to the trade of wood-carving. Or any kind of art, for that matter. His genius was of the heavenly sort-that rare and random type bestowed upon the completely unsuspecting and only bestowed for long enough to leave the bestowee alarmed and often confused. His brother Albrecht had the other kind of gift-that is to say, the kind that allowed him the proper skills to articulate his visions artistically and the kind that had the courtesy to linger about until he was able to get a good grasp on it.
Currently, his elder brother Albrecht was visiting with Bertran and his family in their small home in Nuremburg. This always annoyed Bertran because when this happened their mother would always look at him pointedly and say things like "Withe tenne and eight childerenne, the odds would be graite that moore than wonn of myne offspryng would possess the skilles ov the oyl painte, OR the charcohl penne, OR the cutting ov wood," or "Oh, but iffe the fruite ov myne wombe were alle as ripe withe the seeds ov the Lorde's ownne talente." It was all very tiresome. Working on the farm was a very honest way of life and he had no desire to be an artist like his brother.
“So, Albrecht, are ewe stille working uponne yore oyl painte portraites?” asked Bertran’s mother as the family sat down to dinner.
“No, mother. I amme now working uponne a newe series.”
“Wot is it about?” Bertran asked.
“Oh, The Apocalypse,” Albrecht responded nonchalantly, pushing some of his cabbage aside on his plate with his fork. “Ewe know how it is. I’ve benne doing a lotte of wood-cutting as of late.”
“How wunderfulle! Ewe know, yore ownne brother Bertran has benne cutting wood as of late.”
“Really?” asked Albrecht, seeming genuinely interested.
“Yes. To burne it inne the fyre of the hearth!” his mother crowed, cackling. Bertran scowled.
“I amme going to cleane outte the chicken coope,” he announced shortly, standing up from the table.
“Brother, do notte becomme up-sette,” Albrecht called after him.
“I’m notte up-sette. The chicken coope needs cleaning, that’s alle.”
But it really didn’t.
That night, Bertran couldn’t sleep very well. Granted, his bed was really no more than an itchy sack stuffed uncomfortably full of hay, and it was stiflingly hot that night, and his room smelt of the end result of a chicken’s lunch, but he was rather used to all this. What was keeping him from sleep was the thought of wood-cutting, and his brother visiting from Italy, and the bloody Apocalypse. Albrecht had shown him one of his carvings that he was working on as a part of his new series, and Bertran couldn’t help but admire it, even though it was unfinished. It featured the Four Horsemen, and Hades, and heavenly light, and people being trampled beneath the Horesemens’ horses’ hooves. Who were the Four Horsemen anyway? Albrecht had explained it, but Bertran didn’t seem to remember very clearly… There was Death, right in front, that’s the obvious one… then Famine, with his scales… and War. And the last one… what was his name… Oh, yes. Pollution.
Bertran blinked. Pollution? That clearly wasn’t it. What had made him think of that?
He frowned. Slowly, a vision filled his head. A very strange one, at that. As bits and pieces flooded in, he became more and more excited.
“Ohhh…. OH! OH!” he shouted, flinging his scratchy, roughly hewn blanket to the floor and jumping up. He ran, barefoot, through the house until he had gathered his wits enough to pound loudly on his sister’s door.
“Sibylle! SIBYLLE! Get thee uppe!”
“Byye our Lorde and Saviour! Wot do ewe want from me this late inne the nighte? The moon’s full risen inne the skye!” she screeched at him from behind the door.
“Where does our brother Albrecht keepe his wood cutting tooles?”
“Where does he allways keepe theme, ewe brainless, featherless goose?” Sibylle squawked in annoyance. “On the floore beside the hearth.”
“Thank ewe, deare sister,” Bertran said quickly, running off.
“Albrecht wille be very crosse withe ewe if ewe use his tooles, Bertran!” Sibylle called after him, but her warning fell upon deaf ears. Bertran was halfway across the house by the time she finished her sentence.
Bertran paused as he looked at all the tools that lay before him. He hadn’t the faintest idea as to which ones he needed, or if he needed all of them, or if some of them even belonged to Albrecht. He had the vague idea that he was picking up an iron poker for the fire as he scooped up all of the metal tools on the ground, along with a small wooden slab. With all the proper tools in tow, he scurried into his room, praying that his precious vision wasn’t just a bad after-effect of the cabbage, or the smell of chicken mixed with the heat rattling his brain.
After he returned to his room with his brother’s tools and his head bursting with strange and magical images, he did not emerge for several days.
“Bertran? I have a cuppe of water for ewe,” his brother Albrecht would say to him in a concerned voice, knocking on his door. “Come outte and have a sup.”
“I can notte stop, brother,” Bertran replied foggily. “Got a visionne.”
“Bertran, you’re moore useless than a lame horse on a summer’s day,” his mother would say, rapping sharply at his door. “Gette thee outte here right this moment and cleanne outte the horse’s stalles.”
“Gotte a visionne, mother. Can notte moore stop than I could plucke outte myne ownne eye.”
And so it went for the next five days. Bertran cut his hand four times and almost severed his index finger twice, but he finally finished his masterpiece.
“Brother Albrecht! Sisters, brothers, mother!” cried Bertran, flinging open the door of his room in what he secretly hoped would be a dramatic and impressive manner. However, he only managed to almost hit one of his younger sisters in the head in what might have been a fatal blow. “I’ve done it!”
“Did wot? Did ewe see? Sibylle, wot did he do?” asked Bertran’s mother irritably.
“He did allmoste hit yore youngest daughter inne the heade. Maybee that is wot he is talking about.”
“No!” Bertran cried in frustration. “That is notte it! Come and see! I have had a visionne of the Apocalypse! Come and looke!”
He displayed his wood carving proudly to his mother, Albrecht, and some of his younger sisters. They stared at it.
“Ewe juste coppied Brother Albrecht’s carving,” one of his younger sisters complained loudly. “Only worse.”
“It’s the Apocalypse,” Bertran told her. “It is bounde to be symilar.”
Someone grabbed the masterpiece out of his hand.
“Wot’s that?”
“Is that a horse?”
“No,” Bertran said proudly. “It is an ironne wagonne. Withe but two wheeles.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Blasphemie, Bertran, if I evere did see it!” cried his mother in a very distressful tone of voice. She squinted and put the carving up to her nose to better see-then with a yelp flung it out at arm’s length as if the sins portrayed in it could somehow crawl up her skin and infect her. “Is that a womanne?”
“Umme… yes,” Bertran responded, sounding unsure. “It is War.” He was slowly beginning to realize that nothing he had drawn really made much sense. He hadn’t really thought much concerning the content of his vision in his frenzy to translate it onto the wood. But now he was beginning to wonder if he had committed some awful crime against his Lord. By all accounts, his brother’s version of things seemed much more… well… traditional.
“Heresy!” his mother screamed, throwing the carving onto the ground. “Bertran, wot have ewe done?”
“I have done nothing! I saw a visionne! I sweare it!” Bertran said defensively, scooping up his precious carving from the floor.
“Ewe have seen a visionne from the Devile!” his mother gasped. “O, Lorde, save myne sonne from The Adversarry! O, myne wickede, foolish boy!”
Bertran considered this. He wasn’t entirely sure that his mother’s allegations weren’t true. But he didn’t feel like the Devil was working through him. He had the sneaking suspicion that if the Devil was using him as a vessel for his unholy works, he’d be able to tell-at least a little bit. Then again, the Devil had ever worked through him before-at least, he didn’t think so-and it would be untrue to say that he knew for certain what it would be like.
“Mother, please calme yoreself,” Albrecht told his mother, coming forward to look at the carving for himself. He looked at the cut wood for a very long time-trying nobly to find something positive to say to his younger brother.
“Well, yore shading is quite… That is to saye…” he attempted. Then he looked up at Bertran brightly. “Welle, ewe saye that this is yore first attempte at carving?”
“No,” Bertran replied bluntly.
“Oh,” Albrecht replied in a low voice. Then, “Wot did ewe saye the Horsemen were ryding?”
“Ironne wagonnes,” said Bertran miserably. He began to feel a hint of shame slowly creeping through him as he looked down upon his masterpiece. He realized now that he clearly had no talent with the wood cutting tools, and whatever magic his art had held despite his less-than-stellar mechanical skills was swiftly dissipating.
“Are those fish?” Sibylle scoffed.
“Yes.”
“Who is that in the crownne?” one of Bertran’s younger sister’s asked loudly.
“Pollution. He tooke the place of Pestilence.”
“Wot is this graite formeless blobbe?” Albrecht asked politely, pointing to the lower left hand corner of the block.
“A demonne from Hell.”
Albrecht blinked. “Ohhh,” he said in that way that was suggestive of a mother assuring her child that its formless scratch of a drawing clearly looks like two skeletons in hats having tea, how silly of me to ask, darling. “Of course.”
The silence that followed was tangible. Bertran felt downright awful. He was so certain that he, Bertran Dürer, had seen the Apocalypse as it was happening. He should have known that he, Bertran Dürer, was only the farmhand and that his brother, Albrecht, was the ingénue and the artist. Compared to his brother’s art, the slab of wood he held in his hand looked positively primitive.
Albrecht cleared his throat. “Perhaps, brother, the worke of an artisanne is notte meante for ewe,” he said in the kindest possible way.
Bertran sighed, wiping off his grubby hands on his equally grubby tunic. “I suppose ewe are righte.”
“Of course Albrecht is righte, ewe braneless, lice-riddene donkey,” their mother told Bertran sharply. “Now starte earning yore keepe and give the she-goate a nife milking before we sup upon dinner.”
“Yes, mother,” Bertran mumbled in disappointment as he slowly shuffled off towards the goat pens.
“Bertran?” Albrecht called after his brother. Bertran turned around, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“Yes?”
There was a pause.
“…Are ewe donne withe my tooles?”
Bertran’s face fell. “Yes, brother. They are inne my room.”
“Thanke ewe.”
And so Bertran went to milk the goats and collect the eggs from the hens and tend to the cows and horse, and Albrecht went to work on his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse carving with his tools, and Bertran’s mother took Bertran’s heretical and ill-shaded wood carving and used it to warm up the house a bit, and everything in the Dürer household went back to exactly the state it had been in before Bertran’s strange vision of the Apocalypse and iron wagons and fish.
And when Albrecht completed his carving, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (which was conspicuously devoid of any fish and in which the four riders rode on horses, thank you very much), it was greeted with great success and admiration-celebrated for Albrecht’s great skill and beautiful imagery. Indeed, in later years, this work and his other works that followed in his series about the Apocalypse were often considered among those that most famously defined him as an artist. Albrecht never considered it his greatest work, but as is common in the world of art, one’s most popular piece is rarely one’s personal favorite. Just ask Nirvana.
The name of Bertran Dürer never became known to more than a handful of people during the course of history, and it certainly was not due to his skills as an artist. After that fateful night, he was never again granted so much as a vision about whether or not it would rain the next day, and he never picked up another wood carving tool in his life. Sometimes he would remember that night and wonder vaguely as to whether he had been blessed with some psychic vision of the future or if some spiteful demon had crawled into his head and played a cruel joke on his mind. But then he would realize there was some menial chore he had yet to do, such as clean out the chicken coop, or water the horses, and he wouldn’t give it another thought.
It is clear to see that when Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is placed side to side with the much lesser known Bertran Dürer’s Three Iron Wagon Riding Men and One Iron Wagon Riding Woman of the Apocalypse, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the superior work of art. Albrecht’s use of positive and negative space, his shading, anatomy, and linework are all superb and clearly the work of a seasoned and skilled professional. On the other hand, Bertran Dürer’s work is sloppy, ill-conceived, and at most times makes poor use of perspective. Mechanically speaking, Albrecht was clearly the better artist.
It was very ironic that the lesser skilled and lesser appreciated artist was the one who got the whole thing right-making Bertran Dürer one of only two people in the entirety of history to ever accurately predict the events of the Apocalypse (the other, of course, being Agnes Nutter, witch).
But Bertran was a very good farmhand.
"Three Ironne Wagonne Riding Men and One Ironne Wagonne Riding Woman,"
Bertran Dürer, 1498