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HANDBOOKS OF THE GREAT
CRAFTSMEN. EDITED BY
G. C. WILLIAMSON, LITT.D.
PETER VISCHER
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Handbooks of the Great Craftsmen.
--------------
Illustrated Monographs, Biographical and Critical, on the Great Craftsmen and Workers of Ancient and Modern Times.
Edited by G. C. WILLIAMSON, Litt.D.
Imperial 16mo, with numerous Illustrations, 5s. net each.
First Volumes of the Series
THE PAVEMENT MASTERS OF SIENA. Workers in Graffito. By R. H. HOBART CUST, M.A.
PETER VISCHER. Bronze Founder. By CECIL HEADLAM, B.A.
THE IVORY WORKERS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. By A. M. CUST.
Others to follow.
--------------
LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
STEIN PHOTO.
[FROM A DRAWING IN POSSESSION OF T. A.
STEIN, NÜRNBERG
1. PORTRAIT OF PETER VISCHER]
PETER VISCHER
by
CECIL HEADLAM, B.A.
Formerly Demy of Magdalen College, Oxford; Author of “The Story of Nuremberg,” etc.
Publisher’s Logo
London
George Bell and Sons
1901
Chiswick Press: Charles Whittingham and Co.
Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, London.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
THE Germans have by nature the gift of working in metal, and, among them, in the realms of bronze, Peter Vischer stands easily first. His position as a craftsman may, in fact, be compared with that held by his contemporary and fellow citizen, Albert Dürer, as an artist. The history of his works and of those of his house, have a peculiar interest to the student of art, inasmuch as they illustrate the gradual but easily traceable passage of the German craftsmen from the style of late Gothic to that of complete neo-paganism, and, from the school of the Northern painters and sculptors to that of the great Italian masters successively.
I speak of the works of Peter Vischer “and his house,” because, in tracing this development, we have to take into consideration not only his works but also those of his father Hermann and of his sons, Hermann and Peter and Hans. The pendulum of criticism has indeed swung more than once since the Emperor Maximilian used to visit Peter Vischer’s foundry in Nuremberg, and the questions as to what are actually the works of the Master and what position is to be assigned to him in the world of art, have been answered in more ways than one. For many years, owing partly to the ignorance of most people, and partly no doubt to the greed of the few, the tendency was to attribute to this one famous craftsman the works of many. At one time almost any work of art in bronze to be found throughout the length and breadth of Germany was attributed to Peter Vischer, just as a Talleyrand or a Sydney Smith has had witticisms of every date and every quality fathered upon him.
From unreasoning praise, again, men passed to equally undiscriminating disparagement. Heideloff arose and wished the world to see in Peter Vischer nothing but the mere craftsman who put into bronze the designs and models of Adam Krafft or another. The admirable labours of Retberg, however, and of Dr. Lübke have shown how little foundation there is for this view, and, more recently, by the application of the principles of more exact art-criticism, Dr. Seeger, in his minute and loving study of Peter Vischer the younger, has vindicated the claim of the great craftsman’s son to rank with, or even above, his father as the first and greatest exponent of Renaissance plastic-work in Germany.
To the two latter authors I have been continually and especially indebted whilst writing the present monograph. For the use of very many of the illustrations forming the volume to which Dr. Lübke contributed the text, my best thanks and acknowledgements are due to the publisher, Herr Stein, of Nuremberg.
C. H.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
BIBLIOGRAPHY xi
I. HERMANN VISCHER AND THE EARLY GERMAN 1 BRONZE-WORK
II. PETER VISCHER: HIS LIFE 9
III. THE EARLY WORKS OF PETER VISCHER 20
IV. THE SHRINE OF ST. SEBALD 36
V. THE TOMB OF MAXIMILIAN 64
VI. THE TUCHER MONUMENT AND THE NUREMBERG 72 MADONNA
VII. THE MINOR WORKS OF PETER VISCHER THE 86 YOUNGER
VIII. THE TOMB OF ELECTOR FREDERICK THE WISE, 101 AND THE RATHAUS RAILING
IX. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF VISCHER 119
X. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WORKS OF THE 130 VISCHERS
CATALOGUE OF THE WORKS OF THE VISCHERS 133
Index 142
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE PAGE
1. PORTRAIT OF PETER VISCHER Frontispiece
2. PETER VISCHER, THE CRAFTSMAN St. Sebald, 13 Nürnberg
3. TOMB OF ARCHBISHOP ERNST Cathedral, 23 Magdeburg
4. TOMB OF ARCHBISHOP ERNST Cathedral, 27 Magdeburg
5. ST. MAURICE Krafft House, Nürnberg 29
6. MONUMENT OF COUNT HERMANN VIII. Church, 31 Römhild
7. TOMB OF ST. SEBALD St. Sebald, Nürnberg 43
8. ST. PETER St. Sebald, Nürnberg 46
9. ST. SEBALD St. Sebald, Nürnberg 47
10. ST. SEBALD PUNISHES AN UNBELIEVER St. 55 Sebald, Nürnberg
11. ST. SEBALD HEALING THE BLIND MAN St. 57 Sebald, Nürnberg
12. ST. PAUL St. Sebald, Nürnberg 59
13. ST. BARTHOLOMEW St. Sebald, Nürnberg 61
14. THEODORIC, KING OF THE GOTHS Tomb of 68 Maximilian, Innsbruck
15. KING ARTHUR Tomb of Maximilian, 69 Innsbruck
16. MEETING OF CHRIST WITH THE SISTERS OF 75 LAZARUS Cathedral, Ratisbon
17. BEWEINUNG CHRISTI St. Ægidius, Nürnberg 79
18. THE NUREMBERG MADONNA Museum, Nürnberg 81
19. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE Collection of M. 90 Dreyfus, Paris
20. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE Museum, Berlin 93
21. EARTHLY LIFE (INKSTAND) Ashmolean 96 Museum, Oxford
22. HEAVENLY LIFE (INKSTAND) Ashmolean 97 Museum, Oxford
23. ELECTOR FREDERICK THE WISE 103 Schlosskirche, Wittenberg
24. THE RATHAUS RAILING Formerly at Nürnberg 109
25. THE RATHAUS RAILING Formerly at Nürnberg 113
26. BOY WITH BAGPIPES Museum, Nürnberg 120
27. TOMB-PLATE OF DUCHESS HELENE VON 121 MECKLENBURG Cathedral, Schwerin
28. THE APOLLO FOUNTAIN Rathaus Court, 126 Nürnberg
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baader. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte Nürnbergs.
Bauer (Robert). Peter Vischer und das alte Nürnberg.
Bergau (R). Peter Vischer, in Dohme’s Kunst und Künstler des Mittelalters, vol. ii.
Bode. Geschichte der deutschen Plastik.
Daun (Berthold). Adam Krafft und die Künstler seiner Zeit.
Döbner (A. W.). Peter-Vischer-Studien.
Edelberg (R. von E. von). Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte.
Ephrussi (Charles). Albert Dürer et ses Dessins.
Heideloff. Die Ornamente des Mittelalters.
Jannsen. Geschichte des deutschen Volks.
Lübke (Wilhelm). Peter Vischer und seine Werke. Lübke (Wilhelm). Renaissance in Deutschland.
Mummenhoff (R. von). Das Rathaus in Nürnberg.
Neudörffer. Nachrichten über Künstlern und Werkleuten Nürnbergs.
Reicke (Emil). Geschichte der Reichstadt Nürnberg.
Retberg (R. von). Nürnbergs Kunstleben in seinem Denkmalen dargestellt.
Schönherr (David Ritter von). Geschichte des Grabmals Kaisers Maximilian I.
Seeger (Georg). Peter Vischer der Jüngere.
Sieghart. Geschichte der bildenden Künste in Baiern.
Springer (Anton). Albrecht Dürer.
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“A man of amiable conversation and, among
natural arts (to speak as a layman), finely skilled
in casting.”
JOHANN NEUDÖRFFER.
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PETER VISCHER
CHAPTER I
HERMANN VISCHER AND THE EARLY GERMAN BRONZE WORK
IT was in the middle of the fifteenth century, a little before the year 1450, to be precise, that there wandered into the streets of Nuremberg a working man, a common coppersmith, one Hermann Vischer by name. He came no one knows whence. He came one can easily imagine why. Like the father of Albert Dürer, and in the same decade, he was attracted to that beautiful, busy old town by the greed of gain, as Shakespeare was drawn to London, and many another worker in other arts and crafts has been drawn to many another town. For Nuremberg at this time was the shining jewel of the Holy Roman Empire, the centre of trade and the meeting place of the Arts. Her geographical position and the business energy of her sons had combined to throw into her lap all the commerce of the east and south, of Italy and the Levant, with the northern nations.
The days were near at hand when this proud, free city of the Empire, this trading staple of the German world, was to win the still nobler title of “Albert Dürer’s and Hans Sachs’ City.” For the merchant princes of the place, the Patricians as they called themselves, whilst they grew in wealth and power, waxed also in enthusiasm for the sciences and arts. They strove to make their town a German Florence, and by their lavish expenditure upon the adornment of public and private buildings, both attracted foreign genius and encouraged native talent. Regiomontanus on the one hand, the great mathematician, chose Nuremberg for his place of residence because he found there all the peculiar instruments necessary for astronomy, and because the “perpetual journeyings of her merchants” enabled him to keep in touch with the learned of all countries. These perpetual journeyings of the merchant princes and great explorers, like Behaim, reacted also upon the artists of the town; they contributed to give them a wider outlook upon life, and brought within their reach the wonderful works of Italy.
The broad culture of a Pirkheimer exercised an undoubted influence upon the many-sided genius of Dürer, whilst the liberal atmosphere engendered by travel made the citizens of Nuremberg ready to welcome in their midst foreign artists like the elder Dürer, the elder Vischer and Veit Stoss, and rendered the local artists themselves susceptible to the excellence of foreign art. Not that the Nuremberg artists lack the local note. But they readily accepted the ideas of Flemish realism and again of the Italian Renaissance, and translated them into the terms of their own speech. Albert Dürer, for instance, in spite of his wide experience, always speaks in his art like his master Wolgemut, in the Nuremberg dialect. The intense patriotism and the deep religious feeling which formed so intimate a part of the lives of the citizens are reproduced in their art and literature, giving the greatest examples of them the added charm of locality. The religious spirit in which they worked lent a great humility to these craftsmen. Sculpture and painting had indeed been applied with splendid results to the adornment of domestic and public life, results so splendid that the traveller Æneas Sylvius was obliged to confess that the mansions of the burgesses seemed to have been built for princes, and that the kings of Scotland would gladly be housed as luxuriously as the ordinary citizen of Nuremberg. But the chief work of men like Adam Krafft and Peter Vischer was given to the beautifying of the churches. And, working as they did in a deeply religious spirit, it is noticeable that when they represent themselves in paint, bronze, wood or stone, they give themselves the humble pose of suppliants, choosing always the lowliest place, and often, like Krafft in the tabernacle in the Church of St. Lorenz, or Vischer in the Sebaldusgrab in the Church of St. Sebald, they appear in their working clothes, tools in hand, in the attitude of servants.
There, in a niche of the beautiful shrine he had wrought, with his workman’s cap on his head and a large leather apron round his waist, and in his hand hammer and chisel, the signs of his calling, stands thick-set and full-bearded Peter Vischer, the modest, pious labourer, whose reputation had spread beyond the limits of Germany, and whose bronze work, the chronicler tells us, once filled Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the palaces of princes throughout the Holy Roman Empire. (Ill. 2.)
When Hermann Vischer came to Nuremberg the bronze industry had long been pursued in Germany, and it had been pursued with some success. The individuality of this indigenous art had been in early times uninfluenced by foreign inspiration. While Venice had to go to Constantinople for the bronze gates of St. Mark’s, and Rome was acknowledging the supremacy of Byzantine ideals in the presence of the gates of S. Paolo, in Germany, as Lübke points out, such works as the doors of the Cathedrals of Hildesheim and Augsburg, the tomb-plates at Magdeburg and Merseburg, or the great altar at Goslar, prove the existence, albeit in a very crude and undeveloped state, of a native art in bronze. The twelfth century saw the German foundries supplying many an important font or cathedral door. The work of Lambert Patras von Dinant (1112), the fonts in the cathedral at Osnabrück, the lions at Brunswick and the doors of St. Sophia at Novgorod, exhibit indeed a very considerable advance both in execution and design. The increasing use of bronze for the sacred vessels and ornaments of the Church extended the scope of the craftsmen, and the hey-day of the early Gothic period saw no lack of tomb-plates, candelabra, and fonts from the German foundries. The workmanship of these is good but undistinguished as it is uninspired. It seldom even approaches in artistic merit the splendid tomb of Konrad von Hochstaden in Cologne Cathedral, or the later, vigorous equestrian statue of St. George in the cathedral at Prague, wrought by Georg and Martin von Clussenbach in 1373.
Nuremberg, in spite of her wealth and commercial importance, had not, at the time of the coming of Hermann Vischer, given birth as yet to any great work of art in bronze. Almost the only old piece of bronze of any importance to be seen in the churches there is the font in St. Sebald’s Church. And its importance lies rather in the richness with which it is wrought than in its artistic excellence (1350). This is the font in which the Emperor Wenzel was baptized—a baptism which cost the town the beautiful old parsonage, burnt down by the fires used to heat the water for the imperial infant. The four squat apostolic figures represented here in their straight, heavy mantles bear witness already to that striving after a realistic representation of the great protagonists in the sacred drama which was beginning to betray itself at this time in the works of the nameless Nuremberg painters on the one hand, and, on the other, of the Nuremberg sculptors, such as Hans Decker, the forerunner of Adam Krafft. It was a tendency which the Nuremberg artists, like their brethren of the Swabian school and the school of Cologne owed to the influence of Flemish art. But this was a return to Nature not without its faults. The German artist, in his eager endeavour to reproduce the exact form of his models, of those, that is, whom he saw around him every day, was badly served by the figures of his countrymen. They could not give him the slim and graceful forms of the Italians to copy, and he had not yet learnt from Italy those theories of beauty, based on a study of the antique, which were one day to help an Albert Dürer to perform the true function of an artist by improving upon Nature.
Of Hermann Vischer himself and his doings we know very little. Very little also of his work survives. We know that he became a Burgher of his adopted town and, in 1453, rose to be a Master in the Guild of Rotschmieds. That he gained some reputation in his day, and not at home only, is shown by the fact that four years later he cast the Font for the parish church at Wittenberg. Several tomb-plates at Meissen and Bamberg are also attributed to him. These confirm us in the impression that he had no great individuality. He was an excellent workman without being endowed with the superlative excellence of the artist. For the Font at Wittenberg, which is cast in the Gothic manner with small, undistinguished figures of the apostles, is a work of very little importance. In Nuremberg, where he lived in a house “Am Sand” in the Schiessgraben, there is one work which is generally attributed to Hermann, although it is quite possibly from the hand of one Eberhard Vischer who became a master in 1459 and died in 1488, just one year later than Hermann. The work to which we refer is the large bronze Crucifix outside the central window of the Löffelholz chapel of the church of St. Sebald, which was presented by the Starck family in 1482. It was remodelled in 1625, and on that occasion the Nurembergers earned the nick-name of Herrgottschwärzer or Blackeners of the Lord. For the story ran that the cross was made of silver, and that the Council of the town resolved that it should be painted black in order to preserve it from the roving bands of soldiers that passed through the town during the Thirty Years’ War. The figure on the cross is that of a Hercules rather than of a Christ. The feet are each nailed separately after the ancient manner.
Hermann Vischer was twice married. By his first wife, Felicitas, he had one daughter, Martha, and one son, Peter, the date of whose birth is not known. By his second wife he had three sons of no importance, and he died in 1487, in the year which saw the birth of his second grandson, Peter Vischer the younger, to whom, it will be shown in the succeeding chapters, many of the finest works usually attributed to the elder Peter must now probably be credited.
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CHAPTER II
PETER VISCHER: HIS LIFE
PETER VISCHER, the great bronze-founder, whose work and that of his house embodies the complete transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance style in Germany, was born and brought up in his father’s house in “Am Sand.” There he lived, and he worked as an apprentice with his father in the Town Foundry in the White Tower all the days of his boyhood. So much we may assume, although we know nothing of his youth, and no one of all the men since dead would be more surprised than he to find himself the subject of a monograph, or would be more genuinely astonished to learn that his up-bringing is a source of interest to later generations. For he appears to us in the few historical documents in which he figures as the perfect type of the plain, unspoilt craftsman or Master of a Guild. A man was not an artist in those days, but a mere stonemason, or smith or painter. But, lacking the title, he did not necessarily lack the quality. The study of design was never more enthusiastic, the struggle after excellence never more sincere than in the days when Dürer’s art was regarded as a mere parasite of other trades, when Hans Sachs was
“Schuh—
—Macher und Poet dazu,”
and when Peter Vischer laboured in his leather apron at the foundry, or turned from the entertaining of Emperors to spend his leisure hours in the endeavour to improve his draughtsmanship. I have said that we know nothing of the latter’s boyhood, but if in his case the child was father of the man, he must have been a diligent youth. Johann Neudörffer (1497-1563), an artistic scribe and the man in whom succeeding ages have had to bless the inventor of German type, has left us a charming picture of him in later days. “This Peter Vischer was a man of amiable conversation,” he writes in his Nachrichten über Nürnberger Künstler und Werkleute, a work which is not indeed free from errors, but to which we owe the earliest accounts we have of most of the Nuremberg artists, “and among natural arts (to speak as a layman) finely skilled in casting and so much renowned among the nobility that when any prince or great potentate came to the town he seldom omitted to pay him a visit in his foundry, for he went every day to his casting shop and worked there.”
Adam Krafft the sculptor, we learn from the same source, and Sebastien Lindenast the coppersmith, who made works of art of copper “as if they had been of gold or silver,” were his two bosom friends. They seemed, we are told, to have but one heart. All three were equally simple, disinterested, and ever eager to learn. “They were like brothers; every Friday, even in their old age, they met and studied together like apprentices, as the designs which they executed at their meetings prove. Then they separated in friendly wise, but without having eaten or drunk together.” The spirit of the Reformation had breathed upon these men and inspired them with a new and burning zeal for art and knowledge and industry.
As a boy then, we may assume, Peter Vischer worked as an apprentice with his father. For in those days any youth destined for a certain trade had to be apprenticed to some master of that trade, who was responsible for his education both in mind and morals during his years of learning (Lehrjahre). And almost everything made by hand, every manufactured article was the monopoly of some trade corporation. Every trade, too, and almost every department of a trade, had its separate costume. Each craft bore its special garb or mark of distinction. The masters and high officials of each were often notably bedizened, and garments distinguished the Sabbath from the week day as clearly as they distinguished the merchant from the shopkeeper. The rules and regulations by which wages and prices, and the amount of work to be done and holiday kept, and the relations of the members of the Guild were fixed, were strictly enforced, and could only be infringed at the risk of heavy penalties. The boundaries between the trades were clearly laid down and rigidly observed. For the Middle Ages were riddled with Socialism, and this was a form of it. The Guild system resulted in an arbitrary and irritating enforcement of the division of labour, which finds its counterpart nowadays in the observances of the Trades Unions and several of the learned professions. The man who made a window-frame was a window-frame maker and might not insert the window-pane unless he had also qualified as a glazier. Only a locksmith was allowed to fix the casement to it, and it was a joiner’s business and a joiner’s only to embellish it with carving.
[ST. SEBALD’S CHURCH, NÜRNBERG 2. PETER VISCHER THE CRAFTSMAN
The position of the Bronze Workers in this hierarchy of trades does not appear to have been in any way exceptional. The usual tendency of son to succeed father in the trade, to labour first as youth and apprentice and then as master and married man, to work on in his father’s shop and to live in his father’s house is carried out in the case of the Vischer family. And thanks to this fact we can trace in the works of their house the development of native German art, passing from late Gothic, slightly influenced by Flemish realism, into the full flower of that German renaissance, which is not directly a “New Birth” of the art of old days, but only the second-hand influence of that revival as reflected with a sudden and momentary brilliancy by the productions of German artists who had travelled in Italy and studied with profit Italian works.
On the expiration of his apprenticeship Peter Vischer would naturally, like other German youths, start on a period of travel—his Wanderjahre.
Whither he went we know not, but it is most probable that he turned his steps towards the Netherlands, where he could study the marvels of the new style of Flemish realism which had begun to exercise a potent influence upon the Nuremberg painters of his day.
But whether he reached the Netherlands or not of one thing we may be certain. Neither now nor at any subsequent period did he go to Italy.
It was indeed at one time thought and affirmed that he sojourned there once at least and perhaps twice. (Sandrart, Teutscher Academie, 1675.) But there is not one jot or tittle of evidence to support this theory, which was intended to supply us with the source whence he drew the inspiration for the second and third periods of his art.
After his Wanderjahre he returned to Nuremberg, and living in his father’s house, in friendship with Adam Krafft, and in an atmosphere of late Gothic tradition permeated by Flemish realism, he entered upon the first period of his work, which ended, we may say, with the year 1507, and of which the Magdeburg Monument was the highest expression and achievement. Vischer was by nature an idealist, and he quickly grew out of sympathy with the aims of the realistic school. But even in this tomb of Archbishop Ernst we can trace the influence exercised by Michel Wolgemut on the one hand, and of Martin Schön, through his copper-plates, on the other, as it is displayed in the striving after life and truth even at the expense of beauty, which is clearly noticeable in the figures, faces and heads of the apostles. The architecture and design, however, are cast in the late Gothic mould.
The works that belong to the second period of the Vischer foundry show a pure, plastic sense of form and rhythm emerging from the overwhelming dominion of late Gothic extravagance. The childish things of that style have been put away by the mature artist, and, in obedience to the teaching of the drawings of Jacopo de’ Barbari, whom Dürer called “a lovable, good painter,” and of the drawings of early Renaissance work in North Italy, which Peter the younger had made in his Wanderjahre there, the great masterpiece of the house, the Sebaldusgrab, takes shape in a style that is a curious mixture of the Mediæval and Renaissance manners.
Finally, when Hermann Vischer, Peter’s eldest son, had made a journey to Rome and returned thence laden with drawings, father and sons gave themselves up to a whole-hearted worship of the beauty of form and an eager copying of the antique which resulted in the most beautiful piece of pure Renaissance work which ever issued from a German workshop—the Rathaus Railing, destined to be sold in the fulness of years and melted down for the value of its metal!
The life of Peter Vischer was simple and domestic, but very full of toil and trouble and private grief made bearable perhaps by his absorbing enthusiasm for his work. A few years before his father’s death, probably in 1485, he married Margaretha, daughter of Hans Gross. A document, dated October 4th, 1490, gives us a slight glimpse of her character. Therein her father records that he makes a present to his daughter of the green mantle and veil with which he had provided her on her wedding day, but at the same time he binds Peter Vischer with all the paraphernalia of judges, witnesses and solemn pledges not to allow her to sell or pawn the said articles. The date of this document led to the erroneous conclusion that the marriage only took place in 1489, but Dr. Seeger has recently pointed out that on a medallion by Peter Vischer the younger he expressly states that he was twenty-two years of age when he wrought it, and this in the year 1509. Since Neudörffer, the Nuremberg Vasari, refers to Hermann as “the famous Peter Vischer’s eldest son,” the marriage must have occurred somewhere about 1485. There was also a third son by this union, known afterwards as Hans der Giesser. Margaretha died shortly after the birth of this last son, and in 1493 we find Peter married again to Dorothea von Gericht. She died soon afterwards, leaving him a daughter, Margaretha, and then he took to himself another Margaretha. Meantime he worked like his father at the town Foundry in the White Tower, and lived in the house he had inherited, “Am Sande.” But in 1505 he moved to a house behind the Convent of St. Catherine, which had fallen to him by inheritance. On July 26th of that year he was chosen “Street Captain” (Gassenhauptman) of the Barfüsser or Franciscan quarter of the town, and in the following year he and Margaretha signed a legal document declaring that they had bought another house for 120 fl. Part of this house they pulled down and threw into a third adjoining one which they had also acquired. Thus they formed a single large foundry of their own and enjoyed possession of their own dwelling house next door. This house still stands in the street now called Peter Vischerstrasse. Two other sons came to him by this marriage, Jakob and Paul. Then in 1522 he was again left a widower and a widower he remained the last seven years of his life, although historians, concluding that he had formed an ineradicable habit of matrimony, have placed a fourth wife to his credit. Barbara they name her and say that she survived him. But as her name does not appear in the documents dealing with the partition of property immediately after his death it seems probable that they are thinking of Barbara, the wife of Peter Vischer the younger. For he and his family were living in his father’s house, and seeing that Hermann, the elder son, had died in 1516 and his wife, Ursula Mag, in 1514, it was natural that Barbara, on the death of the old man’s third wife should take care of him and charge of his house. Peter the younger died in 1528, but Barbara and her six children would still live on beneath the paternal roof till the old Bronze-worker died in 1529. The famous foundry was inherited by her brother-in-law Paul, who sold it to his brother Hans, and Barbara, within a few months, found another husband in Jorg Schott, the goldsmith, and another home.[1]
Footnote 1:
Seeger, “Peter Vischer der Jüngere.”
Thus it will be seen that the life of Peter Vischer, although it was over-full of domestic bereavements, was, on the whole and apart from his work, the ordinary happy home life of the German citizen. He fulfilled his duties and had his successes as a burgher. For he was one of the Genannten of the Great Council both in 1516 and again in 1520. He was also appointed in 1506 to the Committee which was to consider the restoration of that extraordinary old clock in the Frauenkirche, known to young and old in Nuremberg as the “Männleinlaufen,” the copper figures in which were cast by his friend Sebastien Lindenast.
For the rest he hardly ever left Nuremberg, and never for long or to go far. It has been one of the difficulties of art criticism to explain how it came about, therefore, that this modest, stay-at-home burgher should have gone on all his life developing and adopting the new ideas and the recent revelations of Italian art, discarding the traditions in which he had been brought up, and finally learning the latest lesson of the Renaissance with such success that in his old age there came forth from his workshop the noblest work of German craftsmanship.
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CHAPTER III
THE EARLY WORKS OF PETER VISCHER
PETER VISCHER was admitted as a Master of his Guild in 1489, shortly after his father’s death. If, as is generally admitted, the monument of Count Otto IV. von Henneberg at Römhild is from his hand, we have in that rather limp, life-size picture of a knight in armour, holding an heraldic banner in his right hand and a sword in his left, the earliest example of Peter Vischer’s work. And this figure, it is noticeable, is supported by a stone plate to which the arms and the inscription, in letters separately cast, are affixed. It is, then, a relic of those days when, just as painting was a parasite of carving and sculpture, bronze also was a handmaid of stone. It may be added that the demand for the products of Vischer’s foundry was fated to be destroyed in the years to come by the new fashion for tombs in stone.
But the monument of Count Otto assuredly did not qualify Peter Vischer as a Meister in his craft. What his “masterpiece” was we cannot say with certainty, but it was very likely the model which he completed in 1488 for the shrine of St. Sebald. This is the design which he was destined to take up twenty years later, and to execute in the fulness of his new knowledge and developed technique. It is now in Vienna, and betrays at every point the influence of Adam Krafft, to the style of whose Sacramentshaüslein it bears an obvious resemblance. Heideloff, the architect, in whose possession the model once was, attributed it indeed to Veit Stoss. But it is signed by Peter Vischer with his mark
Peter Vischer’s Mark.
Heideloff, it is true, claimed this as the token of Veit Stoss, but his opinion is of little value, for his enthusiasm for the Polish carver led him to claim for him amongst other works the design of the tomb of Archbishop Ernst, the Römhild memorials of Count Hermann VIII. and of Otto IV., and even the Imperial tomb of Maximilian at Innsbruck.
Of the original design for the Sebaldusgrab, Lübke says, “It is a masterpiece of Gothic construction but freely endowed with all the exaggeration and extravagance of the late period.” And there can be no doubt that the world lost nothing by the delay which intervened before Peter Vischer, in the words of the chronicler, “with the help of his five sons, who were all married and lived for the most part with him in the house with their wives and children, as I myself have seen,” remodelled it and completed it at last on July 19, 1519.
After commencing Meister he continued to work for a while in the Gothic manner of his father and those about him. He received at this time two commissions worth sixty florins apiece, which he executed after the designs of others. The tomb of Bishop Heinrich III., Gross von Trockau, in Bamberg Cathedral (1492) is one of these. It is skilfully wrought in low relief. The bishop, in his episcopal garments, is conceived as standing on a lion, and a Gothic canopy is set over his head. In style it recalls the second commission referred to—the monument in the same cathedral of Bishop Georg II., Marshal von Ebenet, which was wrought by Vischer from a design by Wolf. Katzheimer.
STEIN PHOTO.
[CATHEDRAL, MAGDEBURG
3. TOMB OF ARCHBISHOP ERNST]
By the year 1494 the Meister had already laid the foundations of the great reputation which was to be his. For, in company with Simon Lamberger, the wood-carver, he was summoned to Heidelberg by Philip, Elector of the Palatinate, who desired them to “serve him with their counsel and their handiwork.” At the special request of the Nuremberg Council, so we are told,[2] they went; and they stayed there for a considerable space of time to work for the Elector. But of the work they performed at Heidelberg we know absolutely nothing. Peter Vischer was certainly back again in Nuremberg in 1496. For in that year he gave a full release (“aller Dinge quitt, ledig und los”) to his friend Peter Harsdorffer the younger, in whose hands he had left the management of all his affairs during his absence. He returned, perhaps, to execute the important commissions he had received from the North. In the following year he completed the first great work of his life, in which his own individuality is for the first time apparent. For the tomb of Archbishop Ernst in the Cathedral at Magdeburg, is the first of Peter Vischer’s masterpieces, and it affords the most important illustration of the early influences under which he worked. The statue of the Archbishop, who was a brother of John the Stable and Frederick the Wise, lies in high relief beneath a Gothic Canopy, which strongly recalls the famous Pyx then just completed by the artist’s friend, Adam Krafft. The figure, which is represented in cope and mitre, rests on a stone Gothic base, as upon a bed of state, and holds in its hands a crosier and a Pontifical Cross. A pleasing Latin inscription round the monument informs us that “with whatever art the hands of the craftsman have wrought me, yet am I but dust, and contain the dust and all the earthly remains” of the great Archbishop, and it concludes with the prayer that his soul may rest in the consolation of light and peace. (Ills. 3 and 4.)
Footnote 2:
Baader.
Ipse me vivus posuit, it is added. And indeed this Child of Light was wise in his generation, and knowing that artists are rare, and that through their pen or brush alone can most men achieve an earthly immortality, the archbishop had ordered his tomb from Peter Vischer in 1494, though he himself did not die till 1513. He was not so foolish as to leave the matter to the care of ungrateful heirs like Browning’s Bishop who ordered his tomb in St. Praxed’s Church. The date on the tombstone, which is the date of the setting up thereof, is variously interpreted 1495 and 1497. But all Peter Vischer’s 5’s are quite unlike the final figure in this inscription, although many perceive in it a 5 after the manner of the Arabic lettering of those days. Moreover Vischer was in Heidelberg in 1494, and only returned to Nuremberg to stay in 1496. Only at Nuremberg can he have had the appliances necessary for so elaborate a work, and, even if he paid a flying visit there before ’96, he had not sufficient time to complete his task by 1495. There is yet another reason for putting the date of the Magdeburg monument as late as possible, and that is its amazing superiority to the Breslau tomb of Bishop John IV., the setting up of which Peter Vischer himself personally superintended in 1496. The latter monument is so inferior in style and treatment that it is incredible that the artist, after having made such an advance as is exhibited in the Magdeburg memorial, should have gone back in the following year to so hard, forced and yet feeble a handling of form. If this Breslau tomb is indeed later than the other it must be the work of an apprentice, who has endeavoured to imitate the idea of the Magdeburg masterpiece, and very lamentably failed in his endeavour. The decorative work, however, is very much more successful than the treatment of the figures, of which the drapery still completely hides the anatomy and still falls in stiff and angular folds.
STEIN PHOTO.
[CATHEDRAL, MAGDEBURG
4. TOMB OF ARCHBISHOP ERNST]
But to return to the tomb of Archbishop Ernst. The artist has adopted that late Gothic style which was apt to lead to so much that was weak, trivial and ineffective. But there is here nothing that is excessive or disproportionate. Even in the case of the canopy above the head of the reclining Bishop, if we concede the permissibility of its presence at all, we must also confess that there is an artistic reason for its existence in the fact that it furnishes the top which one feels to be required for the monument. As to the recumbent form itself, it is, in the strength of its treatment and the individuality of its portraiture, conceived after the realistic manner of the day. But Vischer has not been betrayed into any excess in this direction. Only it is evident that the influence of that striving after the impressions of life as the artist sees it, which has been called Realism, and which yet leaves room for so much that is ideal, has been working strongly within him. The broad, heavy folds of drapery falling straight or almost straight down the bodies of the Bishop and the Apostles speak also to the same conclusion. For statuettes of the Twelve Apostles, ranged on either side of the tomb, stand on pedestals, enriched with deep foliage, and beneath beautiful canopies, intricately wrought in the Gothic style. They are the forerunners of those superb figures on the Sebaldusgrab, but their pose is very monotonous, and in their undersize they recall the works of Adam Krafft, which reflect the short and dumpy type of the contemporary Nuremberger. A tendency to exaggerate the size of the head may be noticed. Possibly it is the result of the artist’s endeavour to express the individuality of the Apostles he represented. But this defect is reproduced in the Angel set at the head of the Archbishop.
A noticeable figure on this tomb is the St. Maurice at the head of it corresponding to the St. Stephen at the foot. This is a veritable Nuremberg type, and reminds us of the statuette of the same Saint now preserved in the Court of Krafft’s House (No. 7 Theresienstrasse) at Nuremberg. It is a fountain-figure, and was originally gilded. Doubt has been cast on the authorship of this piece, but cannot be seriously entertained after a comparison with the St. Maurice at Magdeburg. (Ill. 5.)
STEIN PHOTO.
[KRAFFT HOUSE, NÜRNBERG
5. ST. MAURICE]
The tomb throughout is wrought richly and with the minutest care. On the base Peter Vischer seizes the opportunity of indulging his humour and luxuriant imagination. He has added fantastic dogs and beasts of various kinds, in the same spirit, perhaps, as that in which Dürer used to adorn and complete his engravings and even to crowd the vacant spaces of his compositions with the Traumwerk with which his mind and memory were stored. And in this respect also the Magdeburg tomb foreshadows the Sebaldusgrab.
At the four corners are four lions bearing arms; above are four others poised in the manner of gargoyles on some Gothic building; whilst on the top, at each corner, standing on groups of Gothic pilasters are, or rather were, the symbols of the four Evangelists; for the eagle has been broken off and has disappeared now from its base.
During the next few years (1497-1508) many works were turned out of the Vischer Foundry; several of which were based on the designs of other artists, most probably at the request of the patron. Some of those which we can identify as coming from Vischer’s workshop in this fashion, such as the monument of Bishop Georg II. of Bamberg, which was executed after the design by Wolfgang Katzheimer, the Bamberg painter, or the monuments of Bishop Veit and Heinrich III. are of absolutely no interest to the student of Peter Vischer’s art.
STEIN PHOTO.
[CHURCH, RÖMHILD
6. MONUMENT OF COUNT HERMANN VIII]
But two monuments, this time of temporal princes, which belong to the same period, have a greater interest and a higher merit. They are the memorials of Count Eitel Friedrich II. von Hohenzollern in the parish church of Hechingen (1500), and of Count Hermann VIII., at Römhild. (Ill. 6.) No one who has familiarized himself with the master’s manner will fail to perceive that, if these monuments have been executed by him in bronze, they have no less certainly been based upon the design of another hand. And no one who has studied the drawings of Albert Dürer, and who now compares these knightly figures, for instance, with some of those mail-clad forms of his, whether it be Lucas Baumgärtner or another, will be astonished to learn that Bergau has discovered and published that design, and that it proves to be indeed by Dürer. For that pen-and-ink drawing now at Florence, that sketch of the tall, thin knight, who is standing on a lion in a position that is, it must be confessed, both straddling and constrained, and who is apparently speaking to his wife, whose feet are set, according to the convention, upon a dog, the symbol of fidelity, is undeniably the first sketch for the tomb of Count Eitel and his wife Magdalena, Countess of Brandenburg, which is now to be found in the parish church of Hechingen. Certain very obvious variations have, however, been introduced, whether by the designer in a second sketch, or, as is most probable, by the bronze-worker on his own initiative. The figures, which in the original are excessively separate, have been brought closer together, and thereby, whilst the lion and dog on which they stand have suffered, an opportunity for the development of the background has been provided. A trace of this process is observable also in the position of the Count’s right elbow, which protrudes to the extreme outside edge of the frame. The left hand, holding a rosary, is another innovation, but it is not one for which in its execution any gain in grace can be claimed. Other minor alterations, also, may be remarked, as in the drapery and in the pose of the Countess, which is beautiful and Vischer-like. The substitution of the three coats-of-arms for the late Gothic work in Dürer’s sketch is noteworthy.
Unfortunately, as Lübke points out, this monument has not come down to us complete. Originally it was a Freigrab resting on lions, and the sides of it were richly decorated. Angels are said to have stood at the four corners, some of them supporting candlesticks and others coats-of-arms. But in this instance, as in a later and still more regrettable one, the craftsman was destined to suffer from the greed inspired by the value of the material in which he wrought. For, in 1782, portions of this tomb were melted down, and twenty-two new candlesticks for the church were cast out of the nearly one thousand pounds of metal resulting. The date of the tomb is fixed approximately by the death of the Countess, which occurred in 1496. The Count himself died in 1512, and he probably ordered the monument soon after his wife’s death. It bears the date MCCCCC.
Elizabeth, sister of the Countess Magdalena, daughter of Prince Albert Achilles, of Brandenburg, had married Count Hermann VIII. of Henneberg, and it is doubtless due to this relationship that the double tomb of husband and wife at Römhild was made from the same sketch and by the same craftsman as the memorial at Hechingen. It was indeed probably the earlier of the two. So at least Bergau argues, from the fact that it is nearer to the original sketch by Dürer. The Count, in this version of the design, holds a banner, the floating folds of which form an efficient background. The drapery of the Countess instead of being gathered up into her hands is caught up to her sides in graceful flowing folds.
Peter Vischer knew how to make a thrifty use of accomplished models. Here, as originally at Hechingen, he repeated the symbols of the four Evangelists which he had used for his Magdeburg masterpiece. The tomb stands upon six vigorous and life-like lions, and, says Lübke, among the various saints who are ranged round the sarcophagus is a Madonna pressing to her breast the Holy Child, who is turning with a quick and very natural movement towards the eldest of the three kings who bring gifts. These are all figures quite in the best manner of Peter Vischer’s early style. And several of the other saints are almost equally good. As usual the details are worked with admirable skill.
The following letters are engraved on this tomb: M. F. W. S. 15 C. Döbner was inspired to interpret them thus: “Meister Fischer und Fünf Söhne”; and again with a second effort: “Meister Fischer Waage Sebaldi 15 Centner.” These interpretations, I suppose, carry with them their own refutation. They do not encourage one to make a third attempt.
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CHAPTER IV
THE SHRINE OF ST. SEBALD
“In the Church of Sainted Sebald sleeps enshrined his holy dust, And in bronze the Twelve Apostles guard from age to age their trust.”—LONGFELLOW.
THE Magdeburg monument, whilst it bears obvious traces of the influence of his father Hermann, of the school of Wolgemut, and of Adam Krafft upon the art of Peter Vischer, is an eloquent testimony also to the rapid development which was taking place in the mind and ideas of this eager craftsman. We have now reached the period when the ideals and the lessons of the Renaissance begin to master his imagination and to permeate his art to such a degree and with such success that the work which was next commissioned from him proves to be the first and greatest of Renaissance works in Germany. The shrine of St. Sebald reflects the history of the artist’s mind. Upon a Gothic base and foundation the spirit of Renaissance detail has overwhelmingly impressed itself. Before we consider this work more closely it will be as well to state the sources whence our Nuremberg craftsman drew his new inspirations. How did he learn his lessons in Italian art?
In the first place it would seem probable that Jacopo de’ Barbari lived for some time in Nuremberg during the last years of the fifteenth century. It is at any rate certain that the influence exerted by his drawings upon the Nuremberg artists was strong and lasting. Further, it was only natural that Nuremberg, lying as it did on the direct trade route from east to north, should be in close communication with Venice and the great towns of Northern Italy. Venetians came to Nuremberg; Nuremberg traders and artists, like Dürer, in their Wanderjahre, went to Venice and returned laden with the fruits of their Italian studies, and copies of the works of Italian masters. The Patrician youths of Nuremberg, also, would naturally sojourn at the Italian Universities at Padua, Bologna, and elsewhere, and they would bring home with them Italian books and wood-cuts, examples of the copper-plates of Jacopo de’ Barbari and of the works of Andrea Sansovino.
But we seek for a more direct and personal source of contact to explain the intimate enthusiasm for Italian art displayed by Peter Vischer. And the secret of this source, which had remained hitherto undiscovered, has recently been made public by the elaborate researches of Dr. Georg Seeger.[3]
Footnote 3:
“Peter Vischer der Jüngere.” Leipzig, 1897.
Peter Vischer’s second son and namesake, he reminds us, is mentioned pointedly by the chroniclers in one passage[4] as having done the greater part of the work on the Sebaldusgrab, “for he excelled his father and brother in art”; and in another[5] as having “taken his pleasure in reading the Poets and Historians, whence he then, with the aid of Pancratz Schwenter, extracted many beautiful poems and illuminated them. He was in all things not less accomplished and skilful than his aforesaid brother Hermann, and he too died in his prime.” Now this young craftsman, it would appear, when the period of his “wandering” was at hand, turned his feet, like his fellow-townsman Dürer before him, towards Lombardy, “the Paradise of all arts.” His imagination, doubtless, had already been fired by what he had seen of the North Italian Renaissance in the treasures brought to Nuremberg by merchants, travellers and artists. But the expenses of an Italian tour were beyond the resources of the Vischer household. Fortune and his father’s friends were kind to him; he was entrusted, probably through the influence of Sebald Schreyer, the historian and patron of art, with the task of “travelling” the famous Schedel-Weltchronik, which had been published in 1492, with illustrations by Wolgemut and Pleydenwurff. Booksellers’ accounts enable us to trace the journey of the young craftsman. He passed through Como, where the façade of the cathedral, at that time in course of construction, had many a lesson in the Early Renaissance style to teach him, and he came to Milan, the metropolis of Northern Italy. There he sold one hundred and ninety-one copies of the book, and in the intervals of business he occupied himself with the study of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, from which, like many another artist since, he learnt his first lessons in anatomy and proportion. There also he may have acquired the art of medallion and plaquette work, for it was about this time that he produced the first medallion which comes from the hand of a German craftsman—the portrait of his brother Hermann, dated 1507. From Milan he went south. He visited the Certosa of Pavia, and he filled his sketch book with drawings from the façade of that luxuriant example of the Early North Italian Renaissance. He studied with especial care the figure of his patron saint, and afterwards he reproduced it in the St. Peter of the Sebaldusgrab. Thence he passed to Genoa, where he sold more books and studied, perhaps, the marble Madonna of Andrea Sansovino. And so home, in 1508, by way of Verona and Venice. Inspired by what he had seen, he brought new life and inspiration to the workshop at Nuremberg. The result of his journey was that he passed completely under the influence of Italian art; he was filled with that untrammelled revelling in existence and that unalloyed worship of the beautiful which is the keynote of the Renaissance. He had learnt the value of the study of the nude, and he had seen, as every artist must see, the superiority of the Italian over the Bavarian model. Hereafter the tendency to discard the short and sturdy types of the school of Krafft, and to substitute more slender and more beautiful figures for the Apostles is marked. The results of this Italian journey of his are clearly discernible not only in the Sebaldusgrab, but also in his own particular works, in the two medallions of his brother Hermann, executed in 1507 and 1511; and in that of himself in 1509; in the beautiful plaquettes, “Orpheus and Eurydice”; in the two inkstands and the ornamentation of the tomb of Frederick the Wise in Wittenberg, with which we shall presently deal.
Footnote 4:
Kunz Rösner. MS. 933 b. Library, Nuremberg.
Footnote 5:
Neudörffer.
Remembering that picture of the father spending his holidays in drawing with his friends Lindenast and Krafft, it is easy to imagine that the old man, ever young, enthusiastic, humble and eager to learn, readily appreciated and welcomed the revelations contained in the son’s sketch books. He was already at work upon a Gothic shrine for St. Sebald’s remains, but he soon modified his original plan, improving and enriching it by the light of this new learning.
Ere the fires of that inspiration had yet begun to grow cold, and before the Sebaldusgrab was more than half finished, another member of the family took yet another journey. Hermann, the eldest son, had married Ursula Mag in November of the year 1513. “When his wife left him in death,” Neudörffer tells us, “he went for art’s sake and at his own cost to Rome, and brought back with him much artistic material which he had sketched there, and which greatly pleased his father and served as good practice for his brothers.” Hermann himself died shortly after his return, in the year 1516. He was run over by a sleigh in St. Gilgen-strasse one night as he was returning to his home in the Kornmarkt from the house of his friend Wolfgang Traut, the painter, and thus “perished in his prime, in sad and piteous wise.” But that journey of his had not been taken in vain. His drawings revealed to the old burgher at home the further developments of art and some of the wonders of the full Florentine-Roman Renaissance. The result can be traced in some of the figures on the Sebaldusgrab, and, later, in that complete acceptance of the revival of the antique which is expressed in the Rathaus Railing.