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.
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 For he appears to us in the few historical documents in which he figures as the perfect type of the plain, unspoilt craftsman or Master of a Guild.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.
