[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.
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
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.