Meantime the Vischers, father and sons, were busy, and had at intervals long been busy, with the last supreme work of their foundry, the Rathaus Railing. The story of the chequered career of this beautiful work takes us back some years in the history of the House. At the same time as Maximilian commissioned Peter Vischer to execute two bronze figures for his tomb, the great family of Fugger ordered a railing to be made to shut off their family chapel, in St. Anne’s Church at Augsburg. The design for this railing was completed by the old Peter Vischer. It was submitted to and received the approval of the patron. This was during the absence of Hermann Vischer in his journey to Rome in 1514-15. But when he returned full of new ideas and laden with sketches of the beautiful things he had seen, his enthusiasm for the new style of the antique quickly imparted itself to his father and brothers. Always eager to learn and ready to appreciate the best, father and brothers alike studied the sketches of Hermann, and thus, after his early death, his influence asserted itself more strongly than ever before. The result was that the design for the railing no longer satisfied its author. It was overhauled, and soon revised and improved in many details suggested by the new-found inspiration of the later renaissance. (Ill. [24] and [25].)
The alterations thus introduced by the Vischer family can only have been improvements; improvements introduced by these craftsmen because anything below their best was intolerable to their artistic conscience. But it does not pay to be an artist when you work on commission. So Dürer also had found. And the Vischers in their turn suffered from their enthusiasm. The Fuggers, who had given the commission and had expressed their approval of the original design, died. Their heirs, noticing a difference between the approved sketch and the finished product, suspected a fraud, or, perhaps, seized the opportunity of avoiding the expense of this piece of ancestral extravagance. They therefore brought an action for breach of contract against the house of Vischer. After several weary years of litigation—for the law’s delays stretched from 1522 to 1529—a decision was given. The Fuggers were released from the responsibility of their ancestors’ commission, and the railing was thrown upon the hands of the heirs of Peter Vischer. For the verdict was not awarded till eight months after the old man’s death, which occurred on the 7th of January, 1529, when he was buried in the same grave as his two sons and three wives who had died before him. His heirs, then, the sons who survived him, were left to dispose of the railing as best they could, but they were not called upon to restore the money which had already been paid on account, and which amounted to some fourteen hundred odd gulden. They turned therefore to the Nuremberg Council and offered the railing to them to adorn the Rathaus. On July 15, 1530, the Council bought it as it was, paying six gulden per hundredweight for it.
The railing, still incomplete, was allowed to lie neglected in the cellars of the Rathaus for some years. But at last it was finished and erected. For when the Council heard on good authority that Count Otto Heinrich of the Palatinate was anxious to secure it in order to adorn his castle at Neuburg therewith, they were afraid lest if they did not put it to some immediate use they might be forced into the position of having no excuse for not making a present of it to that powerful nobleman. They therefore hastily commissioned Hans Vischer, “the Bronze-founder,” to complete the work—for a quarter of it still remained uncast—and to set it up in the Rathaus. This, accordingly, he did, and erected it on the 19th of April, 1540, twenty-seven years after the Fugger family had first ordered it for their chapel. It was used for the purpose of dividing the western portion of the great Hall, where the Court of Justice held its sessions, from the rest of the room. The total cost of the work amounted to 2,796 gulden. But so admirable did the Council find it that they actually made a present of one hundred and fifty gulden to the craftsman in addition to the price named, as a token of their pleasure and satisfaction.
STEIN PHOTO.] [FORMERLY AT NÜRNBERG
25. THE RATHAUS RAILING
Unfortunately, the history of the misadventures of this railing is not yet finished. It was removed in 1806 by the Bavarian Government, and, just for the mere value of the metal contained in it, sold to a merchant in Fürth. From him it passed again into the possession of a Nuremberger, and some years later found its way to the South of France. There all trace of this beautiful work of art has disappeared, and one is forced to the reluctant conclusion that it was melted down by the purchaser for the sake of the bronze of which it was composed. Our knowledge of it at the present day is owing to a careful set of drawings which were made of it in 1806, and which have been reproduced excellently and in full detail by Dr. Lübke in the work to which we have so often referred.
The Railing was of bronze throughout, wrought with equal care and finish on both sides, and composed of one hundred and fifty-eight separate pieces. In length it measured nearly forty feet, and stood sixteen feet high, rising at the highest point to twenty-five feet. The drawings which have come down to us show that the fertility of the artist’s invention did not interfere with his harmonious conception of the whole. For though there is a truly wonderful wealth of decorative detail, all in the style of the full Renaissance, it is admirably arranged and subdued to its proper proportion.
Eight Corinthian pillars, with richly ornamented capitals, carried (I base this description on Lübke’s work) a superstructure which terminated throughout in an entablature, frieze and dog-tooth cornice. Of the seven bays comprehended by these columns, three, alternating with the grilles, formed the means of access to the other parts of the hall.
The principal entrance, in the centre, was ten feet high and was finished with a semi-circular arch formed by a moulded architrave. The spandrels of this arch were decorated with figures in relief, and these figures were supported on caps which surmounted decorative panels forming columns without bases. The two smaller and lower gates on either side had square heads with crowning pediments. All three entrances were still more distinctly set off in the composition of the whole, the centre one by means of a rectangular superstructure in the form of an ædicule with a crowning pediment, the two side ones by a segmental pediment directly over the cornice, the upper members of which were the details of the pediment. The erection over the central gate, one may remark, is a blot in the composition: there is nothing to carry the eye up to this abrupt, unsupported rectangle, and it does not harmonize with the beautiful segmental pediments over the other two entrances.
Such was the simple framework, which, says Lübke, thanks to the perfection of its arrangement and the beauty of its proportions, proved so admirably effective. But the Master contributed also to the decoration of every part of it all the wealth of his luxuriant imagination. And he made use of the patterns of the full Renaissance, such as were to be met with in Italy about the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the works of Andrea Sansovino.