ROOMS 27, 28.
The old Refectory of the monks serves now as the home for a collection of German and Italian pottery, majolica and faience, porcelain, glass and stoneware. (German faience, first half of sixteenth century. Augustin Hirschvogel and Nuremberg work, Room 27, cabinets 9 and 16.) Pewter work, end of sixteenth century, by Kaspar Endterlein (Room 28, cabinets 4, 5). English Wedgewood (cabinet 6).
ROOM 29 (Cloister).
Bronze epitaphs from Nuremberg tombstones (cf. St. John’s Churchyard).
ROOM 32 (Kirche)
is the old monastic church. It is filled with mediæval church utensils (ninth to fifteenth century), amongst which we may mention the silver casket in which the Imperial insignia used (p. 51) to be hung in the Spital-kirche, and with 150 original examples of plastic work, carvings and sculptures (thirteenth to sixteenth century). The majority of these have no great artistic merit though they have great interest for the student of German art. They represent the period when painting was not yet regarded as a separate art but as the accessory, the handmaiden of sculpture. In the beginning images of Madonnas and Saints were carved and painted; then, first of all on the wings of altar-pieces, and afterwards throughout, the painter took the place of the carver or sculptor. The process is clearly demonstrated in this collection.
I can only call attention to the following:—Cabinet 6, six apostles in a sitting posture, excellent examples of Nuremberg plastic work (burnt clay) at the end of the fourteenth century.
Over the north-west door St. Anna, Madonna and Child, by Michel Wolgemut (1510?). The Nuremberg landscape background is noteworthy. The picture has the appearance of having been recently retouched. Various works of the Nuremberg School and the Pacher School of carving (late fifteenth century), are ranged along the south and north walls. The large fresco Visit of Emperor Otho III. to the tomb of Charlemagne, is by W. von Kaulbach, and was bequeathed by that painter to the Museum. But the gem of the whole collection is the
Nuremberg Madonna.
It stands at the back of an early sixteenth-century altar-piece of the Swabian School, facing the tombstone (1592) of Georg Ludwig von Seinsheim. No second glance is required to assure us that we have here not only the chef d’æuvre of