Dürer probably executed his carvings about 1510-1520. In the British Museum there is a relief of the Birth of St. John the Baptist, which was purchased in the Netherlands more than eighty years since for $2500. It is cut in a block of cream-colored stone, seven and one half by five and one half inches in size, and is a wonderful work. The companion piece, which represents the same saint Preaching in the Wilderness, is in the Brunswick Museum, where there is also an "Ecce Homo" carved in wood.
Dürer executed many little carvings in stone, ivory, and boxwood, and the existing ones are seen in various collections in Germany. It is quite probable that others are in private hands.
There are in Nuremberg many most excellent wood-carvings by unknown masters; one who cares for this art is well repaid for a visit to this old city, and, indeed, this is true of other old German towns. Bamberg, Marburg, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Dortmund, Halle, and many other towns have riches in this kind of art.
The stone sculpture of Germany in the fifteenth century was of less importance than the wood-carving until toward the close of the period. The exteriors of the churches and other edifices erected at this time had but little sculptural ornament, and that consisted principally of traceries and figures in geometric designs. Some small detached works, such as fonts, pulpits, or fountains, were made in stone, but the chief use of stone sculpture was for monuments to the dead.
Adam Krafft (about 1430-1507), of whose early history almost nothing is known, is a very important master of this time, and his principal works add another charm to the city of Nuremberg. A remarkable series of works by Krafft are the Seven Stages, or seven bas-reliefs placed on the way to the Johannis Cemetery, the designs representing the seven falls of Christ on his way to Golgotha.
These reliefs are much crowded, and the only part that is at all idealized is the figure of Christ; that is noble and calm in effect, and the drapery is simple and dignified. The other figures are coarse and dressed like the Nurembergers of the time in which Krafft lived.
In the churches of St. Sebald and St. Laurence and in the Frauenkirche there are other splendid works of Krafft, and in some dwelling-houses of Nuremberg there are sculptures of his. A Madonna on the houses, 1306, in the Hirschelgasse, is one of the finest, perhaps the very best in all Germany. We do not know whether this was by Krafft or not, but it has a purity and nobleness that scarcely any other German sculptor attained.
That Krafft had a sense of humor is shown by a bas-relief above the entrance to the Public Scales. The weigher stands observing the beam, and beneath it is written, "To thyself as to others." Another man adds a weight to one scale, and the man who is to be taxed puts his hand into his money-bag very reluctantly.
Perhaps his most artistic work was the tabernacle in the Church of St. Laurence. It is sixty-four feet high; the lower part is supported by the kneeling figures of Krafft and two of his associates. Above this rises a slender Gothic pyramid ornamented with bas-reliefs and statuettes. He was employed upon this tabernacle from 1496 to 1500. It is believed that a "Burial of Christ," in the chapel of the Johannis Cemetery, was his latest work, and executed in 1507, the year in which he died, in the hospital of Schwabach. Krafft led a most industrious life, and was so skilful a workman that he could work with his left hand as readily as with his right.
Tilman Riemenschneider was an important sculptor, born at Osterode, in the Hartz Mountains, probably about 1460. In 1483 he went to Würzburg, and was elected to one honorable office after another, until, in 1520, he was head burgomaster. After the Peasants' War, in 1525, he was deprived of his office; he lived but six years after this, and kept himself in close retirement, not even practising his art.