Rambles of an archæologist among old books and in old places

by F. W. Fairholt

The domestic life of the old Nürnbergers seems to have been characterised by honourable simplicity, and their posterity appear to follow laudably in their footsteps. They delight in the antiquity of their city, and reverently preserve the relics of their past glories. Their houses seem built for a past generation, their public edifices for the Middle Ages; their galleries abound in the art of the fifteenth century, and admit nothing more modern than the seventeenth. In the old garden upon the castle bastion is a quaint quadrangular tower[250-*] having its entrance therefrom, and this has been fitted up with antique furniture, to give a true idea of the indoor life of Dürer’s days. It contains a hall hung with tapestries, from which a staircase leads to a suite of rooms, one fitted as a kitchen, another as a music-room, filled with the most quaint and curious antique instruments, which have ceased “discoursing most eloquent music” for the last two hundred years. The third room (a view of which we engrave) is a boudoir, containing the large antique German stove, built up with ornamental tiles cast in relief, with stories from bible history of saints, and arabesque. Beside it is a bronze receptacle for water, shaped like a huge acorn, the tap having a grotesque head, and the spigot being a small seated figure; this was gently turned when wanted, and a thin stream of water trickled over the hands into the basin beneath; an embroidered napkin hangs beside it; and above it is the old-fashioned set of four hour-glasses, so graduated that each ran out a quarter of an hour after the other. The furniture and fittings of the entire building are all equally curious, and reproduce a faithful picture of old times, worthy of being copied in National Museums elsewhere.

Nürnberg being a “free city” was governed by its own appointed magistrates, having independent courts of law. The executive council of state consisted of eight members, chosen from the thirty patrician families who, by the privilege granted to them from the thirteenth century, ruled the city entirely. In process of time these privileges assumed the form of a civic tyranny, which was felt to be intolerable by the people, and occasionally opposed by them. The fierce religious wars of the sixteenth century assisted in destroying this monopoly of power still more; yet now that it is gone for ever, it has left fearful traces of its irresponsible strength. All who sigh for “the good old times,” should not moralise over the fallen greatness of the city, and its almost deserted but noble town-hall; but descend below the building into the dark vaults and corridors which form its basement; the terrible substructure upon which the glorious municipal palace of a free imperial self-ruled city was based in the Middle Ages, into whose secrets none dared pry, and where friends, hope, life itself, were lost to those who dared revolt against the rulers. There is no romance-writer who has imagined more horrors than we have evidences were perpetrated under the name of justice in these frightful vaults, unknown to the busy citizens around them, within a few feet of the streets down which a gay wedding procession might pass, while a true patriot was torn in every limb, and racked to death by the refined cruelty of his fellow-men. The heart sickens in these vaults, and an instinctive desire to quit them takes possession of the mind, while remaining merely as a curious spectator within them. The narrow steps leading to them are reached through a decorated doorway, and the passage below receives light through a series of gratings. You shortly reach the labyrinthine ways, totally excluded from external light and air, and enter one after another confined dungeons, little more than six feet square, cased with oak to deaden sounds, and to increase the difficulty of attempted escape. To make these narrow places even more horrible, strong wooden stocks are in some, and day and night prisoners were secured in total darkness, in an atmosphere which even now seems too oppressive to bear. In close proximity to these dungeons is a strong stone room, about twelve feet wide each way, into which you descend by three steps. It is the torture-chamber. The massive bars before you are all that remain of the perpendicular rack, upon which unfortunates were hung with weights attached to their ankles. Two such of stone, weighing each fifty pounds, were kept here some years back, as well as many other implements of torture since removed or sold for old iron. The raised stone bench around the room was for the use of the executioner and attendants. The vaulted roof condensed the voice of the tortured man, and an aperture on one side gave it freedom to ascend into the room above, where the judicial listeners waited for the faltering words which succeeded the agonising screams of their victim. So much we know and still see, but worse horrors were dreamily spoken of by the old Nürnbergers; there was a tradition of a certain something that not only destroyed life, but annihilated the body of the person sacrificed. The tradition took a more definite form in the seventeenth century, and the “kiss of the Virgin” expressed this punishment, and was believed to consist in a figure of the Virgin, which clasped its victim in arms furnished with poignards, and then opening them, dropped the body down a trap on a sort of cradle of swords, arranged so as to cut it to pieces, a running stream below clearing all traces of it away.

These frightful traditions were received with doubt by many, and with positive disbelief by others, until a countryman of our own, with unexampled patience and perseverance, fully substantiated the truth of all, and after many years traced the absolute “Virgin” herself, which had been hurriedly removed from Nürnberg during the French Revolution, two or three days before the French army entered the town, and then passed into the collection of a certain Baron Diedrich, and was kept by him in a castle called Feistritz, on the borders of Steinmark. Determined to persevere in tracing this figure, our countryman visited this castle in 1834, and there was the machine; it was formed of bars and hoops covered with sheet iron, representing a Nürnberg maiden of the sixteenth century in the long mantle generally worn. It opened with folding doors, closing again over the victim, and pressing a series of poignards into the body, two being affixed to the front of the face, to penetrate to the brain through the eyes. “That this machine had formerly been used cannot be doubted; because there are evident blood-stains yet visible on its breast and part of the pedestal.” This machine was introduced to Nürnberg in 1533, and is believed to have originated in Spain, and to have been transplanted into Germany during the reign of Charles V., who was monarch of both countries. At this period there were great tumults in Germany and continual quarrels at Nürnberg between the Catholics and Protestants: the men of that city had no doubt to thank “the most holy Inquisition” for this importation of horrors.

The great leading principles of the Reformation interested Dürer as they did other thinking men. He examined by the biblical test the unwholesome power and pretensions of the papacy, and found it wanting. We have already noted the exhortation to abide by “the written word” which he appended to his famous picture of the Apostles. In his journal he breaks forth into uncontrolled lamentations over the crafty capture of Luther made by his friend the Elector of Saxony, who conveyed him thus out of harm’s way, and kept him nearly a twelvemonth in the Wartburg. He exclaims, “And is Luther dead? who will now explain the Gospel so clearly to us? Aid me, all pious Christians, to bewail this man of heavenly mind, and pray God for some other as divinely enlightened.” He then exhorts Erasmus to “come forth, defend the truth, and deserve the martyr’s crown, for thou art already an old man.” Dürer had painted Erasmus’s portrait at Brussels in 1520, and appears to have been intimate with that great man as he was with Melancthon, who said of Dürer, that “his least merit was that of his art.”