The Hôtel of the Three Kings—though it is to-day a modern structure that one sees—was, in the ninth century, the meeting-place of Conrad III., Henry III., and Rudolph III., the last King of Burgundy. Following another tradition, the house derived[{90}] its nomenclature from the reliques of "the Three Magi," which were lodged here when on their journey, in 1161, from Milan to Cologne.
In the museum at Basel are two of Holbein's, sketches made from statues in the Sainte Chapelle at Bourges in France. They represent the Duke Jean de Berry and his wife, Jeanne de Boulogne. It seems rather curious that a great draughtsman like Holbein should deliberately have set himself to copying from a cast, which is practically what it amounted to in this case, charming though these drawings be.
Colmar
Colmar, the chief town of the "circle of Colmar," was once strongly fortified. It still has something more than fragments left of its seven towered and turreted gates.
Formerly it was the capital of Upper Alsace, and later it was the capital of the Département du Haut-Rhin. As a result of the war of 1871 it became a German city.
To Americans and Frenchmen it will perhaps be most revered as being the birthplace of Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of the[{91}] celebrated Statue of Liberty at New York. (There is a smaller counterpart at Paris, on the Ile des Cygnes in the Seine, which is often overlooked by visitors to the capital.)
The church of St. Martin is a thirteenth-century Gothic church of more than usual splendour. Its fine foundations date from 1237, and its choir from 1315. It is of the conventional Latin cross form, with two imposing towers and a really grand portal. It is built of red sandstone, and is surmounted with a wonderfully massive steeple, which looks more like an adjunct to a fortification than a dependency of a Christian edifice. There is a counterpart of this feature in the cathedral at Dol in Brittany, but there it has the added detail of a crenelated parapet, which gives it a still more military air.
In other days this great tower on St. Martin's at Colmar served the purposes of a civic belfry as well as that of a Christian campanile.
In the sacristy of this rather grim church is an admirable fifteenth-century work of art, a Virgin surrounded by garlands of roses, executed by Schöngauer, a native of Colmar[{92}] (1450-88) and one of the greatest painters and sculptors of the fifteenth century.
There is the restored fabric of the famous convent of the Dominicans, known as Unterlinden, which is to be considered as one of the chief curiosities of the town. It was built in 1232, before even the church of St. Martin, and its history was exceedingly prominent in the records of mysticism in Germany.