When I was a child, I sometimes received for a New Year's present one of those Nuremberg boxes containing a whole miniature German city. In a hundred different ways I arranged the little houses of painted wood around the church, with its pointed belfry and its red walls, where the seam of the bricks was marked by fine white lines. I set out my two dozen frizzed and painted trees, and saw with delight the charmingly outlandish and wildly festal air which these apple-green, pink, lilac, fawn-colored houses with their window-panes, their retreating gables, and their steep roofs, brilliant with red varnish, assumed, spread out on the carpet.
My idea was that houses like these had no existence in reality, but were made by some kind fairy for extremely good little boys. The marvelous exaggeration of childhood gave this little parti-colored city a respectable development, and I walked through its regular streets, tho with the same precautions as did Gulliver in Liliput. Lübeck gave back to me this long-forgotten feeling of my childish days. I seemed to walk in a city of the imagination, taken out of some monstrous toy-box. I believe, considering all the faultlessly correct architecture that I have been forced to see in my traveler's life, that I really deserved that pleasure by way of compensation.
A cloister, or at least a gallery, a fragment of an ancient monastery, presented itself to view. This colonnade ran the whole length of the square, at the end of which stood the Marienkirche, a brick church of the fourteenth century. Continuing my walk, I found myself in a market-place, where awaited me one of those sights which repay the traveler for much fatigue: a public building of a new, unforeseen, original aspect, the old Stadthaus in which was formerly the Hanse hall, rose suddenly before me.
It occupies two sides of the square. Imagine, in front of the Marienkirche, whose spires and roof of oxydized copper rise above it, a lofty brick façade, blackened by time, bristling with three bell-towers with pointed copper-covered roofs, having two great empty rose-windows, and emblazoned with escutcheons inscribed in the trefoils of its ogives, double-headed black eagles on a gold field, and shields, half gules, half argent, ranged alternately, and executed in the most elaborate fashion of heraldry.
To this façade is joined a palazzino of the Renaissance, in stone and of an entirely different style, its tint of grayish-white marvelously relieved by the dark-red background of old brick-work. This building, with its three gables, its fluted Ionic columns, its caryatides, or rather its Atlases (for they are human figures), its semicircular window, its niches curved like a shell, its arcades ornamented with figures, its basement of diamond-shaped stones, produces what I may call an architectural discord that is most unexpected and charming. We meet very few edifices in the north of Europe of this style and epoch.
In the façade, the old German style prevails: arches of brick, resting upon short granite columns, support a gallery with ogive-windows. A row of blazons, inclined from right to left, bring out their brilliant color against the blackish tint of the wall. It would be difficult to form an idea of the character and richness of this ornamentation.
This gallery leads into the main building, a structure than which no scene-painter, seeking a medieval decoration for an opera, ever invented anything more picturesque and singular. Five turrets, coiffed with roofs like extinguishers, raise their pointed tops above the main line of the façade with its lofty ogive-windows—un happily now most of them partially bricked up, in accordance, doubtless, with the exigencies of alterations made within. Eight great disks, having gold backgrounds, and representing radiating suns, double-headed eagles, and the shields, gules and argent, the armorial bearings of Lübeck, are spread out gorgeously upon this quaint architecture. Beneath, arches supported upon short, thick pillars yawn darkly, and from far within there comes the gleam of precious metals, the wares of some goldsmith's shop.
Turning back toward the square again, I notice, rising above the houses, the green spires of another church, and over the heads of some market-women, who are chaffering over their fish and vegetables, the profile of a little building with brick pillars, which must have been a pillory in its day. This gives a last touch to the purely Gothic aspect of the square which is interrupted by no modern edifice. The ingenious idea occurred to me that this splendid Stadthaus must have another façade; and so in fact it had; passing under an archway, I found myself in a broad street, and my admiration began anew.
Five bell-towers, built half into the wall and separated by tall ogive-windows now partly blocked up, repeated, with variations, the façade I have just described. Brick rosettes exhibited their curious designs, spreading with square stitches, so to speak, like patterns for worsted work. At the base of the somber edifice a pretty little lodge, of the Renaissance, built as an afterthought, gave entrance to an exterior staircase going up along the wall diagonally to a sort of mirador, or overhanging look-out, in exquisite taste. Graceful little statues of Faith and Justice, elegantly draped, decorated the portico.
The staircase, resting on arches which widened as it rose higher, was ornamented with grotesque masks and caryatides. The mirador, placed above the arched doorway opening upon the market-place, was crowned with a recessed and voluted pediment, where a figure of Themis held in one hand balances, and in the other a sword, not forgetting to give her drapery, at the same time, a coquettish puff. An odd order formed of fluted pilasters fashioned like pedestals and supporting busts, separated the windows of this aërial cage. Consoles with fantastic masks completed the elegant ornamentation, over which Time had passed his thumb just enough to give to the carved stone that bloom which nothing can imitate....