When you have long studied those features and contemplated their agony, you involuntarily ask yourself: Where did the sculptor find so suffering a face, so living an agony? whence came his model? for you feel that those features once were the flesh of one to whom ordinary grief were as nothing. That look of life, that pain so real, came certainly from a human heart that once beat beneath them, and in them painted its wounds, its tortures, and its agony. They were seen, and not merely created in the artist's brain.
Yes; you are right. Those features are those of a suffering, repentant, and miserable man. If you approach the base of the crucifix, you will see graven in the once soft stone, in long Gothic letters, and in the Suabian dialect of the fifteenth century, these short and simple words, which are the explanation and the ending of its story:
"MINA, OTHO.
"May God receive you and pardon me."
Nothing more; no signature to the work, nor name added to the prayer. But young souls, simple hearts, poetic spirits, which still may be found at Baden, in spite of "sport" and "the turf," will relate to you the birth of the work and the fate of the artist; for, alas! the story of the crucifix is also the story of the sculptor.
Chapter I.
It was a populous, busy, and bright city, Baden of old, as it flourished in the fifteenth century, in the days of the Margrave Bernard of Staehberg. Less noisy than to-day, it was more picturesque. Where great hotels, white villas, and regular edifices now rise, then only narrow crooked streets were seen; where Gothic houses, those old German dwellings, of which a few still stand at Augsburg, at Ulm, and especially at Nuremberg, reared their sculptured gables and pointed roofs, wherein were set windows looking like half-opened eyes, while beams projected from the wall beneath and supported little balconies, and long, narrow windows with leaden sashes glistened in the glory of their little, thick, greenish hued and diamond-shaped panes.
Nevertheless, those streets in which the sun-rays rarely penetrated, (caught as they were in their way by the projecting fronts of the houses,) were one day of the beautiful month of May, 1435, filled with people in holiday dress, bearing curious and smiling faces, with fluttering pennons, shining armor, and broad banners. It was the day of the tournament, and the gossips grouped themselves together to see pass the barons of the mountains and plains, and to relate to each other the high achievements of each doughty noble and the traditions of his family, while they awaited the return from the burg of the proud victors or humbled vanquished.
But of the general joy, the cries that rang through the town, only a few faint and expiring echoes reached a lonely and distant street, where the houses, lower and more scattered, no longer stood close together, but began to grow scattered through the fields. One of these houses, the largest and almost the last, was distinguished from its neighbors by two peculiarities. The front of the first story, instead of being cut by those narrow leaden-sashed openings joined one to the other, through which the light of day might scarcely enter, offered to the gaze a huge window with larger, neater, and more regular panes than any around. Through the openings on the ground floor a narrow spiral staircase might be seen winding its polished steps and balustrade of stone, carved like lace, beneath a roof of wood delicately cut in graceful flowers, branches, arabesques, and interlaced figures. Above all, in a little wooden niche, a little carved shrine, which surmounted the pointed gable, was the form of an angel with folded wings, chiselled in pure white marble. One might imagine that the heavenly messenger had stopped there to rest in the middle of some long journey; that he gazed calmly down and protected with his frail hands the high gray house which he seemed to bless; so that the gossips, who all knew the dwelling and held its master in high esteem, called his abode The House of the Angel.
And the good burgesses wondered not to see the white statue on that gray front, nor did they marvel at the graceful scrolls and arabesques of the pretty staircase, and that huge dazzling window, for they knew that the last served to light the studio of the sculptor Sebald Koerner, and that the two ornaments of the house, the marble angel and the carved roof, were his work.