PETER VISCHER: HIS LIFE
PETER VISCHER, the great bronze-founder, whose work and that of his
house embodies the complete transition from the Gothic to the
Renaissance style in Germany, was born and brought up in his father’s
house in “Am Sand.” There he lived, and he worked as an apprentice with
his father in the Town Foundry in the White Tower all the days of his
boyhood. So much we may assume, although we know nothing of his youth,
and no one of all the men since dead would be more surprised than he to
find himself the subject of a monograph, or would be more genuinely
astonished to learn that his up-bringing is a source of interest to
later generations. For he appears to us in the few historical documents
in which he figures as the perfect type of the plain, unspoilt craftsman
or Master of a Guild. A man was not an artist in those days, but a mere
stonemason, or smith or painter. But, lacking the title, he did not
necessarily lack the quality. The study of design was never more
enthusiastic, the struggle after excellence never more sincere than in
the days when Dürer’s art was regarded as a mere parasite of other
trades, when Hans Sachs was
“Schuh—
—Macher und Poet dazu,”
and when Peter Vischer laboured in his leather apron at the foundry, or
turned from the entertaining of Emperors to spend his leisure hours in
the endeavour to improve his draughtsmanship. I have said that we know
nothing of the latter’s boyhood, but if in his case the child was father
of the man, he must have been a diligent youth. Johann Neudörffer
(1497-1563), an artistic scribe and the man in whom succeeding ages have
had to bless the inventor of German type, has left us a charming picture
of him in later days. “This Peter Vischer was a man of amiable
conversation,” he writes in his _Nachrichten über Nürnberger Künstler
und Werkleute_, a work which is not indeed free from errors, but to
which we owe the earliest accounts we have of most of the Nuremberg
artists, “and among natural arts (to speak as a layman) finely skilled
in casting and so much renowned among the nobility that when any prince
or great potentate came to the town he seldom omitted to pay him a visit
in his foundry, for he went every day to his casting shop and worked
there.”
Adam Krafft the sculptor, we learn from the same source, and Sebastien
Lindenast the coppersmith, who made works of art of copper “as if they
had been of gold or silver,” were his two bosom friends. They seemed, we
are told, to have but one heart. All three were equally simple,
disinterested, and ever eager to learn. “They were like brothers; every
Friday, even in their old age, they met and studied together like
apprentices, as the designs which they executed at their meetings prove.
Then they separated in friendly wise, but without having eaten or drunk
together.” The spirit of the Reformation had breathed upon these men and
inspired them with a new and burning zeal for art and knowledge and
industry.
As a boy then, we may assume, Peter Vischer worked as an apprentice with
his father. For in those days any youth destined for a certain trade had
to be apprenticed to some master of that trade, who was responsible for
his education both in mind and morals during his years of learning
(Lehrjahre). And almost everything made by hand, every manufactured
article was the monopoly of some trade corporation. Every trade, too,
and almost every department of a trade, had its separate costume. Each
craft bore its special garb or mark of distinction. The masters and high
officials of each were often notably bedizened, and garments
distinguished the Sabbath from the week day as clearly as they
distinguished the merchant from the shopkeeper. The rules and
regulations by which wages and prices, and the amount of work to be done
and holiday kept, and the relations of the members of the Guild were
fixed, were strictly enforced, and could only be infringed at the risk
of heavy penalties. The boundaries between the trades were clearly laid
down and rigidly observed. For the Middle Ages were riddled with
Socialism, and this was a form of it. The Guild system resulted in an
arbitrary and irritating enforcement of the division of labour, which
finds its counterpart nowadays in the observances of the Trades Unions
and several of the learned professions. The man who made a window-frame
was a window-frame maker and might not insert the window-pane unless he
had also qualified as a glazier. Only a locksmith was allowed to fix the
casement to it, and it was a joiner’s business and a joiner’s only to
embellish it with carving.
[Illustration: [ST. SEBALD’S CHURCH, NÜRNBERG
2. PETER VISCHER THE CRAFTSMAN]
The position of the Bronze Workers in this hierarchy of trades does not
appear to have been in any way exceptional. The usual tendency of son to
succeed father in the trade, to labour first as youth and apprentice and
then as master and married man, to work on in his father’s shop and to
live in his father’s house is carried out in the case of the Vischer
family. And thanks to this fact we can trace in the works of their house
the development of native German art, passing from late Gothic, slightly
influenced by Flemish realism, into the full flower of that German
renaissance, which is not directly a “New Birth” of the art of old days,
but only the second-hand influence of that revival as reflected with a
sudden and momentary brilliancy by the productions of German artists who
had travelled in Italy and studied with profit Italian works.
On the expiration of his apprenticeship Peter Vischer would naturally,
like other German youths, start on a period of travel—his _Wanderjahre_.
Whither he went we know not, but it is most probable that he turned his
steps towards the Netherlands, where he could study the marvels of the
new style of Flemish realism which had begun to exercise a potent
influence upon the Nuremberg painters of his day.
But whether he reached the Netherlands or not of one thing we may be
certain. Neither now nor at any subsequent period did he go to Italy.
It was indeed at one time thought and affirmed that he sojourned there
once at least and perhaps twice. (_Sandrart, Teutscher Academie_, 1675.)
But there is not one jot or tittle of evidence to support this theory,
which was intended to supply us with the source whence he drew the
inspiration for the second and third periods of his art.
After his Wanderjahre he returned to Nuremberg, and living in his
father’s house, in friendship with Adam Krafft, and in an atmosphere of
late Gothic tradition permeated by Flemish realism, he entered upon the
first period of his work, which ended, we may say, with the year 1507,
and of which the Magdeburg Monument was the highest expression and
achievement. Vischer was by nature an idealist, and he quickly grew out
of sympathy with the aims of the realistic school. But even in this tomb
of Archbishop Ernst we can trace the influence exercised by Michel
Wolgemut on the one hand, and of Martin Schön, through his
copper-plates, on the other, as it is displayed in the striving after
life and truth even at the expense of beauty, which is clearly
noticeable in the figures, faces and heads of the apostles. The
architecture and design, however, are cast in the late Gothic mould.
The works that belong to the second period of the Vischer foundry show a
pure, plastic sense of form and rhythm emerging from the overwhelming
dominion of late Gothic extravagance. The childish things of that style
have been put away by the mature artist, and, in obedience to the
teaching of the drawings of Jacopo de’ Barbari, whom Dürer called “a
lovable, good painter,” and of the drawings of early Renaissance work in
North Italy, which Peter the younger had made in his Wanderjahre there,
the great masterpiece of the house, the Sebaldusgrab, takes shape in a
style that is a curious mixture of the Mediæval and Renaissance manners.
Finally, when Hermann Vischer, Peter’s eldest son, had made a journey to
Rome and returned thence laden with drawings, father and sons gave
themselves up to a whole-hearted worship of the beauty of form and an
eager copying of the antique which resulted in the most beautiful piece
of pure Renaissance work which ever issued from a German workshop—the
Rathaus Railing, destined to be sold in the fulness of years and melted
down for the value of its metal!
The life of Peter Vischer was simple and domestic, but very full of toil
and trouble and private grief made bearable perhaps by his absorbing
enthusiasm for his work. A few years before his father’s death, probably
in 1485, he married Margaretha, daughter of Hans Gross. A document,
dated October 4th, 1490, gives us a slight glimpse of her character.
Therein her father records that he makes a present to his daughter of
the green mantle and veil with which he had provided her on her wedding
day, but at the same time he binds Peter Vischer with all the
paraphernalia of judges, witnesses and solemn pledges not to allow her
to sell or pawn the said articles. The date of this document led to the
erroneous conclusion that the marriage only took place in 1489, but Dr.
Seeger has recently pointed out that on a medallion by Peter Vischer the
younger he expressly states that he was twenty-two years of age when he
wrought it, and this in the year 1509. Since Neudörffer, the Nuremberg
Vasari, refers to Hermann as “the famous Peter Vischer’s _eldest_ son,”
the marriage must have occurred somewhere about 1485. There was also a
third son by this union, known afterwards as Hans der Giesser.
Margaretha died shortly after the birth of this last son, and in 1493 we
find Peter married again to Dorothea von Gericht. She died soon
afterwards, leaving him a daughter, Margaretha, and then he took to
himself another Margaretha. Meantime he worked like his father at the
town Foundry in the White Tower, and lived in the house he had
inherited, “Am Sande.” But in 1505 he moved to a house behind the
Convent of St. Catherine, which had fallen to him by inheritance. On
July 26th of that year he was chosen “Street Captain” (Gassenhauptman)
of the Barfüsser or Franciscan quarter of the town, and in the following
year he and Margaretha signed a legal document declaring that they had
bought another house for 120 fl. Part of this house they pulled down and
threw into a third adjoining one which they had also acquired. Thus they
formed a single large foundry of their own and enjoyed possession of
their own dwelling house next door. This house still stands in the
street now called Peter Vischerstrasse. Two other sons came to him by
this marriage, Jakob and Paul. Then in 1522 he was again left a widower
and a widower he remained the last seven years of his life, although
historians, concluding that he had formed an ineradicable habit of
matrimony, have placed a fourth wife to his credit. Barbara they name
her and say that she survived him. But as her name does not appear in
the documents dealing with the partition of property immediately after
his death it seems probable that they are thinking of Barbara, the wife
of Peter Vischer the younger. For he and his family were living in his
father’s house, and seeing that Hermann, the elder son, had died in 1516
and his wife, Ursula Mag, in 1514, it was natural that Barbara, on the
death of the old man’s third wife should take care of him and charge of
his house. Peter the younger died in 1528, but Barbara and her six
children would still live on beneath the paternal roof till the old
Bronze-worker died in 1529. The famous foundry was inherited by her
brother-in-law Paul, who sold it to his brother Hans, and Barbara,
within a few months, found another husband in Jorg Schott, the
goldsmith, and another home.[1]
Footnote 1:
Seeger, “Peter Vischer der Jüngere.”
Thus it will be seen that the life of Peter Vischer, although it was
over-full of domestic bereavements, was, on the whole and apart from his
work, the ordinary happy home life of the German citizen. He fulfilled
his duties and had his successes as a burgher. For he was one of the
_Genannten_ of the Great Council both in 1516 and again in 1520. He was
also appointed in 1506 to the Committee which was to consider the
restoration of that extraordinary old clock in the Frauenkirche, known
to young and old in Nuremberg as the “Männleinlaufen,” the copper
figures in which were cast by his friend Sebastien Lindenast.
For the rest he hardly ever left Nuremberg, and never for long or to go
far. It has been one of the difficulties of art criticism to explain how
it came about, therefore, that this modest, stay-at-home burgher should
have gone on all his life developing and adopting the new ideas and the
recent revelations of Italian art, discarding the traditions in which he
had been brought up, and finally learning the latest lesson of the
Renaissance with such success that in his old age there came forth from
his workshop the noblest work of German craftsmanship.
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