【英文文学】Peter Vischer.docx

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1、【英文文学】Peter VischerPREFACETHE Germans have by nature the gift of working in metal, and, among them, in the realms of bronze, Peter Vischer stands easily first. His position as a craftsman may, in fact, be compared with that held by his contemporary and fellow citizen, Albert Dürer, as an artist

2、. The history of his works and of those of his house, have a peculiar interest to the student of art, inasmuch as they illustrate the gradual but easily traceable passage of the German craftsmen from the style of late Gothic to that of complete neo-paganism, and, from the school of the Northern pain

3、ters and sculptors to that of the great Italian masters successively.I speak of the works of Peter Vischer “and his house,” because, in tracing this development, we have to take into consideration not only his works but also those of his father Hermann and of his sons, Hermann and Peter and Hans. Th

4、e pendulum of criticism has indeed swung more than once since the Emperor Maximilian used to visit Peter Vischers foundry in Nuremberg, and the questions as to what are actually the works of the Master and what position is to be assigned to him in the world of art, have been answered in more ways th

5、an one. For many years, owing partly to the ignorance of most people, and partly vino doubt to the greed of the few, the tendency was to attribute to this one famous craftsman the works of many. At one time almost any work of art in bronze to be found throughout the length and breadth of Germany was

6、 attributed to Peter Vischer, just as a Talleyrand or a Sydney Smith has had witticisms of every date and every quality fathered upon him.From unreasoning praise, again, men passed to equally undiscriminating disparagement. Heideloff arose and wished the world to see in Peter Vischer nothing but the

7、 mere craftsman who put into bronze the designs and models of Adam Krafft or another. The admirable labours of Retberg, however, and of Dr. Lübke have shown how little foundation there is for this view, and, more recently, by the application of the principles of more exact art-criticism, Dr. Se

8、eger, in his minute and loving study of Peter Vischer the younger, has vindicated the claim of the great craftsmans son to rank with, or even above, his father as the first and greatest exponent of Renaissance plastic-work in Germany.To the two latter authors I have been continually and especially i

9、ndebted whilst writing the present monograph. For the use of very many of the illustrations forming the volume to which Dr. Lübke contributed the text, my best thanks and acknowledgements are due to the publisher, Herr Stein, of Nuremberg.C. H.CHAPTER IHERMANN VISCHER AND THE EARLY GERMAN BRONZ

10、E WORKIT was in the middle of the fifteenth century, a little before the year 1450, to be precise, that there wandered into the streets of Nuremberg a working man, a common coppersmith, one Hermann Vischer by name. He came no one knows whence. He came one can easily imagine why. Like the father of A

11、lbert Dürer, and in the same decade, he was attracted to that beautiful, busy old town by the greed of gain, as Shakespeare was drawn to London, and many another worker in other arts and crafts has been drawn to many another town. For Nuremberg at this time was the shining jewel of the Holy Rom

12、an Empire, the centre of trade and the meeting place of the Arts. Her geographical position and the business energy of her sons had combined to throw into her lap all the commerce of the east and south, of Italy and the Levant, with the northern nations.2The days were near at hand when this proud, f

13、ree city of the Empire, this trading staple of the German world, was to win the still nobler title of “Albert Dürers and Hans Sachs City.” For the merchant princes of the place, the Patricians as they called themselves, whilst they grew in wealth and power, waxed also in enthusiasm for the scie

14、nces and arts. They strove to make their town a German Florence, and by their lavish expenditure upon the adornment of public and private buildings, both attracted foreign genius and encouraged native talent. Regiomontanus on the one hand, the great mathematician, chose Nuremberg for his place of re

15、sidence because he found there all the peculiar instruments necessary for astronomy, and because the “perpetual journeyings of her merchants” enabled him to keep in touch with the learned of all countries. These perpetual journeyings of the merchant princes and great explorers, like Behaim, reacted

16、also upon the artists of the town; they contributed to give them a wider outlook upon life, and brought within their reach the wonderful works of Italy.The broad culture of a Pirkheimer exercised an undoubted influence upon the many-sided genius of Dürer, whilst the liberal atmosphere engendere

17、d by travel made the citizens of Nuremberg ready to welcome in their midst foreign artists like the elder Dürer, the elder Vischer and Veit Stoss, and rendered the local artists themselves susceptible to the excellence of foreign art. Not 3that the Nuremberg artists lack the local note. But the

18、y readily accepted the ideas of Flemish realism and again of the Italian Renaissance, and translated them into the terms of their own speech. Albert Dürer, for instance, in spite of his wide experience, always speaks in his art like his master Wolgemut, in the Nuremberg dialect. The intense pat

19、riotism and the deep religious feeling which formed so intimate a part of the lives of the citizens are reproduced in their art and literature, giving the greatest examples of them the added charm of locality. The religious spirit in which they worked lent a great humility to these craftsmen. Sculpt

20、ure and painting had indeed been applied with splendid results to the adornment of domestic and public life, results so splendid that the traveller ?neas Sylvius was obliged to confess that the mansions of the burgesses seemed to have been built for princes, and that the kings of Scotland would glad

21、ly be housed as luxuriously as the ordinary citizen of Nuremberg. But the chief work of men like Adam Krafft and Peter Vischer was given to the beautifying of the churches. And, working as they did in a deeply religious spirit, it is noticeable that when they represent themselves in paint, bronze, w

22、ood or stone, they give themselves the humble pose of suppliants, choosing always the lowliest place, and often, like Krafft in the tabernacle in the Church of St. Lorenz, or Vischer in the Sebaldusgrab in the Church of St. Sebald, they appear in their 4working clothes, tools in hand, in the attitud

23、e of servants.There, in a niche of the beautiful shrine he had wrought, with his workmans cap on his head and a large leather apron round his waist, and in his hand hammer and chisel, the signs of his calling, stands thick-set and full-bearded Peter Vischer, the modest, pious labourer, whose reputat

24、ion had spread beyond the limits of Germany, and whose bronze work, the chronicler tells us, once filled Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the palaces of princes throughout the Holy Roman Empire. (Ill. 2.)When Hermann Vischer came to Nuremberg the bronze industry had long been pursued in Germany, and it

25、 had been pursued with some success. The individuality of this indigenous art had been in early times uninfluenced by foreign inspiration. While Venice had to go to Constantinople for the bronze gates of St. Marks, and Rome was acknowledging the supremacy of Byzantine ideals in the presence of the g

26、ates of S. Paolo, in Germany, as Lübke points out, such works as the doors of the Cathedrals of Hildesheim and Augsburg, the tomb-plates at Magdeburg and Merseburg, or the great altar at Goslar, prove the existence, albeit in a very crude and undeveloped state, of a native art in bronze. The tw

27、elfth century saw the German foundries supplying many an important font or cathedral door. The work of Lambert Patras von Dinant (1112), the fonts in 5the cathedral at Osnabrück, the lions at Brunswick and the doors of St. Sophia at Novgorod, exhibit indeed a very considerable advance both in e

28、xecution and design. The increasing use of bronze for the sacred vessels and ornaments of the Church extended the scope of the craftsmen, and the hey-day of the early Gothic period saw no lack of tomb-plates, candelabra, and fonts from the German foundries. The workmanship of these is good but undis

29、tinguished as it is uninspired. It seldom even approaches in artistic merit the splendid tomb of Konrad von Hochstaden in Cologne Cathedral, or the later, vigorous equestrian statue of St. George in the cathedral at Prague, wrought by Georg and Martin von Clussenbach in 1373.Nuremberg, in spite of h

30、er wealth and commercial importance, had not, at the time of the coming of Hermann Vischer, given birth as yet to any great work of art in bronze. Almost the only old piece of bronze of any importance to be seen in the churches there is the font in St. Sebalds Church. And its importance lies rather

31、in the richness with which it is wrought than in its artistic excellence (1350). This is the font in which the Emperor Wenzel was baptizeda baptism which cost the town the beautiful old parsonage, burnt down by the fires used to heat the water for the imperial infant. The four squat apostolic figure

32、s represented here in their straight, heavy mantles bear witness already to that striving after 6a realistic representation of the great protagonists in the sacred drama which was beginning to betray itself at this time in the works of the nameless Nuremberg painters on the one hand, and, on the oth

33、er, of the Nuremberg sculptors, such as Hans Decker, the forerunner of Adam Krafft. It was a tendency which the Nuremberg artists, like their brethren of the Swabian school and the school of Cologne owed to the influence of Flemish art. But this was a return to Nature not without its faults. The Ger

34、man artist, in his eager endeavour to reproduce the exact form of his models, of those, that is, whom he saw around him every day, was badly served by the figures of his countrymen. They could not give him the slim and graceful forms of the Italians to copy, and he had not yet learnt from Italy thos

35、e theories of beauty, based on a study of the antique, which were one day to help an Albert Dürer to perform the true function of an artist by improving upon Nature.Of Hermann Vischer himself and his doings we know very little. Very little also of his work survives. We know that he became a Bur

36、gher of his adopted town and, in 1453, rose to be a Master in the Guild of Rotschmieds. That he gained some reputation in his day, and not at home only, is shown by the fact that four years later he cast the Font for the parish church at Wittenberg. Several tomb-plates at Meissen and Bamberg are als

37、o attributed to him. These confirm us in the impression that he had no great individuality. He 7was an excellent workman without being endowed with the superlative excellence of the artist. For the Font at Wittenberg, which is cast in the Gothic manner with small, undistinguished figures of the apos

38、tles, is a work of very little importance. In Nuremberg, where he lived in a house “Am Sand” in the Schiessgraben, there is one work which is generally attributed to Hermann, although it is quite possibly from the hand of one Eberhard Vischer who became a master in 1459 and died in 1488, just one ye

39、ar later than Hermann. The work to which we refer is the large bronze Crucifix outside the central window of the L?ffelholz chapel of the church of St. Sebald, which was presented by the Starck family in 1482. It was remodelled in 1625, and on that occasion the Nurembergers earned the nick-name of H

40、errgottschw?rzer or Blackeners of the Lord. For the story ran that the cross was made of silver, and that the Council of the town resolved that it should be painted black in order to preserve it from the roving bands of soldiers that passed through the town during the Thirty Years War. The figure on

41、 the cross is that of a Hercules rather than of a Christ. The feet are each nailed separately after the ancient manner.Hermann Vischer was twice married. By his first wife, Felicitas, he had one daughter, Martha, and one son, Peter, the date of whose birth is not known. By his second wife he had thr

42、ee sons of no importance, and he died in 1487, in the year 8which saw the birth of his second grandson, Peter Vischer the younger, to whom, it will be shown in the succeeding chapters, many of the finest works usually attributed to the elder Peter must now probably be credited.CHAPTER IIPETER VISCHE

43、R: HIS LIFEPETER 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 fathers house in “Am Sand.” There he lived, and he worked as an apprentice with his father in the

44、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-bring

45、ing 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 ti

46、tle, he did not necessarily lack the quality. The study of design was never more enthusiastic, the struggle after excellence never 10more sincere than in the days when Dürers art was regarded as a mere parasite of other trades, when Hans Sachs was“SchuhMacher und Poet dazu,”and when Peter Visch

47、er 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 latters boyhood, but if in his case the child was father of the man, he must have been a di

48、ligent youth. Johann Neud?rffer (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 N&uum

49、l;rnberger 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 sourc