Few engraved designs for jewellery are prior in date to the year 1550, though nearly all the prominent painter-engravers delighted in exercising their inventive faculty in this direction. One or two plates of pendants by Brosamer, and a buckle and whistle by Aldegrever, represent almost the sole engravings of the kind before Virgil Solis--the first to devise a more ambitious series of jewels. Amongst the earliest is the _Kunstbüchlein_[124] or pattern book for goldsmith's work, by Hans Brosamer (about 1480-1554). These woodcuts, which are singularly attractive, are of a transitional character, with traces of Gothic design. They include two pages of pendants composed of stones between leafwork grouped round a central ornament and hung with pear-shaped pearls. One pendant consists of a niche between pillars--a similar style of ornament to that adopted by Androuet Ducerceau, and the first assignable instance, says Herr Lichtwark,[125] of the use of architecture in German jewellery of this time, though this same motive was frequently represented later on by Erasmus Hornick and Mignot. Three other pendants are in the form of whistles for wearing on the neck-chain. In an engraving for a whistle of a similar kind by Aldegrever (1502-1558), the lower part is formed of a case containing an ear-pick and a knife for the finger-nails. Except for this design (which finds a place in the background of his engraving of the pair of folding pocket-spoons of the year 1539), Aldegrever's only example of jewellery is the remarkable Gothic girdle-buckle with its buckle-plate and tag (dated 1537). The characteristic fig-leaf ornament of the early German Renaissance is better represented here than on any other engraving of the period. [124] Reproduced by Quaritch in 1897 from a copy now in the possession of Mr. Max Rosenheim. [125] Lichtwark (A.), _Der Ornamentstich der deutschen Frührenaissance_, p. 111. More modern in style is Mathias Zundt (1498-1586), whose compositions (dated 1551-1554) are carried out with great fineness. Zundt lived at Nuremberg, his great contemporaries, Virgil Solis and Erasmus Hornick being natives of the same city. It was to Virgil Solis (1514-1562), one of the most skilful and prolific of the German _Klein-Meister_, that the jewellers and other craftsmen of the day owed their finest inspirations. Virgil Solis's beautiful series of pendants are executed with great charm and delicacy. They bear the character of a transition from the graceful foliage of the early to the full Renaissance, with its fanciful architectural forms, its scroll ornament, arabesques, animals, and grotesque human masks and figures (Pl. XXVII, 1, 2).