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 For he appears to us in the few historical documents in which he figures as the perfect type of the plain, unspoilt craftsman or Master of a Guild.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.”