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.