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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III THE EARLY WORKS OF PETER VISCHER