PETER VISCHER was admitted as a Master of his Guild in 1489, shortly after his father’s death. If, as is generally admitted, the monument of Count Otto IV. von Henneberg at Römhild is from his hand, we have in that rather limp, life-size picture of a knight in armour, holding an heraldic banner in his right hand and a sword in his left, the earliest example of Peter Vischer’s work. And this figure, it is noticeable, is supported by a _stone_ plate to which the arms and the inscription, in letters separately cast, are affixed. It is, then, a relic of those days when, just as painting was a parasite of carving and sculpture, bronze also was a handmaid of stone. It may be added that the demand for the products of Vischer’s foundry was fated to be destroyed in the years to come by the new fashion for tombs in stone. But the monument of Count Otto assuredly did not qualify Peter Vischer as a Meister in his craft. What his “masterpiece” was we cannot say with certainty, but it was very likely the model which he completed in 1488 for the shrine of St. Sebald. This is the design which he was destined to take up twenty years later, and to execute in the fulness of his new knowledge and developed technique. It is now in Vienna, and betrays at every point the influence of Adam Krafft, to the style of whose Sacramentshaüslein it bears an obvious resemblance. Heideloff, the architect, in whose possession the model once was, attributed it indeed to Veit Stoss. But it is signed by Peter Vischer with his mark [Illustration: Peter Vischer’s Mark.] Heideloff, it is true, claimed this as the token of Veit Stoss, but his opinion is of little value, for his enthusiasm for the Polish carver led him to claim for him amongst other works the design of the tomb of Archbishop Ernst, the Römhild memorials of Count Hermann VIII. and of Otto IV., and even the Imperial tomb of Maximilian at Innsbruck. Of the original design for the Sebaldusgrab, Lübke says, “It is a masterpiece of Gothic construction but freely endowed with all the exaggeration and extravagance of the late period.” And there can be no doubt that the world lost nothing by the delay which intervened before Peter Vischer, in the words of the chronicler, “with the help of his five sons, who were all married and lived for the most part with him in the house with their wives and children, as I myself have seen,” remodelled it and completed it at last on July 19, 1519.