Peter Vischer’s second son and namesake, he reminds us, is mentioned pointedly by the chroniclers in one passage[4] as having done the greater part of the work on the Sebaldusgrab, “for he excelled his father and brother in art”; and in another[5] as having “taken his pleasure in reading the Poets and Historians, whence he then, with the aid of Pancratz Schwenter, extracted many beautiful poems and illuminated them. He was in all things not less accomplished and skilful than his aforesaid brother Hermann, and he too died in his prime.” Now this young craftsman, it would appear, when the period of his “wandering” was at hand, turned his feet, like his fellow-townsman Dürer before him, towards Lombardy, “the Paradise of all arts.” His imagination, doubtless, had already been fired by what he had seen of the North Italian Renaissance in the treasures brought to Nuremberg by merchants, travellers and artists. But the expenses of an Italian tour were beyond the resources of the Vischer household. Fortune and his father’s friends were kind to him; he was entrusted, probably through the influence of Sebald Schreyer, the historian and patron of art, with the task of “travelling” the famous _Schedel-Weltchronik_, which had been published in 1492, with illustrations by Wolgemut and Pleydenwurff. Booksellers’ accounts enable us to trace the journey of the young craftsman. He passed through Como, where the façade of the cathedral, at that time in course of construction, had many a lesson in the Early Renaissance style to teach him, and he came to Milan, the metropolis of Northern Italy. There he sold one hundred and ninety-one copies of the book, and in the intervals of business he occupied himself with the study of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, from which, like many another artist since, he learnt his first lessons in anatomy and proportion. There also he may have acquired the art of medallion and plaquette work, for it was about this time that he produced the first medallion which comes from the hand of a German craftsman—the portrait of his brother Hermann, dated 1507. From Milan he went south. He visited the Certosa of Pavia, and he filled his sketch book with drawings from the façade of that luxuriant example of the Early North Italian Renaissance. He studied with especial care the figure of his patron saint, and afterwards he reproduced it in the St. Peter of the Sebaldusgrab. Thence he passed to Genoa, where he sold more books and studied, perhaps, the marble Madonna of Andrea Sansovino. And so home, in 1508, by way of Verona and Venice. Inspired by what he had seen, he brought new life and inspiration to the workshop at Nuremberg. The result of his journey was that he passed completely under the influence of Italian art; he was filled with that untrammelled revelling in existence and that unalloyed worship of the beautiful which is the keynote of the Renaissance. He had learnt the value of the study of the