Meantime the Vischers, father and sons, were busy, and had at intervals long been busy, with the last supreme work of their foundry, the Rathaus Railing. The story of the chequered career of this beautiful work takes us back some years in the history of the House. At the same time as Maximilian commissioned Peter Vischer to execute two bronze figures for his tomb, the great family of Fugger ordered a railing to be made to shut off their family chapel, in St. Anne’s Church at Augsburg. The design for this railing was completed by the old Peter Vischer. It was submitted to and received the approval of the patron. This was during the absence of Hermann Vischer in his journey to Rome in 1514-15. But when he returned full of new ideas and laden with sketches of the beautiful things he had seen, his enthusiasm for the new style of the antique quickly imparted itself to his father and brothers. Always eager to learn and ready to appreciate the best, father and brothers alike studied the sketches of Hermann, and thus, after his early death, his influence asserted itself more strongly than ever before. The result was that the design for the railing no longer satisfied its author. It was overhauled, and soon revised and improved in many details suggested by the new-found inspiration of the later renaissance. (Ill. 24 and 25.) The alterations thus introduced by the Vischer family can only have been improvements; improvements introduced by these craftsmen because anything below their best was intolerable to their artistic conscience. But it does not pay to be an artist when you work on commission. So Dürer also had found. And the Vischers in their turn suffered from their enthusiasm. The Fuggers, who had given the commission and had expressed their approval of the original design, died. Their heirs, noticing a difference between the approved sketch and the finished product, suspected a fraud, or, perhaps, seized the opportunity of avoiding the expense of this piece of ancestral extravagance. They therefore brought an action for breach of contract against the house of Vischer. After several weary years of litigation—for the law’s delays stretched from 1522 to 1529—a decision was given. The Fuggers were released from the responsibility of their ancestors’ commission, and the railing was thrown upon the hands of the heirs of Peter Vischer. For the verdict was not awarded till eight months after the old man’s death, which occurred on the 7th of January, 1529, when he was buried in the same grave as his two sons and three wives who had died before him. His heirs, then, the sons who survived him, were left to dispose of the railing as best they could, but they were not called upon to restore the money which had already been paid on account, and which amounted to some fourteen hundred odd gulden. They turned therefore to the Nuremberg Council and offered the railing to them to adorn the Rathaus. On July 15, 1530, the