The broad culture of a Pirkheimer exercised an undoubted influence upon the many-sided genius of Dürer, whilst the liberal atmosphere engendered by travel made the citizens of Nuremberg ready to welcome in their midst foreign artists like the elder Dürer, the elder Vischer and Veit Stoss, and rendered the local artists themselves susceptible to the excellence of foreign art. Not that the Nuremberg artists lack the local note. But they readily accepted the ideas of Flemish realism and again of the Italian Renaissance, and translated them into the terms of their own speech. Albert Dürer, for instance, in spite of his wide experience, always speaks in his art like his master Wolgemut, in the Nuremberg dialect. The intense patriotism and the deep religious feeling which formed so intimate a part of the lives of the citizens are reproduced in their art and literature, giving the greatest examples of them the added charm of locality. The religious spirit in which they worked lent a great humility to these craftsmen. Sculpture and painting had indeed been applied with splendid results to the adornment of domestic and public life, results so splendid that the traveller Æneas Sylvius was obliged to confess that the mansions of the burgesses seemed to have been built for princes, and that the kings of Scotland would gladly be housed as luxuriously as the ordinary citizen of Nuremberg. But the chief work of men like Adam Krafft and Peter Vischer was given to the beautifying of the churches. And, working as they did in a deeply religious spirit, it is noticeable that when they represent themselves in paint, bronze, wood or stone, they give themselves the humble pose of suppliants, choosing always the lowliest place, and often, like Krafft in the tabernacle in the Church of St. Lorenz, or Vischer in the Sebaldusgrab in the Church of St. Sebald, they appear in their working clothes, tools in hand, in the attitude of servants. There, in a niche of the beautiful shrine he had wrought, with his workman’s cap on his head and a large leather apron round his waist, and in his hand hammer and chisel, the signs of his calling, stands thick-set and full-bearded Peter Vischer, the modest, pious labourer, whose reputation had spread beyond the limits of Germany, and whose bronze work, the chronicler tells us, once filled Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the palaces of princes throughout the Holy Roman Empire. (Ill. 2.)