When Hermann Vischer came to Nuremberg the bronze industry had long been pursued in Germany, and it had been pursued with some success. The individuality of this indigenous art had been in early times uninfluenced by foreign inspiration. While Venice had to go to Constantinople for the bronze gates of St. Mark’s, and Rome was acknowledging the supremacy of Byzantine ideals in the presence of the gates of S. Paolo, in Germany, as Lübke points out, such works as the doors of the Cathedrals of Hildesheim and Augsburg, the tomb-plates at Magdeburg and Merseburg, or the great altar at Goslar, prove the existence, albeit in a very crude and undeveloped state, of a native art in bronze. The twelfth century saw the German foundries supplying many an important font or cathedral door. The work of Lambert Patras von Dinant (1112), the fonts in the cathedral at Osnabrück, the lions at Brunswick and the doors of St. Sophia at Novgorod, exhibit indeed a very considerable advance both in execution and design. The increasing use of bronze for the sacred vessels and ornaments of the Church extended the scope of the craftsmen, and the hey-day of the early Gothic period saw no lack of tomb-plates, candelabra, and fonts from the German foundries. The workmanship of these is good but undistinguished as it is uninspired. It seldom even approaches in artistic merit the splendid tomb of Konrad von Hochstaden in Cologne Cathedral, or the later, vigorous equestrian statue of St. George in the cathedral at Prague, wrought by Georg and Martin von Clussenbach in 1373.